Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen; and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spacesmdash;public; private; seen; unseen; accessible; and forbiddenmdash;thus mapping; graphing; and even transgressing those spaces; especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender; sexuality; and desire; becoming strategies of empowerment; of domination; of expression; and of being seen. Hence; the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not; and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs; one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long dureacute;e or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.
2016-12-06 2016-12-06File Name: B01MQT27C9
Review
