Description:
This book examines Qajar Iran (1785-1925) as an ocular-centered society founded on what was seen and unseen, in the context of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Review Quotes:
"The subject is fascinating and the book is rewarding. ... [Scheiwiller's] careful and detailed descriptions of the illustrations and the copious and thoroughly documented captions admirably place the examples within the history of Iranian stylistic deveopments, political history, religion, and literature."
--Woman's Art Journal
"Scheiwiller provides a significant intervention into the field of Qajar photographic history and serves as a timely and substantial addition to the growing corpus of analyses of gender and sexuality in modern Iran....Reading this book and its images is both edifying and thought provoking; the questions it forces us to confront carry resonances far beyond the area of Iranian studies, with repercussions for how we understand gender and sexuality and the postcolonial more fundamentally."
--Art and Vernacular Photographies in Asia