Iran: Modernity, Photography and the Painter’s Dilemma

The talk is the opening keynote of  “A Cultural History of Asian Art in the Long Nineteenth Century”

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Iran: Modernity, Photography and the Painter’s Dilemma

Date: 23 June 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 6pm-7:15pm
Venue: Room 4.36, 4/f, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

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It is commonly assumed, in much of scholarship on 19^th-century photography, that the introduction of the new technology to societies outside Europe and especially those in Asia was so irresistible to have upended, almost automatically, the local ‘traditions’ of image making and especially of portraiture. The story of photography in Iran, where it arrived early in the 1850s offers a cautionary example of the complexity of that transition from tradition to modernity. This talk focuses on a single painting dated to 1854-1855 which depicts a photographer in the process of taking a daguerreotype picture of a seated man. This in fact is a portrait of the making of a portrait: one is with brushes, watercolours, and inks on paper; the other with a camera. The two modes of representation clash over their disparate concepts of ‘reality’ and its hold onto portraiture. When photography arrived, I argue, there was already a movement underway towards making visible an idea of ‘likeness’ in portraiture. That idea was not of European origin but had filtered in through the tight-knit cultural worlds spanning West and South Asia, especially through their shared linguistic and literary predilections across the Persianate sphere. Here, I shall argue that artistic reverberations across Iran and India in the case of portraiture, had already prepared the scene for that transition to modernity. Photography had of course immense role to play but not everything was so simply and slavishly surrendered to the new. The painting of a photographer by Mirza Riza Tabrizi asks us to rethink such facile conclusions.

Speaker:

Sussan Babaie is Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam at The Courtauld, University of London. A graphic designer by training (BA, Tehran University), she earned her PhD in Art History from IFA, New York University. Among her publications are Isfahan and Its Palaces (2008, 2018) and Persian Kingship and Architecture (2015) edited with Talinn Grigor, as well as on modern and contemporary arts of Iran and West Asia. She is currently working collaboratively on several projects focusing on the arts across trans-Asian networks: co-editor with Stephen Whiteman and author, Cultural History of Asian Art, six-volume series (Bloomsbury); co-curator of an exhibition on the Arts of the Great Mongol World; and lead scholar on Mongol Connections, a traveling seminar supported by Getty Connecting Art Histories.