With its large format and superb collection of archival material, Faces of Esfahan presents an incredible amount of research into the proliferation and perception of portrait photography in Iran. During the Qajar dynasty, the production of photographic images was restricted to the nobility, but with the rise of the Pahlavi regime in the early 20th century and its vision of linking traditional Iranian society to the modern world, film portraiture became accessible to the general public. The product of a decade of research, the book documents this fascinating cultural phenomenon, and is devoted to promoting awareness and preservation of these invaluable images.

Following the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, photographs of women uncovered were forbidden, resulting in the burning down of many photographers' studios. This work is a collection of pioneering photographs from the early twentieth century, which offers a window on the changing face of Iranian society during that period.

The historiography of early photography has scarcely examined Islamic countries in the Near and Middle East, although the new technique was adopted very quickly there by the 1840s. Which regional, local, and global aspects can be made evident? What role did autochthonous image and art traditions have, and which specific functions did photography meet since its introduction? This collective volume deals with examples from Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab lands and with the question of local specifics, or an „indigenous lens." The contributions broach the issues of regional histories of photography, local photographers, specific themes and practices, and historical collections in these countries. They offer, for the first time in book form, a cross-section through a developing field of the history of photography.

Iran is a country waiting to be rediscovered. Foreign visitors can travel freely and will receive a

Explore the changing world of late nineteenth-century Iran through the gaze of one of its most renowned photographers, Antoin Sevruguin. This volume, which will be accompanied by a forthcoming exhibition, publishes for the first time the Oriental Institute Museums complete collection of nineteenth-century Iranian photographs, most of which were created by Sevruguin. Sevruguins artfully staged photographs still resonate with us today. Accompanying the print catalog is a series of essays that investigate Sevruguins life and photographic career, including the lasting impact of his unique vision, as demonstrated by the work of contemporary artist Yassaman Ameri.

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 spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—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 durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.