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.

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.

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.

Since the revolution in 1979, Iran has developed an image culture projecting statesanctioned religious ideology in public spaces that serve as transit zones. Between 2011 and 2014, German artist and former freelance photographer for the New York Times Oliver Hartung produced a body of work on Iran comprised of images which, upon first glance, depict colorful street paraphernalia, posters, graffiti, murals, monuments, and war cemeteries, but upon a closer inspection reveal a much deeper psychology engineered to bolster the myth of the Islamic Republic. Hartungs unique view of the Middle Eastoften lost amid images of war and conflictcreates a portrait of a country still largely unknown to the West. Part of a long-term project exploring the contemporary cultures of the Middle East, Hartungs thoughtful monograph is packed with over 300 color images. Hartungs last publication with Spector was Syria Al-Assad.

-This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran, on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from August 26, 2017 through January 7, 2018.-