Lecture- Dr. P. Khosronejad, Lost Souls: Photography of African Eunuchs & Female Servants in Qajar Iran

Pedram Khosronejad Discussion

Lecture by Dr. P. Khosronejad (Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies, Oklahoma State University)
 

Lost Souls: Photography of African Eunuchs & Female Servants in Qajar Iran

May 1 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

UCLA Humanities Room 365.

The focus of scholars of photography of Qajar Iran, remains fixed solely on photographic content, without any consideration of the materiality of photographic form. Recognizing photographs as material culture is a way to address such a blind spot, and suggests that any methodological use of them requires a more complex and subtle approach. Photographs of enslaved children, women and men in Iran during the Qajar period provide compelling and haunting documentation of individuals (African slaves) otherwise lost to the written historical record. Yet the history of such photographs is firmly embedded in the dynamic of exploitation and dehumanization that lay at the core of African slavery in Qajar Iran.