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Cairo: Through the looking glass

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  • Cairo: Through the looking glass

    Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt
    Nov 28 2009


    Through the looking glass

    Iran and the Arab world were the focus of last week's Paris Photo, a
    photography show confirming international interest in Middle Eastern
    art, writes David Tresilian in Paris


    Hot on the heels of a well-attended dossier exhibition on 165 years of
    Iranian photography at the musée du quai Branly, the Middle Eastern
    and photographic theme continued at this year's Paris Photo
    photography show at which Iran and the Arab World were guests of
    honour. Both events included significant historical components, as
    well as accounts of contemporary trends. Together they provided an
    intriguing glimpse both of the history of Middle Eastern photography
    and of its place on the contemporary international art scene.

    Held each year since 1997, Paris Photo is a major international show
    that this year was housed in the prestige environment of the Carrousel
    du Louvre and attracted around 100 galleries from 23 countries. Every
    year there is a guest of honour, with the chosen country's
    photographic traditions placed on show in relation to its contemporary
    production. Last year's guest was Japan, and this year French curator
    Catherine David, a specialist in Middle Eastern art and photography,
    provided a focus on Iran and the Arab World.

    Immediately upon entering this year's show, once past a café area
    apparently used for professional networking, visitors encountered an
    exhibition of historical photographs taken from the archives of the
    Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a Beirut-based NGO, with an adjacent
    space being used to house a "statement" section that consisted of
    eight photography galleries from Iran and the Arab world representing
    some 15 emerging photographers.

    In her curatorial essay in the show's catalogue, David provided an
    account of the beginnings of photography in the Arab world. Starting
    in the 1840s, European photographers began to visit biblical and
    historical sites in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, producing images of
    panoramic landscapes, historical monuments and "native types,"
    particularly veiled women or local merchants and craftsmen, all of
    which became material for innumerable photograph albums and postcards.
    >From the 1860s onwards, European and Armenian photographers began to
    establish permanent studios in Arab cities, the most famous of which
    were probably orientalist photographers Félix Bonfils in Beirut and
    Lehnert and Landrock in Tunis.

    It was only later, David writes, that Middle Eastern populations
    became both the authors and the subjects of photographs, and only
    later, too, that the studio photograph, a characteristic Middle
    Eastern genre, began to enjoy a vogue among the region's middle and
    upper classes. However, once photography had firmly established itself
    in Iran and the Arab World, dated here to the early decades of the
    last century, it began to play an important role not only for domestic
    purposes, innumerable families recording significant rites of passage
    through a visit to the photographic salon, but also for recording
    national events and in the illustrated and celebrity press.

    Photography became an art form in its own right, with Cairo studio
    photographers, such as the Armenians Van Leo or Armand, specialising
    in glamourising the actors, actresses, singers and dancers of the
    golden age of Egyptian cinema and producing carefully posed images of
    the country's beau monde. Elsewhere, photographers such as Hashem
    El-Madani in Lebanon and Latif El-Ani in Iraq specialised in recording
    the populations and streetscapes of rapidly changing Arab cities like
    Sidon and Baghdad.

    Such images, David writes, serve as evidence of the cosmopolitan
    character of the Arab world's major cities in the earlier part of the
    last century, as well as of the cross-over between photography,
    popular imagery, the cinema and advertising, with some Cairo
    photographers at least being influenced by experimental trends in the
    arts, such as surrealism.

    It is this heritage of Arab photography that today is under threat as
    a result of poor conservation and a lack of proper archives, and in
    order to illustrate the wealth of material available David had
    selected 50 images from the 300,000 or so now contained in the AIF
    archives for the show's central exhibition. Set up in 1997 and relying
    on funding from American foundations, the AIF's mission is to
    research, collect and preserve the photographic heritage of the Arab
    world, persuading individuals, studios and organisations to part with
    prized, if sometimes poorly conserved, materials in order that these
    may be properly archived and preserved.

    According to collections manager Tamara Sawaya, speaking in an
    interview with the Weekly, the AIF is one of the only such
    organisations in the Arab world, and it has taken a lead not only in
    researching and trying to preserve the photographic production of the
    region, but also in drawing attention to the sometimes poor condition
    of Arab public collections, for example those held by the region's
    newspapers.

    Making such images available to a wider public is another of the AIF's
    aims, and in addition to a programme of exhibitions that has taken
    selections of images on tour in Europe and the United States, it is
    making its entire collection available on- line in digitized form,
    also allowing users to purchase high- resolution versions for
    professional purposes.

    Catherine David's selection of images from the AIF collection for
    Paris Photo included images by familiar Cairo studios such as Van Leo,
    Alban and Armand, including a 1940 portrait of the francophone
    Egyptian writer Albert Cossery, apparently taken months before he left
    Egypt, and at least one of Van Leo's own extensive series of
    self-portraits. There was a series of photographs taken by Egyptian
    film director Shadi Abdel-Salam, director of Al-Mumiaa (1969), while
    working on the 1959 film Hikayat hubb, and a selection of studio and
    other photographs from the Baghdad of the 1960s.

    Eight Iranian and Arab galleries were presenting contemporary work at
    Paris Photo, though it was disappointing to see no Egyptian
    representation. Among the eight galleries, two were from Tehran, two
    from Tunis and two from Dubai, with galleries from Marrakech and
    Beirut also being represented. Each had been invited to present the
    work of emerging photographers, with Iranian photography making a
    strong showing not only in the selections presented by the Assar and
    Silk Road galleries from Tehran, but also in the work by Reza Aramesh
    presented by the B21 Gallery from Dubai.

    Aramesh photographs re-stagings of politically motivated atrocities
    with actors in the comfortable surroundings of English country houses,
    and some of his images had been used as publicity materials for Paris
    Photo. (The main image was a 1970s studio shot of a gun-toting girl by
    Van Leo.) Still on the political violence-related theme, the Beirut
    and Hamburg- based Sfeir-Semler gallery was displaying a series of
    snapshot-type images of guerilla fighters by Akram Zaatari in the
    statement section, many of them apparently taken in prison. A "liberty
    of appearing" series of more gentle Cairo street scenes by Yasser
    Alwan came as a form of relief.

    In addition to the Iranian and Arab galleries exhibiting in the
    statement section of the show, other European and North American
    galleries had also dug into their archives of Middle Eastern
    photographs, with the well-known Magnum agency (Paris) presenting the
    news photography of Iranian photographer Abbas, for example, and
    Bernheimer (Munich) showing vintage prints shot in Iran in 1949. Still
    other galleries were presenting contemporary photographers working in
    the Arab world, such as Moroccan Laila Essaydi, represented by Edwynn
    Houk (New York), and Egyptian wunderkind Youssef Nabil, represented by
    Michael Stevenson (Cape Town).

    The Serge Plantureux gallery (Paris) had dug up what was advertised as
    "the first photograph ever taken in the Orient," a view of the outside
    of Mohammed Ali Pasha's harem in Alexandria taken on 7 November 1839
    by French photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet.

    Press material produced around the show, not least that in the various
    glossy art magazines with stands, focused on twin issues of
    representation and market behaviour. Ever since the late
    Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said drew attention to it in
    his 1978 book Orientalism, the distorted representation of the Orient
    in the western world has been the stock-in-trade of academic industry,
    and in her role as curator of the Iranian and Arab focus at this
    year's Paris Photo Catherine David gamely fielded questions about the
    selection of the material and the "orientalism," or otherwise, of the
    pieces on show.

    However, Paris Photo is primarily a commercial show, and that being so
    market conditions and the positioning of Iranian and Arab photographic
    materials on the international art market was perhaps of more pressing
    interest. As is well known, Arab art has undergone something of a boom
    on international markets in recent years, in a trend fed by the
    expansion of public art institutions and museums, particularly in the
    Gulf, the development of a significant number of private collectors,
    and growing international appetite for the Middle Eastern label.

    It is now not uncommon for contemporary Arab artists to command prices
    running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though according to
    the art magazine artpress, the record for a contemporary artist from
    the region is currently held by the Iranian Fahrad Moshiri for his
    piece Eshgh, "a calligraphy of the word 'love' done in Svarowski
    crystal," which made over a million dollars at auction last year in
    Dubai.

    Such conditions have not left photography untouched, and though it
    seems unlikely that Arab and Iranian photography will command the
    prices paid for Arab and Iranian art, what Paris Photo deputy director
    Guillaume Piens described as the show's "exploratory side" was
    intended to suggest that there was a "milieu being born at the present
    time" that had an interest in collecting Middle Eastern photography.
    While there are few public or private collectors of such material at
    present, Piens said, sales at auction in London and Paris have
    suggested that this situation may be changing. The fact that most of
    the Middle Eastern photography galleries invited to the Paris show had
    been founded within the last ten years or so confirms this impression.

    According to the Moroccan art magazine diptyk, while prices for Middle
    Eastern photography have been falling, possibly as a result of the
    world financial crisis, there is nevertheless a healthy market in
    historical photography. The Baudoin Lebon gallery (Paris) was selling
    views of Egypt taken by the 19th- century French photographer Gustave
    Le Gray for between 10,000 and 150,000 euros at this year's Paris
    Photo, and anyone interested could expect to pay between 15,000 and
    100,000 euros for one of Horst's 1940s photographs of Iran.
    Price-wise, the star among contemporary Iranian photographers is
    Shirin Neshat, based in the United States and represented by Paris
    gallery Jérôme de Noirmont, whose work Women of Allah can fetch
    between 50,000 and 120,000 euros.

    Looking at some of the contemporary material on show at this year's
    Paris Photo, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the lessons
    of Orientalism had been taken on board by at least some of the
    photographers. There seemed to be a lot of photographs of subjects
    that might be described as "native types," together with a slew of
    works dealing with women (veiled and unveiled) and political violence.
    Naturally, contemporary photographers are vastly more theoretically
    self- conscious, but it was possible to come away with the nagging
    feeling that there was a line between some of these images, taken by
    regional photographers but sold on the international market, and
    earlier 19th and 20th-century European orientalist photographs.
    Perhaps each new generation has to negotiate issues of representation
    afresh.

    Emerging from the slightly giddy atmosphere of Paris Photo, where talk
    of money and "the next big thing" -- contemporary Pakistani art,
    according to artpress -- was never very far away, it came as a relief
    to enter the otherworldly atmosphere of the musée du quai Branly for
    the museum's survey exhibition of historical and contemporary Iranian
    photography, curated by Anahita Ghabaian-Ettehadieh of the Tehran Silk
    Road gallery in cooperation with Iranian photographers Bahman Jalali
    and Hasan Sarbakhshian.

    While photography was introduced into Iran at the same time as into
    the Arab world, the vector was rather different. Whereas European
    photographers swiftly established themselves in the Arab countries,
    producing a now-familiar series of orientalising images, in Iran it
    seems to have been more difficult for European photographers to find a
    niche, and a main impetus behind the development of photography in the
    country came from the personal interest of the Qajar monarch Nasser
    El-Din Shah. It also seems to have been more difficult for European
    visitors to visit Iran, and there was no equivalent of the package
    tours of historical sites that were available from the late 19th
    century onwards for sites in Egypt and the Levant, presumably
    inhibiting the development of a postcard market.

    The earliest images from the musée du quai Branly exhibition therefore
    date from the collection made by Nasser el-Din Shah, now located in
    the Golestan Palace in Tehran and in the main closed to visitors.
    Nasser el-Din seems to have photographed at least in part for his own
    amusement, and the quai Branly show includes some odd images,
    apparently showing the shah in fancy-dress. Easier to understand are
    the photographs taken by the Armenian photographer Antoine Sevruguin,
    who worked in Iran until his death in 1933 and ran a successful studio
    in Tehran.

    Selections from Sevruguin's surviving photographs can be found on the
    Internet (many were destroyed during the 1905 revolution), and they
    show cityscapes, monuments and studio portraits of individuals and
    families. According to the exhibition notes -- there is,
    unfortunately, no catalogue -- Sevruguin's studio business took off
    from the 1920s onwards, when the fall of the Qajars and the spreading
    bureaucracy of the Pahlavi regime meant that individuals were
    increasingly likely to require ID photographs. Portrait photographs
    were also adopted, as in the Arab world, as family mementos and used
    to adorn the walls of living rooms, shops and offices.

    While this first section of the exhibition contains fascinating
    materials, it seems to have been constrained by the few materials
    available, and one wonders whether the Iranian Cultural Heritage
    Organisation, which has overall responsibility for the Golestan Palace
    and archives, might be persuaded to sponsor a more comprehensive
    exhibition of 19th and early 20th-century Iranian photography outside
    Iran. In the meantime, the strengths of the current exhibition lie in
    its later sections dedicated to Iranian photojournalism and
    contemporary art photography.

    Curator Bahman Jalali made his name as a news photographer during the
    1979 Iranian revolution, when photojournalism began to flood out of
    the country, and in subsequent years he and fellow news photographer
    and documentary filmmaker Kaveh Golestan were among the few
    photographers to document the early years of the Islamic Republic and
    the 1981-88 Iran-Iraq war. However, such documentary work in fact
    began earlier in the 1960s, and the present exhibition includes both
    images of the drama in the streets of Tehran during the revolutionary
    period of 1978-79, as well as of earlier and later scenes photographed
    in the 1960s and 1980s.

    The last section of the exhibition is given over to contemporary
    Iranian photography, which exhibits an eclectic range of styles in
    order to express life in today's Iran and to say something about
    contemporary Iranian identity, particularly in its relation to the
    country's past. Sadegh Tirafkan, for example, superimposes motifs
    taken from Persian miniature painting over images of modern Iranian
    tourists visiting historical sites in an attempt at historical
    layering, while Rana Javadi juxtaposes brightly coloured contemporary
    textiles with black-and-white images taken from the archives of long-
    defunct studio photographers. Shadi Ghadirian produces images of
    domestic items -- clothes on racks, cigarettes in boxes -- with,
    smuggled in among them, memories of recent conflicts, such as a
    uniform hung among clothes or a bullet lying between cigarettes.

    Elsewhere, Payman Hoshmanzadeh referenced ideas of youth and gender
    segregation in his Paradoxical Life (2006), while Mohsen Yazdipour
    reminded viewers of the wars and memories of wars that have marked
    life under the Islamic Republic in his My First Name Soldier (2006),
    rows of ID-style portraits of young men in military uniform, each with
    his name written on an adjacent card. Individual reluctance in the
    face of the nationalist choreography of the regime was indicated in
    Mehran Mohajer's Tired and Lazy (2008), a glimpse out of a window at a
    row of flags, while Mehraneh Atashi represented herself in a series of
    self-portraits showing her enlarged face against various Tehran street
    scenes.

    Visiting Iran a few years ago on a whistle-stop tour from Rasht and
    Tabriz in the north to Tehran and then on to Isfahan, Shiraz and
    Persepolis, magnificently atmospheric as the sun rose over the
    surrounding plains, one was struck by how apparently little these
    marvelous cities and landscapes have imprinted themselves on
    extra-Iranian imaginations, possibly owing to the fact that the
    photographic record is sparse when compared to that available for
    other countries.

    Perhaps the present international vogue for Iranian and Arab
    photography will also increase international understanding of these
    countries.

    Paris Photo, 19-22 November 2009, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris

    165 ans de photographie iranienne, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until
    29 November

    http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/974/cu4. htm
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