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To Be or Not To Be An Orientalist?: The Ambivalent Art of Antoin Sevruguin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Aphrodite Désirée Navab
Aphrodite Désirée Navab*
Affiliation:
College of Fine Arts, University of Florida
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Extract

The name of the Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin (ca.1838-1933) is not found today in the literature of the world history of photography. Although his photographs were published in several English books about Iran during his own time, the standard Western works on the history of photography, including those covering the Near East, all fail to mention Sevruguin. He does appear, however, in Yahya Zoka's Persian-language history of photography in Iran (1997).

In 1999 the Smithsonian Institution, which houses one of the two major collections of Sevruguin's work, published Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran 1870-1930. Almost simultaneously, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands, which houses the other collection, published a book called Sevruguin's Iran, a combined effort by the Netherlands and the Islamic Republic of Iran and containing both English and Persian text. Once again, this Middle Eastern artist has emerged in Western scholarship.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 1-3 , Winter Summer 2002 , pp. 113 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2002

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