Qajar Photography

On a December morning in 1842, the Russian diplomat Nikolai Pavlov exposed a polished silver plate at the Tehran court of Mohammad Shah Qajar. The portrait that emerged is the earliest surviving photograph taken anywhere in Asia — three years after Louis Daguerre announced his process in Paris, and a full decade before photography reached Japan. Within a generation, the Qajar court would become one of the most photographed royal households on earth.

The catalyst was Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–1896), an enthusiastic amateur who learned to develop his own plates, kept a private darkroom inside the Golestan Palace, and personally photographed his wives, ministers, court eunuchs and the construction of new bridges and railways. His handwritten captions in nasta'liq survive on tens of thousands of glass negatives in the palace vaults.

"Today we photographed the courtyard from the window of the Marble Hall. The light was perfect, the prints came out clear."

The greatest photographer of Qajar Iran was an Armenian Iranian named Antoin Sevruguin. Born in Tehran to a diplomat father and trained in Tbilisi under the Russian master Dmitri Ermakov, Sevruguin opened a studio on Ala al-Dowleh Street in 1870. Over half a century he produced more than seven thousand glass-plate negatives — portraits of dervishes, qanat workers, harem ladies, Bakhtiari nomads, Zoroastrian priests at Yazd, and the ruined columns of Persepolis under sandstorm.

Half of his archive was destroyed in the 1908 Russian bombardment of the Majles. The surviving plates are now divided between the Smithsonian's Freer-Sackler Galleries in Washington, the Rijksmuseum in Leiden, and the National Museum of Ethnology in Hamburg.

The Golestan Palace archive — never fully digitised — is the largest royal photographic collection of the 19th century. It includes the only known photographic record of court ceremonies later abandoned (the salām-e Nowruz, the royal coronation rites), of streetscapes since demolished (the great Tehran bazaar before 1900), and of provincial governors whose names are otherwise lost.

For Iranian historians, Qajar photography is the only direct visual evidence of pre-modern Iran. Manuscripts and miniatures show how the court wanted to be seen; the daguerreotypes show how it actually was — the threadbare carpet on the Marble Throne, the gap-toothed smile of a vizier, the ten-year-old crown prince in an oversized military uniform. The archive collapses 80 years of Iranian social history into a single visual sentence.

Few monarchs in history left so complete a self-portrait. Crowned at seventeen and reigning for forty-eight years, Naser al-Din Shah Qajar (1831–1896) discovered photography as a teenager and never put it down. He imported French and Austrian cameras through the diplomatic pouch, built a darkroom in the Golestan, and trained a permanent court photographer — Aqa Reza Akkasbashi — whom he ennobled with the title akkasbashi ("chief of photographers"), the first such office at any royal court in the world.

The Shah's personal albums — bound in tooled leather, kept in the Albumkhaneh ("house of albums") at the Golestan — contain everything from formal coronation portraits to candid shots of his harem at picnic, the royal cats, the construction of the first Tehran tram, executions in Toopkhaneh Square, and a famous series of the Shah pulling faces at the camera. He captioned each plate himself in nasta'liq, often with wry commentary: "Today the wind was strong; the picture is a little blurred."

"The camera does not flatter, but it does not lie. This is how I am, and how my court is."

The most extraordinary section of the Golestan archive is the Andaroun (harem) album: roughly 1,200 plates of the Shah's wives, concubines, daughters and female attendants, taken in domestic dress without male photographers present — the Shah operated the camera himself. The images upended a century of Orientalist fantasy. Far from veiled odalisques on silk cushions, the women appear in shaliteh (short tutu-like skirts the Shah brought back from a Paris ballet in 1873), drinking tea, smoking qalyans, posing with cigars, and — in one celebrated plate — wrestling.

The harem album was suppressed after the 1979 Revolution but published in part by the scholar Afsaneh Najmabadi in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards (2005), and is now a primary source for the social history of Qajar womanhood.

The Qajar studios moved through every photographic technology of the long nineteenth century. The earliest images are daguerreotypes — silver-coated copper plates developed in mercury vapour, unique positives that could not be reprinted. From the 1860s the court switched to the wet collodion process: a glass plate coated in collodion, sensitised in silver nitrate, exposed and developed within the fifteen minutes before the emulsion dried. Pesce and Carlhian carried portable darkroom tents into the field for the Persepolis surveys of 1858 — the first photographs ever taken at the site.

After 1880 the Golestan adopted the more convenient gelatin dry plate, which could be bought ready-made in Vienna, exposed weeks later, and developed at leisure. The dry plate is what made the harem album possible — for the first time the Shah could photograph quickly enough to catch a laugh.

Particular photographs in the Golestan have become canonical for Iranian historians. The 1873 plate of Mirza Hosein Khan Sepahsalar beside a wax model of the proposed Trans-Caspian Railway is the only surviving evidence of that ill-fated project. A 1906 plate by Reza Akkasbashi shows the constitutionalists gathered in the British Legation garden during the bast sit-in — the founding image of Iranian democracy. The 1908 plate of the Majles in ruins, taken hours after the Russian-led bombardment, gave the world its first photograph of an act now studied as the prototype of modern political coup.

The Tehran archives can give the impression that Qajar photography was purely a court phenomenon, but by the 1880s commercial studios had opened in Tabriz (the seat of the Crown Prince), Isfahan, Shiraz and Mashhad. The Tabriz studios of Khan Baba Mo'tazedi and Mirza Hasan Akkasbashi documented the Constitutional Revolution in real time — including the famous 1908 plate of the Sattar Khan irregulars in the gardens of Bagh-e Shomal, the only contemporary photograph of an armed constitutionalist column. Hoeltzer's Isfahan archive, now in Heidelberg, contains some 2,000 plates of the Zayandeh Rud bridges, the Armenian quarter of New Julfa, and the qanat workers of the Najaf Abad plain.

A live gallery of original 19th-century Qajar-era glass-plate photographs hosted on Wikimedia Commons, including works by Antoin Sevruguin and the court photographers of Naser al-Din Shah.

Images shown here are served from the local media library.