Material Culture and Photography

Curated by Dr Pedram Khosronejad (Western Sydney University), this exhibition traces the unexplored history of African slaves in Iran during the Qajar dynasty and looks at the unique relationship between photography and slavery in Iran from 1840s to the 1930s.

The photographs in this exhibition are drawn from government and personal archives throughout Iran, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Photography, Race and Slavery: African Sitters of Qajar Era Iran is the first exhibition organized in Australia that traces the history of African enslaved in Iran using photographs of the Qajar (1796-1925) and early Pahlavi periods (1925-1979).

This exhibition is presented as part of the UNSW Library Exhibitions Program and the Silk Roads @ UNSW Research Network Seminar Series in collaboration with the Religion and Society Cluster of Western Sydney University.

Photo Exhibition

"Re-imagining Iranian African Slavery: photography as material culture"

Curated by: P. Khosronejad

Walter A. Buehler Alumni Center, University of California, Davis
May10th- June 27th 2018

Sponsored by: Mellon Research Initiative Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds

A theoretical discussion of the booming research field of photo book research by way of recent book publications.
Expanded version of: Jens Ruchatz, „Bereichsrezension im erweiterten Forschungskontext: Fotobuch“, in. MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen | Reviews, Nr. 3, 2015, S. 408-416. http://dx.doi.org/10.17192/ep2015.3.3704

The article focuses on the reconfiguration of analogue instant photography (Polaroid-like) in the digital age. Drawing on STS literature on the mutual shaping of users and technology, and on anthropology and the history of photography, it adopts the concept of " photo-object " to discuss how the digitalization of photography stimulated a change in the cultural significance of materiality in the context of aspirational amateur photography , thus showing how this triggered a redefinition of instant photography as a more authentic form of aspirational practice. The article is based on empirical data collected during a multi-sited ethnography conducted in Italy between 2014 and 2015. By focusing on Polaroid's " objectness " and its dialectical tension with the immateriality of digital photography, the paper highlights an increasingly common process of circulation between analogue and digital photographic environments and argues that this process of circulation can be conceived in terms of a " remediation " process between analogue and digital practices.