Art History Research Lecture: Dr Mira Xenia Schwerda Intimate Strangers: Visual Arts and the Emergence of Print-Based Celebrity Culture in 19th-Century Iran

Join us on the 15th November at 4pm in School 2 of St Salvator's Quad for Dr Mira Xenia Schwerda's Research Lecture.

During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) photography played a critical role in defining, mobilizing, and memorializing political movements and their leaders in an era of spectacle. The wide circulation of picture postcards featuring political photographs taken by the most prominent Iranian photographers of the time convinced a mainly illiterate audience to support the revolutionary movement. A new genre of revolutionary portraiture, bridging commercial and political imagery, depicted Constitutionalist fighters (mujahidin) and politicians, and was introduced and disseminated through postcards. Speaking to national and foreign, as well as contemporary and future audiences, the postcards traversed time and space, and remain active agents of revolution today. The photographs from the Constitutional Revolution gained renewed significance in 2022-23, when they were posted on social media during the ongoing protests in Iran. However, the sustained investment in these images in Iran is juxtaposed with the general academic neglect of this body of photographic material until now. These portable photographs from the turn of the century provide insight not only into a moment of revolution in Iran, they also highlight international networks of artistic and political communication across geographical and linguistic boundaries, allowing us to better understand the importance of the photographic image at a time of rapid political change.

Bio:
Mira Xenia Schwerda is a historian of photography and print and of modern Middle Eastern art. She holds a joint PhD in History of Art and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard. She has taught courses in the history of photography, Islamic art history, and South Asian art history in the Department of Art History at the University of Edinburgh. This academic year, she is a Getty/ACLS postdoctoral fellow in the history of art and an honorary postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where she focuses on her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905-1911).