Description:

Professor Ali Behdad
John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Department Chair
UCLA

Title: "The History of Iranian Photography"

Abstract: "This presentation is meant to be experienced the way we might look at a series of photographs taken by a camera equipped with different lenses. I'll start with a wide angel lens, providing a general history of the way photography was developed in Iran, and then I’ll zoom in on some examples of early photography to elaborate the way amateur and professional Iranian photographers used the new medium to represent and document themselves and their cultures. Nineteenth-century Iran, I suggest, offers a unique context in which to explore what I call “contact vision,” that is a mode of photographic representation borne of cross-cultural encounters and circulation.”

Bio: Dr. Ali Behdad is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Behdad's academic areas of interest include postcolonial literature and theory, European representations of the Middle East, and photography of and in the Middle East. He has written numerous works on the subject, including his upcoming book, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2016).