Fashioning the Modern In and Beyond the Middle East: Photography as a Technology of Expression in the Islamic World
Session will present: In-PersonAffiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of Islamic Art Association
Photography was taken up in the Islamic world almost immediately after the Daguerreotype process had been publicly introduced in Paris in 1839. This panel investigates photography as a technology of modernity—from its earliest moments to the twenty-first century. It examines the medium’s itinerant character, its role in the visualization of cultural identity and diasporic modes of representation in Africa and the Middle East. More specifically, it considers photography’s relationship to religious rules, underlining that Islam is not monolithic. Like the photographic image, which slips easily across disciplinary boundaries, our panel is interdisciplinary and brings together the voices of practicing photographers, anthropologists, and art historians. It critically evaluates photographic representations in and of the modern and contemporary Islamic world by asking questions such as: How did photography, especially that of and in the Middle East and Africa, contribute to the fashioning of a modern self?; What does the itinerancy of the photographic medium and its cross-pollination across different geographies tell us about colonial and imperial modernism of the period?; How do archives and repositories impact our understanding of the histories of MENA photography today?; What do we know about the relationship between photographic representations from the Islamic world and Islam in the past and present?; How does contemporary art engage with the complex heritage of modern Middle Eastern and African photography?
Field(s) of Study:
Geographic Area: Middle East
Geographic Area: Africa
Geographic Area: Western Asia
Geographic Area: South Asia
Time Period: Nineteenth Century
Chairs:
Mira Xenia Schwerda, University of Edinburgh
and
Erin Hyde Nolan, Sch of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts Univ
Discussant:
Hala Auji, Virginia Commonwealth University
Abstract Submissions Closed