Re-imagining Iranian African Slavery: Photography as Material Culture

The exhibition focuses on the overlooked study of race and ethnicity in the field of Iranian photography. The photographs showcase Africans enslaved during the Qajar period of the 1840s-1920s and are considered to be a new topic in the field of visual studies of modern Iran. This is the first ever photo exhibition organized in the United States that uses photographs of the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods to study the level of ability of the medium as material culture. The photographs included in the exhibition are from the Dr. A. Fazel Visual Archive, Media Collection and Digital Resources (Oklahoma State University), the Kimia Foundation (U.S.A), and the Farhad and Firouzeh Diba Collection of Qajar Photographs (Spain). The exhibition is sponsored by the Mellon Research Initiative Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds and co-sponsored by Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Persian Language and Literature and the Art History Program at UC Davis in cooperation with the Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at Oklahoma State University.