Iran and the Arab world were the focus of last week's Paris Photo, a photography show confirming international interest in Middle Eastern art, writes David Tresilian in Paris Hot on the heels of a well-attended dossier exhibition on 165 years of Iranian photography at the musée du quai Branly, the Middle Eastern and photographic theme continued at this year's Paris Photo photography show at which Iran and the Arab World were guests of honour. Both events included significant historical components, as well as accounts of contemporary trends. Together they provided an intriguing glimpse both of the history of Middle Eastern photography and of its place on the contemporary international art scene. Held each year since 1997, Paris Photo is a major international show that this year was housed in the prestige environment of the Carrousel du Louvre and attracted around 100 galleries from 23 countries. Every year there is a guest of honour, with the chosen country's photographic traditions placed on show in relation to its contemporary production. Last year's guest was Japan, and this year French curator Catherine David, a specialist in Middle Eastern art and photography, provided a focus on Iran and the Arab World. Immediately upon entering this year's show, once past a café area apparently used for professional networking, visitors encountered an exhibition of historical photographs taken from the archives of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a Beirut-based NGO, with an adjacent space being used to house a "statement" section that consisted of eight photography galleries from Iran and the Arab world representing some 15 emerging photographers. In her curatorial essay in the show's catalogue, David provided an account of the beginnings of photography in the Arab world. Starting in the 1840s, European photographers began to visit biblical and historical sites in Palestine, Syria and Egypt, producing images of panoramic landscapes, historical monuments and "native types," particularly veiled women or local merchants and craftsmen, all of which became material for innumerable photograph albums and postcards. From the 1860s onwards, European and Armenian photographers began to establish permanent studios in Arab cities, the most famous of which were probably orientalist photographers Félix Bonfils in Beirut and Lehnert and Landrock in Tunis. It was only later, David writes, that Middle Eastern populations became both the authors and the subjects of photographs, and only later, too, that the studio photograph, a characteristic Middle Eastern genre, began to enjoy a vogue among the region's middle and upper classes. However, once photography had firmly established itself in Iran and the Arab World, dated here to the early decades of the last century, it began to play an important role not only for domestic purposes, innumerable families recording significant rites of passage through a visit to the photographic salon, but also for recording national events and in the illustrated and celebrity press. Photography became an art form in its own right, with Cairo studio photographers, such as the Armenians Van Leo or Armand, specialising in glamourising the actors, actresses, singers and dancers of the golden age of Egyptian cinema and producing carefully posed images of the country's beau monde. Elsewhere, photographers such as Hashem El-Madani in Lebanon and Latif El-Ani in Iraq specialised in recording the populations and streetscapes of rapidly changing Arab cities like Sidon and Baghdad. Such images, David writes, serve as evidence of the cosmopolitan character of the Arab world's major cities in the earlier part of the last century, as well as of the cross-over between photography, popular imagery, the cinema and advertising, with some Cairo photographers at least being influenced by experimental trends in the arts, such as surrealism. It is this heritage of Arab photography that today is under threat as a result of poor conservation and a lack of proper archives, and in order to illustrate the wealth of material available David had selected 50 images from the 300,000 or so now contained in the AIF archives for the show's central exhibition. Set up in 1997 and relying on funding from American foundations, the AIF's mission is to research, collect and preserve the photographic heritage of the Arab world, persuading individuals, studios and organisations to part with prized, if sometimes poorly conserved, materials in order that these may be properly archived and preserved. According to collections manager Tamara Sawaya, speaking in an interview with the Weekly, the AIF is one of the only such organisations in the Arab world, and it has taken a lead not only in researching and trying to preserve the photographic production of the region, but also in drawing attention to the sometimes poor condition of Arab public collections, for example those held by the region's newspapers. Making such images available to a wider public is another of the AIF's aims, and in addition to a programme of exhibitions that has taken selections of images on tour in Europe and the United States, it is making its entire collection available on- line in digitized form, also allowing users to purchase high- resolution versions for professional purposes. Catherine David's selection of images from the AIF collection for Paris Photo included images by familiar Cairo studios such as Van Leo, Alban and Armand, including a 1940 portrait of the francophone Egyptian writer Albert Cossery, apparently taken months before he left Egypt, and at least one of Van Leo's own extensive series of self-portraits. There was a series of photographs taken by Egyptian film director Shadi Abdel-Salam, director of Al-Mumiaa (1969), while working on the 1959 film Hikayat hubb, and a selection of studio and other photographs from the Baghdad of the 1960s. Eight Iranian and Arab galleries were presenting contemporary work at Paris Photo, though it was disappointing to see no Egyptian representation. Among the eight galleries, two were from Tehran, two from Tunis and two from Dubai, with galleries from Marrakech and Beirut also being represented. Each had been invited to present the work of emerging photographers, with Iranian photography making a strong showing not only in the selections presented by the Assar and Silk Road galleries from Tehran, but also in the work by Reza Aramesh presented by the B21 Gallery from Dubai. Aramesh photographs re-stagings of politically motivated atrocities with actors in the comfortable surroundings of English country houses, and some of his images had been used as publicity materials for Paris Photo. (The main image was a 1970s studio shot of a gun-toting girl by Van Leo.) Still on the political violence-related theme, the Beirut and Hamburg- based Sfeir-Semler gallery was displaying a series of snapshot-type images of guerilla fighters by Akram Zaatari in the statement section, many of them apparently taken in prison. A "liberty of appearing" series of more gentle Cairo street scenes by Yasser Alwan came as a form of relief. In addition to the Iranian and Arab galleries exhibiting in the statement section of the show, other European and North American galleries had also dug into their archives of Middle Eastern photographs, with the well-known Magnum agency (Paris) presenting the news photography of Iranian photographer Abbas, for example, and Bernheimer (Munich) showing vintage prints shot in Iran in 1949. Still other galleries were presenting contemporary photographers working in the Arab world, such as Moroccan Laila Essaydi, represented by Edwynn Houk (New York), and Egyptian wunderkind Youssef Nabil, represented by Michael Stevenson (Cape Town). The Serge Plantureux gallery (Paris) had dug up what was advertised as "the first photograph ever taken in the Orient," a view of the outside of Mohammed Ali Pasha's harem in Alexandria taken on 7 November 1839 by French photographer Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet. Press material produced around the show, not least that in the various glossy art magazines with stands, focused on twin issues of representation and market behaviour. Ever since the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said drew attention to it in his 1978 book Orientalism, the distorted representation of the Orient in the western world has been the stock-in-trade of academic industry, and in her role as curator of the Iranian and Arab focus at this year's Paris Photo Catherine David gamely fielded questions about the selection of the material and the "orientalism," or otherwise, of the pieces on show. However, Paris Photo is primarily a commercial show, and that being so market conditions and the positioning of Iranian and Arab photographic materials on the international art market was perhaps of more pressing interest. As is well known, Arab art has undergone something of a boom on international markets in recent years, in a trend fed by the expansion of public art institutions and museums, particularly in the Gulf, the development of a significant number of private collectors, and growing international appetite for the Middle Eastern label. It is now not uncommon for contemporary Arab artists to command prices running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, though according to the art magazine artpress, the record for a contemporary artist from the region is currently held by the Iranian Fahrad Moshiri for his piece Eshgh, "a calligraphy of the word 'love' done in Svarowski crystal," which made over a million dollars at auction last year in Dubai. Such conditions have not left photography untouched, and though it seems unlikely that Arab and Iranian photography will command the prices paid for Arab and Iranian art, what Paris Photo deputy director Guillaume Piens described as the show's "exploratory side" was intended to suggest that there was a "milieu being born at the present time" that had an interest in collecting Middle Eastern photography. While there are few public or private collectors of such material at present, Piens said, sales at auction in London and Paris have suggested that this situation may be changing. The fact that most of the Middle Eastern photography galleries invited to the Paris show had been founded within the last ten years or so confirms this impression. According to the Moroccan art magazine diptyk, while prices for Middle Eastern photography have been falling, possibly as a result of the world financial crisis, there is nevertheless a healthy market in historical photography. The Baudoin Lebon gallery (Paris) was selling views of Egypt taken by the 19th- century French photographer Gustave Le Gray for between 10,000 and 150,000 euros at this year's Paris Photo, and anyone interested could expect to pay between 15,000 and 100,000 euros for one of Horst's 1940s photographs of Iran. Price-wise, the star among contemporary Iranian photographers is Shirin Neshat, based in the United States and represented by Paris gallery Jérôme de Noirmont, whose work Women of Allah can fetch between 50,000 and 120,000 euros. Looking at some of the contemporary material on show at this year's Paris Photo, one could be forgiven for wondering whether the lessons of Orientalism had been taken on board by at least some of the photographers. There seemed to be a lot of photographs of subjects that might be described as "native types," together with a slew of works dealing with women (veiled and unveiled) and political violence. Naturally, contemporary photographers are vastly more theoretically self- conscious, but it was possible to come away with the nagging feeling that there was a line between some of these images, taken by regional photographers but sold on the international market, and earlier 19th and 20th-century European orientalist photographs. Perhaps each new generation has to negotiate issues of representation afresh. Emerging from the slightly giddy atmosphere of Paris Photo, where talk of money and "the next big thing" -- contemporary Pakistani art, according to artpress -- was never very far away, it came as a relief to enter the otherworldly atmosphere of the musée du quai Branly for the museum's survey exhibition of historical and contemporary Iranian photography, curated by Anahita Ghabaian-Ettehadieh of the Tehran Silk Road gallery in cooperation with Iranian photographers Bahman Jalali and Hasan Sarbakhshian. While photography was introduced into Iran at the same time as into the Arab world, the vector was rather different. Whereas European photographers swiftly established themselves in the Arab countries, producing a now-familiar series of orientalising images, in Iran it seems to have been more difficult for European photographers to find a niche, and a main impetus behind the development of photography in the country came from the personal interest of the Qajar monarch Nasser El-Din Shah. It also seems to have been more difficult for European visitors to visit Iran, and there was no equivalent of the package tours of historical sites that were available from the late 19th century onwards for sites in Egypt and the Levant, presumably inhibiting the development of a postcard market. The earliest images from the musée du quai Branly exhibition therefore date from the collection made by Nasser el-Din Shah, now located in the Golestan Palace in Tehran and in the main closed to visitors. Nasser el-Din seems to have photographed at least in part for his own amusement, and the quai Branly show includes some odd images, apparently showing the shah in fancy-dress. Easier to understand are the photographs taken by the Armenian photographer Antoine Sevruguin, who worked in Iran until his death in 1933 and ran a successful studio in Tehran. Selections from Sevruguin's surviving photographs can be found on the Internet (many were destroyed during the 1905 revolution), and they show cityscapes, monuments and studio portraits of individuals and families. According to the exhibition notes -- there is, unfortunately, no catalogue -- Sevruguin's studio business took off from the 1920s onwards, when the fall of the Qajars and the spreading bureaucracy of the Pahlavi regime meant that individuals were increasingly likely to require ID photographs. Portrait photographs were also adopted, as in the Arab world, as family mementos and used to adorn the walls of living rooms, shops and offices. While this first section of the exhibition contains fascinating materials, it seems to have been constrained by the few materials available, and one wonders whether the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organisation, which has overall responsibility for the Golestan Palace and archives, might be persuaded to sponsor a more comprehensive exhibition of 19th and early 20th-century Iranian photography outside Iran. In the meantime, the strengths of the current exhibition lie in its later sections dedicated to Iranian photojournalism and contemporary art photography. Curator Bahman Jalali made his name as a news photographer during the 1979 Iranian revolution, when photojournalism began to flood out of the country, and in subsequent years he and fellow news photographer and documentary filmmaker Kaveh Golestan were among the few photographers to document the early years of the Islamic Republic and the 1981-88 Iran-Iraq war. However, such documentary work in fact began earlier in the 1960s, and the present exhibition includes both images of the drama in the streets of Tehran during the revolutionary period of 1978-79, as well as of earlier and later scenes photographed in the 1960s and 1980s. The last section of the exhibition is given over to contemporary Iranian photography, which exhibits an eclectic range of styles in order to express life in today's Iran and to say something about contemporary Iranian identity, particularly in its relation to the country's past. Sadegh Tirafkan, for example, superimposes motifs taken from Persian miniature painting over images of modern Iranian tourists visiting historical sites in an attempt at historical layering, while Rana Javadi juxtaposes brightly coloured contemporary textiles with black-and-white images taken from the archives of long- defunct studio photographers. Shadi Ghadirian produces images of domestic items -- clothes on racks, cigarettes in boxes -- with, smuggled in among them, memories of recent conflicts, such as a uniform hung among clothes or a bullet lying between cigarettes. Elsewhere, Payman Hoshmanzadeh referenced ideas of youth and gender segregation in his Paradoxical Life (2006), while Mohsen Yazdipour reminded viewers of the wars and memories of wars that have marked life under the Islamic Republic in his My First Name Soldier (2006), rows of ID-style portraits of young men in military uniform, each with his name written on an adjacent card. Individual reluctance in the face of the nationalist choreography of the regime was indicated in Mehran Mohajer's Tired and Lazy (2008), a glimpse out of a window at a row of flags, while Mehraneh Atashi represented herself in a series of self-portraits showing her enlarged face against various Tehran street scenes. Visiting Iran a few years ago on a whistle-stop tour from Rasht and Tabriz in the north to Tehran and then on to Isfahan, Shiraz and Persepolis, magnificently atmospheric as the sun rose over the surrounding plains, one was struck by how apparently little these marvelous cities and landscapes have imprinted themselves on extra-Iranian imaginations, possibly owing to the fact that the photographic record is sparse when compared to that available for other countries. Perhaps the present international vogue for Iranian and Arab photography will also increase international understanding of these countries. Paris Photo, 19-22 November 2009, Carrousel du Louvre, Paris 165 ans de photographie iranienne, Musée du quai Branly, Paris, until 29 November
