To Be or Not To Be An Orientalist?: The Ambivalent Art of Antoin Sevruguin

Abstract

The name of the Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin (ca.1838-1933) is not found today in the literature of the world history of photography. Although his photographs were published in several English books about Iran during his own time, the standard Western works on the history of photography, including those covering the Near East, all fail to mention Sevruguin. He does appear, however, in Yahya Zoka's Persian-language history of photography in Iran (1997).In 1999 the Smithsonian Institution, which houses one of the two major collections of Sevruguin's work, published Sevruguin and the Persian Image: Photographs of Iran 1870-1930. Almost simultaneously, the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, Netherlands, which houses the other collection, published a book called Sevruguin's Iran, a combined effort by the Netherlands and the Islamic Republic of Iran and containing both English and Persian text. Once again, this Middle Eastern artist has emerged in Western scholarship.