AT THE SACKLER

Antoin Sevruguin and the Persian Image, now up at the Sackler, is a retrospective of prints from an Eastern artist who until now has not been recognized in the West. His photographs are precise and beautifully composed, and the content makes them interesting enough to hold their own-but why now? If the images of Persia as portrayed by Sevruguin seem familiar, it could be because you've actually seen them before. Sevruguin's photographs have been published in the past with educational and informative texts about Persia, either anonymously or under some other artist's name. More likely, though, these photographs will seem familiar because the lens through which Sevruguin saw Persia is a familiar one: it is the lens of Orientalism. Or at least that is what the post-colonial studies experts would have us think.

Orientalism, as defined by Columbia professor and cultural critic Edward Said, is the Westerner's way of coming to terms with the Orient, based not on "truth" about that area but on what he projects onto it. The Orient and "Orientals" are seen, stereotypically, as the "Other": eccentric and backward, sensual and passive. Men are feminine, but also threatening; women are exotic and easily dominated. Images that portray the Orient from an exotic point of view, even if they are just landscapes, are said by scholars to be Orientalist.

Many of Sevruguin's images fall under the umbrella of Orientalism; one need not look further than their use as illustrations in imperialist western texts to infer that. Also, in his studio he took pictures of white men and women dressed as Easterners. These photographs show the attitudes of the Europeans-they were sure enough of their superiority that they could dress up as Iranians just for fun or for a souvenir to send home.

Sevruguin, however, is not your average Orientalist. He lived in Iran his whole life (from sometime in the 1830s to 1933), and he expressed in his letters a deep love for his country. To him, Persia was hardly the exotic or inferior area that it was to the British and French. His studio photographs may just have been a concession to what was popular at the time, but it is hard to photograph a landscape through a political lens. Sevruguin's landscapes are beautiful, exotic when we look at them only because they are not fields and trees in New England. It seems a shame to say that just because his pictures are similar to those taken to entice Europeans to visit the empire, they themselves are Orientalist.

Among the photographs is a series that Sevruguin took when he had access to the Persian royal court. He was allowed to take formal portraits but also more casual, intimate pictures of the shah. These unlikely photographs were probably made possible because Nasir al-Din Shah, who reigned from 1848 to 1896, was a patron of photography and encouraged the craft in his country. One print is of a Western barber dying the shah's mustache. Here the European is serving the Easterner in a photograph by a native. It is here that it becomes clear that Sevruguin is more than a simple puppet of Orientalism. The shah looks regal and sophisticated in his Eastern garb, but also like a real man and not the Western caricature of an Iranian.

The photographs of Sevruguin are particularly relevant right now because of the prevalence of post-colonialist studies in academia. If a Persian made women seem passive and highly sexual, whose fault is that? How can we say he was purposefully promoting a Western ideal if he was not Western? Sevruguin's photographs, besides being diverse and stunning images, add a new dimension to the often oversimplified academic dialogue in the post-colonial era.

-Sarah E. Kramer