Our Work

Professor Ali Behdad has published two articles centered on photography and its constructs. The first, “On Vernacular Portrait Photography in Iran,” is available in Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, edited by Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, and Brian Wallis. This book brings together leading scholars and critics to consider vernacular photography: snapshots and family pictures; photo albums and displays; mug shots and identification photographs; and ethnographic, scientific, industrial, and architectural images. Professor Behdad’s article puts pressure on postcolonial critics’ celebratory views of non-Western vernacular photography by demonstrating that to the extent to which it is possible to be both the subject and the object of representation as a Middle Eastern subject, vernacular photographs in Iran do not necessarily constitute a locus of opposition in relation to the official or dominant forms of photographic representation.

Professor Behdad’s article, Le harem pluriel: Jean Geiser and Photographic Orientalism, is also available in the first Yale French Studies issue on photography, which examines French photography’s place in art, identity, and society through a lens of diversity and interdisciplinary investigation. Professor Behdad’s article complicates symptomatic readings of postcolonial art historians, asking whether colonialism as a conceptual paradigm is sufficient to describe the images of a photographer like Geiser and whether his photographs perform the same ideological function as those of other Orientalist photographers.