Books by Staci Scheiwiller
Anthem Middle East Studies The Anthem Middle East Studies series is committed to offering to our ... more Anthem Middle East Studies The Anthem Middle East Studies series is committed to offering to our global audience the finest scholarship on the Middle East across the spectrum of academic disciplines. The twin goals of our rigorous editorial and production standards will be to bring original scholarship to the shelves and digital collections of academic libraries worldwide, and, to cultivate accessible studies for university students and other sophisticated readers.
Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen a... more Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.
THE INDIGENOUS LENS: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, 2017
The historiography of early photography has scarcely examined Islamic countries in the Near and M... more The historiography of early photography has scarcely examined Islamic countries in the Near and Middle East, although the new technique was adopted very quickly there by the 1840s. Which regional, local, and global aspects can be made evident? What role did autochthonous image and art traditions have, and which specific functions did photography meet since its introduction? This collective volume deals with examples from Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab lands and with the question of local specifics, or an "indigenous lens." The contributions broach the issues of regional histories of photography, local photographers, specific themes and practices, and historical collections in these countries. They offer, for the first time in book form, a cross-section through a developing field of the history of photography.
Articles and Book Chapters by Staci Scheiwiller
Performing Iran: Cultural Identity and Theatrical Performance, ed. Babak Rahimi, 2021
In: Ritter and Scheiwiller (eds), The Indigenous Lens? Early Photography in the Near and Middle East (Berlin 2018) 11–26
https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/475898 Very soon after its official announcement, photogra... more https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/475898 Very soon after its official announcement, photography was introduced to the Near and Middle East. The new medium became a global phenomenon of the nineteenth century, and its themes, visuality, and practices were arguably shared wherever it was used. The techniques and their uses in a studio or outdoors created certain requirements that were universal, thus spreading European norms of depiction across the globe. As a discipline, the history of photography, through this inception, has foregrounded early photography in Europe and North America. While this narrative has emphasized the global diffusion and universal impact of European photography, it has underexposed local photography in other regions where the new pictorial medium was quickly adopted. This volume brings current scholarship on local photography of the nineteenth century in the regions of the Near and Middle East to an international discussion....
Contemporary Iranian Photography: Five Perspectives, ed. Abbas Daneshvari (Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2017), 83-98, 2017
Middle East Studies after September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony and Academia, ed. Tugrul Keskin (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 194-213., 2018
Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, ed. Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016), 139-54, 2016
Trans Asia Photography Review, 2018
During the Pahlavi Dynasty , three genres of photographs dominated: state photographs, photojourn... more During the Pahlavi Dynasty , three genres of photographs dominated: state photographs, photojournalism, and family photographs, all of which become mirrors of the state, as the state gave rise to the "kingly citizen." [#N1] One staple attributed to family photography was the representation of the heteronormative, nuclear family of wife-husband-children in typical bourgeois fashion, reflecting the desires of Reza Shah (r. 1925-41) to model his subjects as part of the modern, industrialized world. In studio photography as an institutionalized and regulated industry during the Pahlavi era, [#N2] heterosexual, married couples pose with their children, and in other photographs, couples show physical affection. [#N3] Photohistorian Reza Sheikh writes: "The 'emancipation' of women left its mark on family portraits. Whereas previously women had been conspicuously absent from family photographs, whether alone or next to their husbands and children they were now prominently present." [#N4] Although more women did pose in family photographs, and heterosexual couples displayed for the camera more physical affection during the reign of Reza Shah, two observations remain. First, in studio photography, the poses and approaches did not vary much from those of the Qajar era (1785-1925) -a transitional period that Motarjemzadeh calls the "Grey Years" -in that many family photographs still conspicuously omitted the matriarchs, leaving only the father and his offspring. [#N5] Second, photographic depictions of a loving, heterosexual, nuclear family also began during the Qajar period in both studio and private family photographs of the elites, in particular those of Princess ʿEsmat al-Dowleh Qajar, the second daughter of the king Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-96), and of her immediate family.
The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Markus Ritter and Staci Gem Scheiwiller (University of Zurich Press, published by De Gruyter, 2017), 121-43
Many scholars have already written on the 1990s photographic series Women of Allah by artist Shir... more Many scholars have already written on the 1990s photographic series Women of Allah by artist Shirin Neshat (b. 1957), but the series' relationship to its written texts has not been fully explored or explained, such as in her photograph Rebellious Silence of 1994 ( .1). 1 This paper seeks to address this need by examining the importance of the written words inscribed on the images and texts that have created the ideal revolutionary woman in Iran during the Iranian Revolution (1978-79). In accomplishing this task, I argue two major points: first, one must read the Persian texts inscribed on these photographs or find their translations, as understanding what these texts say results in a more nuanced exegesis of the images. Neshat's appearance becomes subversive only when one reads the texts, thus dislodging prototypical representations of postrevolutionary Iranian women. Neshat's photographs offer more psychologically complex representations of Iranian women than the global mass media has projected.
Exhibition Catalogue Essays by Staci Scheiwiller
HK Zamani: Edifice/Oedipus, 2023
Abelina Galustian: Womansword and Beyond , 2020
Shirin Neshat: Frauen in Gesellschaft, ed. Heide Barrenechea (Tübingen: E. Wasmuth, 2017), 107-19, 2017
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Books by Staci Scheiwiller
Articles and Book Chapters by Staci Scheiwiller
Exhibition Catalogue Essays by Staci Scheiwiller