Large albumen carte-de-visite, image measuring 99 by 143mm. Small pinhole to top of card, chip to bottom right corner, unclear ink inscription to verso, otherwise very good. Studio information of Sevruguin printed in gold to verso. Tehran, n.d. but A rare large carte-de-visite from the studio of Antoine Sevruguin (c.1838-1933), showing an aristocratic young man standing beside a eunuch who was most likely his servant. Like so many of his group portraits it speaks of power and class in Qajar society at the turn of the century. Though Sevruguin was a Russian subject, he spent the best part of his life in Iran. Born in the Russian Embassy in Tehran, he later settled in the city, establishing a photographic studio on ?Ala-al-Dawla (now Ferdowsi) Street. Of Armenian and Georgian origin, he mixed East and West in his identity and art ? a number of academics have argued that his images push beyond an Orientalist visual system that typically reduced the country to a set of pre-existing stereotypes. ?Living at a time when orientalist fervour was at its height and Europeans were using photographic images to construct and confirm their notions of the Orient, Sevruguin used his camera to construct counter-representations. ? Sevruguin does not over-simplify Iran; he complicates it.? (Navab, 114). In 1908, around 5,000 of Sevruguin?s 7,000 glass-plate negatives were destroyed in riots following the bombardment of the Majlis. The remaining plates were later confiscated by Reza Shah Pahlavi, who found the images at odds with his vision of a modernized Persia. Though Sevruguin doubtlessly produced tens of thousands of prints, those from the lost plates are scarce and even studio portraits (and other ephemeral carte-de-visites), such as this, are rare outside of Iran. Navab, Aphrodite Désirée, ?To Be or Not to Be an Orientalist?: The Ambivalent Art of Antoin Sevruguin? in Iranian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1/3 (Winter-Summer, 2002), pp.113-144.
