Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

In a Persian harem

January 13, 2017

Naser al-Din Shah was king of Persia from 1848 up to his assassination in 1896. He also happened to be a keen photographer, having been given a camera as a child by Queen Victoria. And, being king and all, he could defy the usual prohibition on portraits. As a result, we have some intimate – for the time – pictures of his harem, which has been estimated at some 100 concubines.

Here's the man himself, taken by Russian photographer Anton Sevryugin, who opened a studio in Tehran in the 1870s:

And here are some of his portraits of the concubines, including his favourite, the "incomparable" Anis al-Doleh….reclining, on the right, and below, in the first three photos:

Incomparable indeed. The finest eyebrows and moustache east of Arabia….

And let's just draw a veil, as it were, over that concubine at the bottom.

So much for those orientalist fantasies.

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5 responses to “In a Persian harem”

Paolo Pagliaro

January 13, 2017

Aaarrgh! Appalling!
A myth shattered…

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Dom

January 14, 2017

The little child looks like he’s about 40.

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Lauri M

January 15, 2017

I had to dig around, driven by deep curiosity, to find out why the harem seemed to be full of men- and found what seems like a plausible answer on a blog called Anthroscape.http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/5946916/1/ “In many cases, across the Islamic world, since Muslim women were forbidden to pose for pictures, similar looking men with makeup were substituted. ”
That makes sense to me. And there was a photo of his cherished first wife, the incomparable- which also makes more sense in light of the comment above.

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Mick H

January 15, 2017

Thanks for the link. Yes, that one commenter suggests they were men in the photos, but I have to say I’m not at all convinced. The consensus was that he made the women wear make-up, as he liked his wives to look like that. I really don’t know.

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Graham

January 16, 2017

The child and its mother have very similar facial features, and the hand and legs of the reclining figure in the last photo look feminine to me. Unlike the faces, which are quite surprising 😮

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