Ali Behdad's Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography in the Middle East is a fresh and original piece of scholarship that delivers on what it promises in its first pages. Namely, it “aims to expose the formalistic silences” within Art History's approach to Orientalist photography and, at the same time, offers “a corrective to postcolonial counterclaims by mapping the various ways in which the Orientalist archive was the product of visual contact between West and East, though marked by enormously uneven relations of domination and cultural hegemony” (p. 9). Behdad contributes to the critique of Orientalist photography and the more recent emergence of interest in the lost histories of indigenous photographic practice and representation of the Middle East in two ways. Camera Orientalis offers a sustained critique of Orientalism's aesthetic compulsion to ahistoricize its object. The book tracks the Orientalist effects and afterlives of indigenous and foreign photography and the ways in which the Orientalist and native image reemerges within new political and visual contexts. The book also pushes against the “celebratory” counterclaims offered by a number of postcolonial studies that proclaim native Middle Eastern photography served as a means of “writing back” to Orientalism's objectifying effect and colonial intentions (pp. 14, 77).

Camera Orientalis dismantles these Manichean choices that structure the study of Southwest Asian photography. Behdad convincingly discredits Art History's formalistic fascination with Orientalism's aesthetic qualities and value, a fascination that erases photography's social context and displaces Orientalist photography's own ideological and political effects within larger colonial and ongoing political agendas. At the same time, Behdad disputes the “postcolonial” tact that searches for inherent formalistic idiosyncrasies in indigenous photography as evidence of its ability to “speak back” to colonialist and Orientalist erasure, objectification, exoticization, and eroticization. Camera Orientalis agilely provides an alternative analytical prism that theorizes Orientalist photography “as a complex network of aesthetic, cultural, economic, and political relationships” and “transnational and transcultural in nature” (p. 15). The author's attention to this “network” or “complex web of relations” considers “the nodes and ties that bind photographers, consumers, and collectors of exotic images, and later, museums and curators across national boundaries” in creating meaning and photographic representation that often commuted between European Orientalist and indigenous photographers and the markets (p. 15).

Camera Orientalis is well written and methodically organized. Behdad carefully unfolds his arguments through a series of separate, but still interrelated, studies that deliberate the interplay between Orientalist photography and indigenous photography (particularly of Iran and Istanbul). His opening chapter on Orientalist photography does not introduce new information to the topic but discerningly refers to a small number of canonical early photographers (e.g., Du Camp, Frith) to argue that early Orientalist photography was informed by an accumulated yet synthetic foundation of artistic and academic Orientalism from which these photographers (and their markets) originated.

In the most valuable contribution of the chapter, Behdad offers the Barthian, semiotic concept of “anchorage,” where the polysemous threat and the potentiality inherent to free-floating interplay of signification within any image are “countered by the ubiquitous presence of titles” that accompany Orientalist photography (p. 29). This concept could be a valuable fulcrum to think through how meaning is contained and corralled to essential discursive effects, if not political ends, of Orientalism. Like other potentially fecund concepts he develops (see “contact vision” below), Behdad could have threaded this productive concept throughout his study. That said, the chapter successfully demonstrates what the author does so masterfully, that is, interlace central indigenous examples (particularly, the Sébahs and the Abdullah Frères) with expatriate and traveling photographers. In doing so, he restores the “aesthetic dimension of the [photography's] studium,” contrary to Barthes’ elevation of the punctum. This does not depoliticize Orientalist photographic representation but, to the contrary, emphasizes the false dichotomy between the political, the aesthetic, and the social nature of Orientalist photography both in Europe and the Middle East (p. 39).

Chapter 2 focuses on five standards of Orientalist photography: albums, panoramas, monuments, character types, and erotica. Examining the Getty Research Institute's Pierre de Grigord's collection of Ottoman photography, Behdad shows that Orientalism is transnational and transcultural, cutting across national boundaries of East and West. If Orientalism forms and tropes are shared, yet still mediated, by both indigenous and European photographers, the standardization and repetition of those photographic tropes arose from Orientalism and pictorialism's shared pedigree in European Romanticism. The author's closing analysis of the “afterlives” of the Grigord collection is the chapter's most original contribution. In discussing curatorial and collecting practices, Behdad lays bare the tenacity of the Art History's “Orientalist nostalgia” that persistently seeks to aestheticize Orientalist photography at the expense of delinking it from its historical, political, and cultural implications (p. 70).

Chapter 3 revisits the photographic practice of Antoin Sevruguin, a “resident photographer” of the Qajar court who Behdad and Fred Bohrer have previously studied. Here, the author cultivates his concept of “contact vision” (as an extension of Mary Louise Pratt's contact zone), as “a mode of visual representation that embodies the asymmetrical effects of cultural, economic, and political contacts between Middle East and European powers” (p. 77). Arguing against a postcolonial “flat reading” that endows Sevruguin with oppositional agency that “writes back” against Western Orientalism, or, contrarily, as a self-orientalizing coconspirator of Orientalism, Behdad chooses Said's more nuanced concept as Orienteur as a less ideologically coded and more culturally interesting analytic (p. 78). In turn, he closely reads two images (of shahre-farang) by Sevruguin, both of which “depict scenes that present the Iran of the late Qajar period as a ‘contact zone,’ where Europe encounters and clashes with the East, a complicated social space in which cultures (as practices of everyday life) and identities meet in an asymmetrical fashion” (p. 80). The author concludes the chapter asserting “the reception of his photography is tied to both his position as a commercial photographer attending to the taste of his European audiences and the locations where his images were consumed, displayed, and utilized” (p. 98). Equally important, Behdad also offers brief yet sordid, political accounts of Servruguin's afterlife in the hands of Western spies and imperialists (most enthralling, in Iran preceding Mossadegh's overthrow). In revealing these histories, the author affirms how photographic representation continues to prove “useful to neocolonial enterprises in Iran,” revealing “a circular relation between photography and Orientalism, knowledge and power, aesthetics and politics.” (p. 99).

Chapter 4 enlarges a previously published article, offering expanded thoughts on the way in which photography functioned and circulated in Iran. This rewarding chapter draws from the author's own narrative, exploring his grandfather's photographic collection (as well as its absences). In examining this archive, Behdad reconnoiters how local practices of photography “were not merely derivative of their Western counterparts, nor simply oppositional representational, working against Orientalist aesthetics” (p. 102). Nor were they “authentic” expressions of “vernacular cultures” (p. 102). Rather photography was “simultaneously enmeshed in local culture and political and in dialogue with European aesthetic conventions . . . mobilized by middle- and upper-class men to foreground their social status and patriarchal values” thereby relying on “local aesthetic conventions and ideological assumptions.” At the same time, however, these same photographic practices “engaged in a local form of photo-exoticism produced by the depiction of people of the lower classes as primitive and culturally inferior” (pp. 102–3). Subsequently, Behdad offers an informative, yet concise, history of Iranian photography, before closely analyzing a small number of photographs from his grandfather's collection, including his fruitful reading of the “photo-exoticism” of Iranian elites through unpacking the photograph of snake charmers (by Mohammad Hassan Khan Qajar) and that of a Mazandarani porter with his cow (pp. 128–29). “Neither reflexive or ironic,” these indigenously produced, circulated, and consumed images formalistically “typicalize” the scènes et types of Orientalist photography (p. 127). The formalistic mimesis was less about mindless mimicry of Western forms than a technique by which local elites deployed new technologies and representational conventions to perpetuate “traditional structures of power” (p. 132).

Camera Orientalis’ final chapter discusses Nasir al-Din Shah, the Qajar monarch who was an avid and prolific amateur photographer. Behdad fully accepts the challenge as put forth by “recent claims about the autonomous nature of local photographic practices in non-European contexts by demonstrating how Qajar-era photographs, though firmly rooted in local traditions of royal portraiture, also reflect European influences that are themselves rooted in ideologies of domination” (p. 134). The author crunches three royal portraits to evince how “local” photography was “formalistically in dialogue with European portraiture” (p. 137). This chapter's true contribution is in how the author demonstrates that photography was not merely a tool of state craft, not solely to “reaffirm traditional gender roles that buttresses monarchical power” (p. 147), and “not just a representation of monarchical authority but, as a material object, was a metonymy of power itself” (p. 144), if not actually a “technical means to produce effects of power” (p. 151), to varying degrees of success (p. 147).

Behdad's brief afterword visits the afterlife of Orientalist photography through its critical reemergence in the contemporary art work of Shadi Ghadarian, Leila Elsayyadi, Shirin Neshat, and others and its recuperation in the Western art market. While acknowledging the conscious ways in which these artists explicitly work to counter the tradition of Orientalist representation, the author carefully scrutinizes how “they are deeply implicated, however inadvertently, in the project of neo-Orientalism” (p. 167).

Camera Orientalis is a much-needed contribution to the dearth of critical and theoretical research on the full history of Middle Eastern photography. While this reviewer would like to have seen more use of Persian sources (even if only vignettes from fiction or snippets from autobiographies), the study provides a nuanced exposition of Middle Eastern photography as a unified, albeit multiplicitous, historical and visual field—a scopic field, however, with two intertwined, interlocked, mutually implicated, and dialectical continental plates: indigenous and foreign practice, consumption, and circulation.

Behdad's book will be seen as the beginning of a larger trend to complicate the “history of photography” not only from the center outward but to flesh out how that center's own tradition was inextricable from its Orientalized subject just as those “non-Western” traditions were saturated by the representation, technology, epistemology, and discourses of the colonializing West.