Local Portraiture. Pérez González, Carmen. Published by Leiden University Press. For additional information about this book

Transcription

1 Local Portraiture Pérez González, Carmen Published by Leiden University Press Pérez González, Carmen. Local Portraiture: Through the Lens of the 19th Century Iranian Photographers. Leiden University Press, Project MUSE., For additional information about this book No institutional affiliation (11 Mar :15 GMT)

2 Acknowledgments There are many people who have contributed in different ways to this research. I am indebted to several Iranian photo historians who have helped me to acquire the material required to start this research project. They bought books for me in Iran and sent them to me in Spain or Germany through Iranian friends traveling back and forth to Iran, or they themselves brought them to me. Rana Javadi has been aware of my research since the very first moment, when in 2003 I went to Iran to start collecting books on the topic. She has helped me ever since, continuously, not only in practical things like getting books for me, but also on a personal level, continuously supporting me and encouraging my research. She has my deepest respect, admiration, and gratitude. Mohammad Rezā Tahmāsbpur has been extremely helpful and kind to me in the last two years of my PhD thesis research, helping me to get recently published books in Iran and answering every question I posed to him by . Dr Rezā Sheikh has been a wonderful colleague, always encouraging me to keep on my research path, especially in the last two years of post-doctoral research. I had the honor to meet Prof. dr. Iraj Afshar personally on the day of my PhD thesis defense (February 2010), as he was part of the defense committee. Unfortunately, he passed away just a year after that date. There are other scholars to whom I am thankful, since their books were an inspiration and a valuable source of information to me throughout my research (and all of them acted, without knowing it, as my invisible and most respected teachers): among them, the late Yahyā Zokā, Prof. dr. Sheila Blair, Dr. Layla Diba, Prof. dr. Robert Hillenbrand, Prof. dr. Oleg Grabar, and Dr. Charhyar Adle, all of them referenced several times throughout the book. To Corien Vuurman I am thankful for suggesting me to contact one of my three supervisors when I was lost looking for someone somewhere who might have interest in my research. My dissertation was a higly cooperative and satisfactory work between my supervisors in Leiden and myself. I came to Leiden with an interesting corpus of photographs and paintings and some hypotheses and intuitions, but thanks to the guidance of my three supervisors the dissertation achieved the theoretical depth that was required. Prof. dr. Kitty Zijlmans and Dr. Helen Westgeest have worked hard to pinpoint the best of my research and have guided me and inspired me since I started working with them. To Helen Westgeest I am especially indebted for her ideas on the chapter of the arrangement of the space, and to Kitty Zijlmans for her remarks

3 14 LOCAL PORTRAITURE throughout the whole dissertation and especially on the chapter about the interaction of Western and Iranian photography. Prof. dr. Just Jan Witkam was also a fundamental member of the team of supervisors and his remarks and corrections on the chapter devoted to text and photography were very important. Further, I am honored that he translated some of the texts found in the photographs selected for that chapter. After I finished writing my dissertation in the summer of 2009, I kept researching and testing my different research hypotheses, and in this new phase the help and guidance of the neurologist Prof. dr. Chris McManus (for chapter 1) and the Islamic art historian Prof. dr. Sheila Blair (for chapter 2) have been fundamental. Kausar Turabi and Dr. Evan Siegel have been very helpful with their corrections of this manuscript written in English, not my mother language. Mina Zand Siegel has kindly helped me with the translation of a long poem found on one of the photographs and has helped me with editing the manuscript. Dolors Tapias and Manolo Laguillo were the supervisors of my research during the two year PhD course that I took at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Barcelona University in order to get my ABC (All But Dissertation), that allowed me to start my PhD Thesis a couple of years later at the Faculty of Art History at Leiden University. They both helped me in different ways to start my research. Dolors has been one of the most generous teachers that I have ever had, and Manolo was probably the only one in Barcelona University who properly understood the importance of making an in-depth study of the visual-laterality hypothesis. My family has been extremely important in making me strong enough to persevere in my research. Ali-Reza Darvish has been part of the whole delivery process of this book and the three kids that came to this world in the years that I wrote my dissertation: Luna, who was born in Barcelona the year that I started thinking about this research, in 2004 and Mitra and Mani, who decided to come to this world together, in Cologne, in the Summer of I also thank the support given to me by good friends of mine: Pilar Lombardo, Kausar Turabi, Sandra Garabello and Eduardo Yáñez, Zari Ashena and Sharhyar Ahadi, Ana Briongos and Toni Alsina, Yael Langella (who spoke 10 languages, among them Hebrew, Arabic and Russian, and whose wisdom, integrity and kindness keep guiding me) and Uwe Geest, Elmar Seibel, Shirin Farahi, Mardi and Nushin Bahadori, Soheila Mirzai, Laura Morala Forte, Eduardo de Francisco Jiménez, José Miguel Espí Huerta, Patricia Cantó, Mónica Solé, and my aunt Angelita Pérez Campos. Lastly, and most important, I would like to thank my publishers, the Iranian Studies Series (Leiden University Press), especially Asghar Seyed Gohrab, Yvonne Twisk and Chantal Nicolaes. I am grateful also to ICAS

4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 15 and its director Paul van der Velde, for the ICAS Prize that they awarded me for my dissertation and for their generous help to print this book. Cologne, January 2012 Transliteration note: I wish to thank Dr. Asghar Seyed Gohrab for applying systematically through my manuscript the transliteration schema. An ideal transliteration system for Persian does not exist and there are various systems of transliterations used by different encyclopedia, journals, libraries, etc. For the sake of consistency and uniformity, a transliteration system is used in this book to transcribe the Arabo-Persian script involving a minimum of diacritical signs: only the long vowel /a/ is indicated with ā. The compound words consisting of a noun and a suffix such as akkāsbāshi is written as one word. The initial hamze and the letter eyn at the beginning and at the end of a word is not transcribed, only in the middle of the words the eyn and hamze are indicated. The Persian ezafe is written as -e after consonants and -ye after vowels.

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