Above: Mosque of Qait Bey, Cairo, c. 1880, Abdullah Frères, Turkish, Albumen print
Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, acc. no. X1989.704

Dr. Frederick Bohrer
Photography, Islam, and Art: The Nineteenth Century and Now

6:30-7:30 PM Lecture, DIA Lecture Hall
7:30-8:30 PM Reception, Kresge Court

Photography’s rapid spread across the globe seemed to offer a new and widely accessible medium through which people of the world could represent themselves and view each other.  This talk will explore two moments in the development of this most worldly of arts, one from each end of its historical range.  First, it will view the rise of photography in the Middle East, focusing on the work of native photographers and on the connections with other, pre-existing forms of art.  Second, it will turn to recent photographic representations of the same locales by contemporary photographic artists.   Strikingly, these recent images bring up many of the same kinds of questions as the earlier ones—questions of culture, identity, worldliness, and representation—with a new perspective that befits our time.

A note on the speaker:

An associate professor of art at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, Dr. Frederick Bohrer is the author of Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  In addition to publishing widely on the representation of the Middle East in modern times, he curated the widely acclaimed exhibit Antoin Sevruguin and the Persian Image for the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. 

Sponsored by the Asian & Islamic Art Forum.

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