Performing violence, displaying evidence: photographs of criminals and political inmates in Qajar Iran (1860s–1910s)

Abstract

This article examines prisoner photography in Qajar Iran encompassing images not only of criminals but also of religious apostates and political opponents, taken in an institutional framework between the 1860s and the 1910s. The article sheds light on the use of photography as a technology of violence by the Qajar autocracy in the late nineteenth century and its use as a technology of evidence following the police reforms in the early twentieth century. Frequently used prior to imminent execution, photographs of prisoners became a ritual within the violent regime: a performative act associated with death and dying. Thus, prisoner photography correlated with the earlier body-centred forms of chastisement and torture in Qajar society  that were abounded from the public spaces after several penal reforms. It was only in the wake of the broad-reaching police reforms in the 1910s that a universal system of judicial photography as instructed by Alphonse Bertillon was established, epitomising the ostensive aspects of the global mobility and circulation of technologies, methods and expertise. Thus, the practice of photographing prisoners lays bare unique insights into the judicial and penal systems of Qajar Iran and their ensuing transformation as part of modernisation and the formation of nation-building.