The Photograph and the Slave: Locating One’s Place in the Family

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, privileged urbanites in Iran commissioned local photographers to produce family portraits, and these portraits often included slaves. This body of visual evidence raises an important question about the ways in which Iranian slavery has been visualized both historically and historiographically. To what extent were domestic slaves in Iran integrated into the family unit? My reading of these photographs reveals the complicated relationship between domestic slaves in Iran and the households that they ran. While these servants played a crucial role in the life-events of those individuals whom they served, they were nevertheless treated as objects, as status-affirming property. And their lack of agency, which is clear in these portraits, suggests the cruelty of the institution of slavery in Iran.

Scholars have generally positioned the domestic slavery that was common in Iran (and throughout the Middle East) as a gentler institution when compared to other forms of enslavement worldwide. The underlying assumption is that domestic slaves shared an intimate relationship with their masters. Because slaves lived under the same roof as their slavers, their presence was automatically incorporated into the household or family unit. However, my research challenges this line of thinking by highlighting the distance between slave and master in family portraits from the Qajar era. In these portraits, slaves were not depicted as members of the family, but rather as props displayed to signal the family’s status to the viewer. At the same time, photographers often positioned slaves with children and highlighted the child’s age. This act suggests the degree to which the slaves impacted the child’s life. These portraits together capture the multi-faceted position of slaves in the family unit in Qajar Iran, and this line of research, which draws on visual evidence, allows us to access a fuller picture of slavery in the Middle East.