Background and purpose. Photography entered Iran only a few years after its public announcement in France (1840 CE/1256 AH). Qajar elites quickly embraced the new technology, transforming the camera from a mere documentary device into a visual instrument for enacting and displaying monarchical power. Among the social groups captured by the royal lens were enslaved men, women, and children—actors whose bodily presence had been largely muted or allegorized in textual and pictorial sources. While the legal abolition of slavery in Iran dates to the early twentieth century, the visual archive of the Qajar period (1840s–1920s) still preserves hundreds of photographs in which enslaved subjects appear either as central figures, marginal aides, or spectral absences. Despite this rich corpus, slavery has seldom been examined from a visual cultural perspective inside Iran, and almost never through the prism of Actor–Network Theory (ANT). The present article addresses this lacuna by asking: How did a heterogeneous network of human (king, princes, photographers, enslaved subjects, album viewers) and non human actants (camera, chair, backdrop, light, caption, album page, and even absence) collaborate to produce, circulate, and stabilize the image of slavery in late Qajar Iran?
Theoretical framework. The study is anchored in three interlocking frameworks: (1) ANT, which posits ontological symmetry between human and non human actants and views meaning as the outcome of translations within unstable networks; (2) Stuart Hall’s constructivist theory of representation, emphasizing stereotyping and naturalization as key operations in the politics of signification; and (3) Gillian Rose’s tri layered model of image analysis (production, the image itself, and reception) read through the technological, ideological, and compositional facets of each layer. Building on these foundations, the article advances the concept of the “visual network of domination,” arguing that Qajar photographs acted not as passive reflections but as operative nodes in a larger socio technical assemblage that encoded racialized hierarchies.
Materials and methods. Adopting a qualitative, exploratory design, the research analyzed more than 500 photographs preserved in the Golestan Palace albums, the Women of Qajar digital project, and several private collections. Purposeful sampling continued until theoretical saturation was achieved; thirty images that most vividly engaged the research questions were selected for deep reading. Data collection combined bibliographic research (historical, anthropological, and art historical texts) with systematic visual observation. Analysis proceeded in four iterative steps: (1) open coding and actant identification; (2) mapping initial socio technical networks; (3) tracing translations and mediations under emergent thematic nodes; and (4) interpretive synthesis leading to theory building. Reliability was enhanced through triangulation of visual, textual, and archival evidence.
Findings. Thematic analysis yielded four recurrent motifs:
1. Spatial hierarchy and pictorial composition. Seating, standing, depth of field, and object props (chairs, canes, carpets) served as non human mediators that translated social rank into visual form. Over time, some elite khājeh (court eunuchs) migrated from blurred margins to sharp centrality, yet always within a monarchical frame that preserved dominance.
2. Context of presentation and paratext. Royal albums and handwritten captions were active devices for arranging, naming, or anonymizing enslaved subjects. Terms like “Siāh Golchehre” or formulae such as hasb al amr reinforced otherness and royal authorship. The album page thus functioned as an ideological grid that choreographed both gaze and memory.
3. Absence as actant. Strategic elisions—missing individual portraits, veiled female slaves, blurred bodies—operated as tactics of visual control. The case of page 198 in ʿAlī Khan Valī’s album shows how simultaneous presence/absence (a shrouded nurse above, a labelled “slave” below) re affirms class boundaries through the concerted agency of cloth, caption, and page layout.
4. Legitimizing family portraits in the post abolition era. Late and post Qajar family photographs continue to stage enslaved or formerly enslaved figures to dramatize elite respectability. A seated white child writing with pen and paper beside a standing black child holding the inkwell, or a silent black woman at the edge of a domestic group portrait, extend the memory of slavery into the private sphere, turning the family album into a micro apparatus of social reproduction.
Discussion. Across these motifs, the study demonstrates that meaning in Qajar slave photography emerges from a distributed agency: royal desire, technological affordances, material props, and discursive labels coalesce to fix or recalibrate racial and social identities. The findings culminate in the proposed model of the visual network of domination, comprising six analytic stages (actant identification, translation mapping, socio technical diagramming, network interpretation, black boxing, and historical positioning). This model reframes Qajar photographs as operative agents within a living network rather than inert historical evidence.
Contributions. The research (a) supplies a theoretically grounded method for reading Iranian historical photographs; (b) foregrounds ordinary objects—chairs, backdrops, captions—as pivotal actants in racialized signification; and (c) widens the lens of Iranian visual culture studies to include the long overlooked domain of domestic slavery.
Implications and future research. Extending the model to Pahlavi era imagery could reveal continuities and ruptures in visualized hierarchies. Comparative work between Qajar photography and contemporaneous court painting may further illuminate cross media translations of power. Finally, probing European travelogues in tandem with local albums could clarify the reciprocal gaze shaping Iran’s pictorial modernity.
Keywords: Slave representation; Qajar photography