The latest cultural headlines in the media.

“Qajar Persia” in the eyes of Italian photographer hits bookstores

Tehran Times :Pictures taken by the Italian photographer Luigi Montabone have recently been published in a book named “The Qajar Persia”.

Compiled by Mojgan Tariqati, the bilingual book was edited by Iraj Afshar. Shahriar Adl and Mohammad Sattari have written a preface for the book released by Mirdashti Publications.

The book contains 71 photos taken by Montabone. The photos are collected from three albums; two of them are now in Tehran’s Golestan Palace and another is kept in Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, Tariqati mentioned in book’s prelude.

She mentioned that Montabone has added or removed photos from albums. For example, he removed four photos of ladies, three of them were Italians and one of them was Armenian lady from Tbilisi, from the albums dedicated to the Golestan Palace.

Instead, the albums contain photos featuring urban landscapes, people’s social culture, historical sites, people’s costumes, jobs as well as people from different social classes.

Arguably, Luigi Montabone (? – 1877) might be called the first and only Italian photographer in nineteenth century in Iran. He was commissioned to join an Italian delegation to Persia to take pictures of anything that could be of interest to the members of this delegation.

The mission, consisting of sixteen persons, mostly diplomats and scholars, left Geneva in 1862 for Constantinople, and from there travelled via Tbilisi, Yerevan, Tabriz, and Qazvin to Tehran. The delegation aimed to establish diplomatic relations and to promote commercial affairs.

Montabone not only took portraits of all sorts of people, but also took photographs of a variety of architectural structures, landscapes and city views. He climbed buildings or hills to find beautiful panoramas or just the right angle to take his photographs.

He also experimented with coloring his photographs which was and still is a unique aspect within nineteenth century photography in Persia. 

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Tehran hosting two-day Intl. Congress on Islamic Awakening Literature

Tehran Times :Tehran will be playing host to the International Congress on Islamic Awakening Literature today.

About 80 literati from the Islamic countries have been invited to the two-day congress, which opens at the Art Bureau, World Assembly of Islamic Awakening (WAIA) Secretary General Ali-Akbar Velayati said in a press conference on Saturday.

“The language of poetry is the most eloquent language,” Velayati stated.

“Poetry has played a key role in the mobilization of people’s support for the Islamic awakening throughout history,” he added.

Velayati said that the congress is aimed at giving coherence to the thought orientations among Muslim literati, especially among poets in the Arab world, which has witnessed the Islamic awakening.

The Art Bureau, which is an affiliate of the Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization, has helped the WAIA in organizing the conference.

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U.S. company to publish woman’s memoirs on Iran-Iraq war

Tehran Times: A book that chronicles the life story of an Iranian woman during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war will be printed by the U.S. publishing company Mazda in the near future.
The Persian version of “Red Olive: Memoirs of the Iran-Iraq War” has previously been published by Iran’s Sureh-Mehr. Mohammadreza Ghanoonparvar, a professor of Persian literature at the University of Texas at Austin, translated it into English, the Sureh-Mehr Publications announced in press release on Saturday.

The book covers an interview with Nahid Yusefian, who lost her husband during the war, which also maimed her son.

The interview conducted by Qasem Yahosseini.

“What characterizes her memoir is her honesty in telling her story,” wrote Mazda Publishers in description of the book on their website.

“As is inevitable in interviews, the reader will find some instances of repetition, which the editor has rightly decided not to alter in order to show the natural flow of Nahid Yusefian’s narration of her life’s story.

“What is remarkable about her is that she comes from a very unremarkable, humble background. Her father was an ordinary railroad worker who eventually became a railroad engineer, but he was determined to have his seven children - all girls - educated, a fact that was fairly uncommon among lower income working class families in Iran in the middle decades of the twentieth century, especially in the 1950s when Nahid began her schooling. 

“Like everyone else in the working classes in Iran, the main concern of Nahid’s parents during her formative years was economic survival, and their persistence eventually paid off, to the point that all seven daughters received a higher education.

“As Nahid mentions early in her memoir, in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, all her sisters and her parents immigrated to the United States; but Nahid herself was determined to stay in Iran with her husband, a decision that cost her dearly with the loss of her husband, the maiming of her son, and the ill-effects on the health of her daughter and herself.”

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