The two hundred-odd images in “Eye of the Shah: Qajar Court Photography and the Persian Past” were executed for the most part by a small number of court and portrait photographers using an ultra-modern medium in a land still run according to the divine writ of kings, where the Shah’s harem contained hundreds of wives, concubines, and eunuchs, and many people continued to keep slaves. It’s in this confrontation—between the bastinado and the wet collodion method—that the principal interest of “Eye of the Shah” lies.

Source: Persia: The Court at Twilight by Christopher de Bellaigue | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books