“It came to me that Naser al-Din Shah was Iran’s very first nude photographer,” says Bozorgmehr Hosseinpour, an Iranian art director and cartoonist from Tehran. “He made the women in his harem stand naked in front of the camera.”
Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, who presided over Persia as one of the Qajar dynasty’s most iconic kings until his assassination in 1896, and his royal harem are the subject of Hosseinpour’s new exhibition ‘A Cartoonist Inside a Royal Harem’ at the Nicolas Flamel Gallery in Paris on September 18.
Naser al-Din Shah was the first Iranian king to visit Europe repeatedly, and those trips, which he recorded in detail in his journals, document Iran’s early encounters with the technological innovations and social customs of the West. He also dined with Queen Victoria, who appointed him a Knight of the Order of the Garter. But his affection for the modern world was equally infused with a love for ancient Persian traditions and this is what drew Hosseinpour to organise the exhibition.The Shah’s wives, all of whom were concealed within the royal harem and attended to by eunuchs, were also ordered to wear short skirts modeled on the tutus he had seen in a ballet on a trip to Paris.
In an interview with IranWire, Hosseinpour said that it was this contrast, the fact the King’s wives wore both the Islamic veil and the tutu-style miniskirts, that piqued his interested.
Hosseinpour was further enthused by the project when he came across an unpublished collection of photographs taken by Naser al-Din Shah that alluded to the monarch as being Iran’s first nude photographer.
Hosseinpour read numerous history books and undertook extensive research on Naser al-Din Shah’s harem before he was able to sketch the drawings. “This wasn’t just something I could find in a one single book,” he says. “I had to put it together bit by bit from different sources and pictures to find out what had really happened and to portray a realistic image. One thing I read was that he’d bring in blindfolded musicians so the women in his harem could dance to the music. Then he’d watch them whilst sitting down and smoking a water pipe.”
The exhibition was well received in Tehran, and now, like Naser al-Din Shah himself, it travels to Paris.
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