“Islamic Photo-Theologies: Thinking Through Image Making and the Human Figure from the Camera to AI”

This talk explores the concept of "photo-theologies" and the role of technology in broader debates about the camera's capacity to record and visualize the human body in Islamic lands. Through several key case studies, I investigate and at times challenge often-quoted prohibitions and anxieties around printmaking and photography in the Muslim world. I begin my examination with a printed manual of photography from nineteenth-century Iran, which intertwines the novel technology of the Daguerreotype with a Shiʿite theological discourse on resurrection, providing a poignant counterexample to Weberian disenchantment. I then turn to investigating fears around photographic images through a discussion of photomechanical reproduction and circulation in Islamic lands, specifically in the shape of the portable picture postcard in the early twentieth century. Finally, the talk scrutinizes fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) related to photography and their interconnection with longstanding photographic debates, enabling us to examine questions such as the purported truth-value and evidentiary force of photography from an Islamic legal perspective. Through these three foci, it becomes apparent that many of the themes discussed at the advent of photography, in both Islamic and non-Islamic lands, are also echoed in contemporary Muslim discourses about the legality of analogue as well as digital photography and AI-generated photorealistic images. An examination of image making, figural imagery, and the ontology of the photographic image through the lens of "photo-theology" enables an engagement with both picture logics and religious concepts, thus allowing a rethinking of key debates.

Mira Xenia Schwerda (PhD, Harvard University, 2020) is a historian of photography and print culture. She is a co-editor of the journal Art in Translation. Her book manuscript-in-progress, tentatively titled "Between Art and Propaganda: Photographing Revolution in Modern Iran (1905-1911)," focuses on the art and visual culture of Iran's Constitutional Revolution. She has been awarded several grants and fellowships for her research, including the Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship, and has published her research in peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and exhibition catalogues. Dr. Schwerda also worked at the Harvard Art Museums, where she curated the photography section of the 2016-17 exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran.