The organizers of a major London exhibition wanted to put politics aside and showcase the country’s rich 5,000-year-old culture. But politics kept getting in the way.
There once was a shah who lived in a palace between the mountains and the desert in Persia, near the Caspian Sea. One day, a wagon arrived at his gates bearing a gift from a rival court – a magical box that, using mirrors and a lens, could snatch a sliver of reality and fix it forever in silver. Unfortunately, no one at the court could work out how to operate the thing, so for two years it remained a curiosity, sitting in dusty purgatory, until a travelling French photographer recognised the box for what it was, and showed the Shah how to make a daguerreotype. It could be a tale from One Thousand and One Nights, couldn’t it? In fact, it’s a true account of photography’s arrival in Iran in 1842, which forms a small but tantalising strand of a new exhibition, Epic Iran, that opens at the V&A today. Three years earlier, when the camera was unveiled in Paris and London – by Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot, respectively – it had startled
Five thousand years of Iranian art goes on show at the V&A this month. A private collector who lent many of the treasures reveals what light they cast on the country