Who could pin down Antoine Sevruguin’s nationality? He was born in Tehran; his father was a Russian diplomat, his mother came from a distinguished Georgian family. He studied photography in Tiflis in the 1860s—like other great Caucasian photographers such as Alexander Roinashvili and Dmitri Yermakov—but he put his skills to use in Persia, where he became court photographer to Naser al-Din Shah. He even got the shah and the court aristocracy hooked on photography themselves (which is how we owe a handful of images from aristocratic harems). He was granted a Persian noble title and spent decades photographing the peoples of Persia—yet, to underline his outsider status, he consistently used a French-sounding name. His Armenian origins only became widely known in 2015, when his grandson, German citizen Emmanuel Sevrugian, donated the family estate of Antoine and his son—André Sevrugian, the donor’s father—to the Matenadaran in Yerevan, the Institute of Ancient Manuscripts.
Antoine Sevruguin’s family around 1900. Seated: Antoine, his second daughter Olga, his wife Louise, and his first daughter Marie. Standing: his two sons, André and Sasha, and his brother Emmanuel
Antoine Sevruguin produced nearly seven thousand photographs of the peoples of late-19th-century Persia—Persians, Turks, Kurds, and mountain tribes. Today, when one might take that many digital photos on a ten-day trip through Iran, this number may seem modest; but it was anything but modest at a time when every single glass negative was the hard-won end result of a carefully prepared situation during a demanding expedition. Not to mention the quality of Sevruguin’s photographs—the intimacy they radiate, and their unmistakable “Oriental magic.”
At the exhibition recently opened at the Matenadaran, only a handful of enlarged photographs accompany the Sevruguin/Sevrugian legacy. The exhibition is opened, almost metaphorically, by two late-19th-century iron figures displayed together in a single glass case: a pomegranate, the symbol of the Armenians, and an iron blackbird—which, as I’ve written before (and Borges already noted), is a symbolic animal of the Persians.
Most of the exhibited estate consists of paper: letters, documents, and 19th-century printed books or manuscripts, with the characteristic wide-eyed, naïve, almost childlike figures of the late Qajar period.
The story of Yusuf and Zuleikha (the biblical Joseph and Potiphar’s wife), 1841
And a few personal objects from the same period: cabinet figurines, decorative cushions, ornamental plates bearing Persia’s emblem, the sun and the lion. The small selection a family deemed worth carrying with them into exile.
I’ll be writing separately about Antoine Sevruguin’s photographs—the unique visual chronicle of old Persia—with plenty of illustrations.
Persian family sleeping under a table, with a copper brazier hidden beneath it, c. 1880–90
Manure collectors, c. 1880
Lorestani (Zagros Mountains) women, c. 1880–90
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