Chapter 1 - Resurrectional mediations: Shiʿa eschatology and photography

Summary

Abstract

This chapter begins with an instructional manual on photography written in 1889, Resurrectional Photography (ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye). Through this object, I will examine the relationship between nineteenth- century discourses on photography and Shiʿa eschatological imagination. Closely reading this work, I show how an exceptional intertwinement between the religious discourses and optical technics manifests a unique absurdism specific to the Shiʿa religious thought. In this irrationality, eschatological imagination draws on the evidential aspects of the photographic image. God resurrects people's deeds in exactly the same way a photographer develops a photograph: a divine optical apparatus. I show how the notion of the hereafter becomes a medium different from both the classical conception of ākhera and from the common understanding of the photographic image. Despite this impossibility, Resurrectional Photography finds a way to stabilise its meaning-making system and survives.

Keywords: photography, eschatology, embodiment of deeds, photographic image

In 1889, an obscure Muslim photographer in Iran was commissioned by the state to write an Islamic instructional manual about photography. In this work, the author, Moḥammad Ebn-e ʿAli Meshkāt al-Molk, intersperses extensive Islamic eschatological discussions with technical descriptions about how to operate a photographic camera and how to capture and develop photographs. Titled Resurrectional Photography (ʿAksiye-ye Ḥashriye), the text repeatedly compares photography with God's power to “record all humans’ deeds flawlessly”, which He will put on display on the day of Resurrection. The word ḥashriye in the title of the book is a derivative of the verb ḥashara from the root ḥ-sh-r, which in Arabic literally means to gather, to assemble, or to bring together. In Islamic eschatology, the term refers to one of the Divine Acts on the Day of Resurrection (qiāma) whereby all people and their deeds are summoned up to be judged. According to this manual, God records humans’ (mis)deeds “in exactly the same way” a photographer takes and develops pictures. Upon the Resurrection, as Meshkāt al-Molk writes,

All the details [of our worldly affairs] become visible in the same way the image appears in an instance (marratan wāḥedatan) o4n the glass – when taken out of the photographic camera frame (shāsi) and subjected to the proper techniques.