Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination,...

This book delivers an in-depth analysis of Hercules Florence, who is virtually unknown despite being among the world's photographic pioneers. Based on the texts of various manuscripts, letters, diaries, notes, and advertisements, this book answers numerous questions surrounding Florence's work, including the materials, methods, and techniques he employed and why it took more than a century for his discovery to come to light. Kossoy's groundbreaking research establishes Florence's use of "photographie" to describe the product of his experiments, half a decade before Sir John Herschel...