SOAS PhD Studentship on Islamic Architecture and its Photographic Archives
This project investigates the use of photography for the study of Islamic architecture. Photographic archives are key sources for the history of Islamic architecture. The project proposes that the perspective that underpins the lens-based technology of photography used to visualise Islamic architecture emerges from an historically and culturally specific development in European art and science. As such, photographic sources for the study of Islamic architecture might not integrate key elements of Islamic visuality, or the social and cultural conditions of both seeing in the Islamic world and the making of meaning of what is seen by the inhabitants of that world. Photography might not fully accommodate Islamic visuality.
The project’s first aim is thus to establish how inimical photography is to the recording of Islamic material culture, including Islamic architecture. That is because Islamic architecture and design are commonly linked to metaphysical elements, forming part of a visuality that pertains as much to the invisible realm (the Quranic al-ghayb) as to the visible realm (the Quranic al-shahada). The photographic archives represent, at best, perspectives of the visible realm of this Islamic visuality. The project’s second aim is the development of strategies that expose the perspectives at work in photography and suggest ways of allowing for the ongoing use of the images the archives of Islamic architecture contain, but in a manner accommodating of both realms of Islamic visuality.
Objectives:
1) the unravelling of the problematics of Islamic architecture’s records in photographic archives; 2) the appraisal and harnessing of scholarship and practice-based research that critique photography’s claim to produce indices of reality, in order for 3) the development of strategies that accommodate the ontology of Islamic visuality and offer a more appropriate and contextually interpretive use of the existing collections in the photographic archives.
Principal Supervisor: Dr. Simon O’Meara
Co-Supervisor: Dr. Emma Sandon
Application deadline: 26 March 2021
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