ABSTRACT
In retelling this salacious story about a lewd photograph of a powerful man in a compromising act, all the narrators are women. The king’s sister informs the “teacher,” the mysterious addressee of her memoirs, of a photograph that depicts her kingly brother Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1896-1907) having sex with a female horse while he was still valiʿahd (crown prince) in Tabriz. This story she initially heard from her mother Turan al-Saltaneh recounting the tale to “a very highly respected guest.” Since her mother had heard the rumor from another “lady,” and Taj al-Saltaneh was also privy to the information as a child, it can be assumed that the venerable guest had also been a woman, and that the story was told within the spaces of the harem. The photograph was “taken with great difficulty,” possibly with the ten-second wet collodion process, and then sent to the then-king Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848-96). Considering some of the other playful photographs in the royal albums of Nasir al-Din Shah, the photograph was meant as a joke and most likely taken as a joke by the king, to which he probably had a great laugh and would explain why everyone, including the harem, knew about it. Or the shah was terribly embarrassed, always disappointed in his son regardless of this photograph. Assuming that the photograph actually existed, someone else down the line must have not seen the humor in it and had it disposed. Nonetheless, the photograph that is lost and can no longer be seen (or should not have been seen) is thus revived and seen again over and over through the witnessing of women. Although Taj al-Saltaneh had not seen the photograph with her own eyes and even questions its validity, she nevertheless thought it was important to describe in her memoirs. Thus the narrations of women on lost photographs make these women inevitable witnesses to phenomena both unseen and unknown.
