Name	Antoin Sevruguin Photographs of Iran (1880s-1910)
URL	http://www.asia.si.edu/archives/finding_aids/sevruguin.html
Description	Antoin Sevruguin (1830s-1933) was an official photographer of the Imperial Court of Iran whose commercial photography studio was one of the most successful in Tehran from the late 1870s to about 1934. The images in this collection provide a rich visual documentation of the Qajar and early Pahlavi dynasties of Iran. The astonishing range of Antoin Sevruguin's photographs, and the prolific output of the studio, provides today's viewer with an important resource for examining the cultural histories and hierarchical elements of Iranian society. They assist the scholar in studying architectural sites that may have been damaged or destroyed, or are unavailable for first-hand investigation. Increasingly, the prints are valued for their artistic elents that may sometimes overshadow their documentary value. Most significantly, Sevruguin's images form part of an ongoing history that links a distant past and place to the present. The website contains a finding aid for the Sevruguin images located at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Organized by subject matter under the larger categories of "royalty", "people", "birds", "architecture", "landscape" and "arts", each image is presented with a medium size .jpg, embossed with the text "for reference use only".
Contributed by	Ozgur Basak Alkan
Contributed on	November 2, 2005