UNIDENTIFIED PHOTOGRAPHER.
Sixteen photographs of late-Qajar Persia, mostly Bandar-e Anzali, by a French photographer.
MARITIME TRADE IN BANDAR-E ANZALI
A coherent and beautiful set of amateur photographs, mainly focused on the port city of Bandar-e Anzali. Taken by an unidentified French photographer, they focus on the traffic of goods in the dock, trading vessels, and local people.
Bandar-e Anzali sits on the Caspian Sea and has long been an important trading and fishing port. The commercial focus of the images suggests the French travelers (shown in one image) might have been businessmen, or at least involved in some maritime activity along the Caspian Coast. An image of a bridge on the route from Bandar-e Anzali to Tehran (via Rasht) show they probably progressed to the Persian capital. The single captioned image, ‘Mohammerah, Golfe Persique, décembre 1924’, is the only photograph taken in Southern Iran and captures one of the men, suited in a palm grove.
Several postcards of Bandar-e Anzali, such as the example in this group, were produced in the interwar period, but original photographs are scarce. This is partly due to the disruption during and after WWI, which included a successful Soviet invasion in 1920 and the brief establishment of the Socialist Soviet Republic of Gilan.
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