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This article explores the emergence of fine art photography in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s, bringing to the fore the significance of Ahmad Aali and his early photographic works for this transformation. It sheds light on the confluence of the main trajectories that paved the way for the formation of fine art photography in Iran, firstly by exploring historical practices of photography, secondly by addressing the influences of transforming political and social agendas after World War II on photographic developments, and finally by underlining the involvement of photography in the artistic sphere of that time. Central to the latter is Aali’s contribution to theoretical discourses about photography as an artistic medium and the major role he played in the first photographic exhibitions in art spaces. In that perspective, this article argues for the pivotal role of Ahmad Aali in bridging the gap between photography and art for the first time in Iran’s long history of photography. It analyses Aali’s photographic works exhibited during the 1960s and 1970s to comprehend the circumstances of the emergence of fine art photography in Iran, and does so by discussing the modernist aesthetics in photography that emerged at the time. Going beyond Aali’s regional importance, it examines his conceptual approaches to overcoming the ‘static realism’ and the limitations of the medium. Aali’s novel photographic concepts of space and time that emerged therefrom should be accorded their full autonomy and uniqueness in the (re-)writing of a narrative of art history on their very premises. This article thereby seeks to support a critique of the narrow epistemological boundaries of the discipline of art history and its resulting marginalization of locally developed art forms and concepts.

A New “Vision”: Early Works of Ahmad Aali and the Emergence of Fine Art Photography in Iran (1960s–1970s)