Aesthetics in Digital Photography

Appendix 3The Aesthetic of Persian Miniatures

Today, the common translation of muDawwir is “creator” in the sense of “painter” and, by extension, “photographer”, “cameraperson”, “illustrator”, etc., while the verb Dawwara refers to any act of creation.

Ioana FEODOROV (2005)

The aesthetic current represented by the miniatures¹ of the Middle East is undeniably one of the strongest and best-documented aesthetic traditions in the history of art.

While this art spans a wide period, extending approximately from the 12th century to the 19th century, its spatial boundaries are a little less precise.

The heart of this form is in Persia (modern-day Iran and Iraq), but it extended to the North, to the cities of Uzbekistan, to the East it covered Afghanistan, Kashmir and the Indian Punjab region, while in the West it extended into modern-day Turkey, as far as Istanbul (Roux 2007).

A3.1. A brief history

A3.1.1. Image and Islam

One of the questions that quickly comes up when looking at the place of aesthetics in the Middle East is the role of Islam as a religion in the relationship between the artist and the image. This has been the subject of many texts. We recommend the analyses penned by Mohamed Aziza (1978) and by Silvia Naef (2011) for their wealth of detail and relevance. We will briefly summarize these analyses here: when Islam originated (Feodorov 2005), the Prophet Mohammed did not seem very inclined toward images. The Koran does not reject figurative images, but recommends ...