Shahzad Bashir is dean, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University (International) in the United Kingdom. His most recent books are the Open Access multi-modal digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press 2022) and The Market in Poetry in the Persian World  (Cambridge 2021). He is currently working on the possibility of theorizing history via photography and a cultural history of knowledge in India circa 1750–1850.

This talk will make a case for understanding historical narration via analogy with anamorphism in conceptual photographic art. Photography works by imaging a world presumed to be phenomenologically perceptible. But the photographic image always stands between, on one side, the maker’s positionality and technical choices, and on the other, the viewer’s prior visual and other experience. I show that photographic examples containing self-conscious play on issues of intention and perception provide a template to theorize about historical narration in a complex register. The paradigm I offer references established philosophical discussions of historical narration; it exceeds these through appeal to the visual metaphor. Moreover, I aim to change the conversation away from evaluative judgements on historical narration dominant in philosophical analyses. Instead, my concerns are, first, to theorize how historical narratives operate as mediators between authors and presumed audiences, and second, to use the resulting understanding to make us more nuanced readers and writers of history.