LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies presents Images From the End Game - Persia through a Russian Lens 1901 – 1914, on view from October 10 through December 9, 2006. Presented by the Iran Heritage Foundation. On 11 August 1913, the Tsar’s consul in Persia, Alexander Iyas, photographed Mamed Amin Agha, Head of the Kurdish Piran tribe, in front of a wall of fierce-looking warriors from Bayz Pasha’s Mangur tribe. The photographer was thus marking a reconciliation he had successfully negotiated between the two warring tribes. 15 months later, on 29 December 1914, Iyas was assassinated and beheaded by these and other tribesmen and Turkish troops that had crossed the Persian border as WW1 spilled out onto the Middle Eastern front. By an extraordinary series of coincidences, the reconciliation negatives as well as others were recovered on a Turkish officer killed by the Russians during the battle of Tabriz in January 1915.

Alexander Ivanovich Iyas, officer in the Tsar’s Lithuanian Regiment, had arrived in Persia in 1901, in the small town of Turbat-i Haydari near the Afghan border. He was armed with several cameras, including the remarkable Kodak Panoram taking wide-angle images of 1420. As Head of the Sanitary Cordon his mission was to ensure that Bubonic Plague would not be carried to Russia by trading caravans coming from British India, but the British were convinced he was an “agent provocateur” gathering military intelligence. He soon was appointed consul and, in 1912, transferred to Soujbulak, a Kurdish town south of Lake Urmieh near Persia’s disputed western border with Turkey. Speaking fluently several of the local languages, he documented the places, people and events he encountered with some remarkable photographs, providing us today with a rare Russian point of view of the Great Game – the rivalry between Britain and Russia for the domination of Central Asia. A unique and hitherto unknown group of images has been uncovered for a region and a time for which no other comprehensive collection exists.

A book by John Tchalenko published by Saqi Books and including 80 photographs and 5 maps accompanies the exhibition. As an earthquake geologist, John Tchalenko travelled extensively in Iran where he first came across the traces of Alexander Iyas. On researching the Foreign Office archives he uncovered information on Iyas, namely his death by beheading in 1914, which made him realise that Iyas had been his great-uncle. Eventually he succeeded in locating all of Iyas’s known photographs and many of his reports to the Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg. John Tchalenko is presently Reader in Drawing and Cognition at the University of the Arts London.

This exhibition was made possible with the additional support of the British Academy; Factum Arte; Finnish Museum of Photography; Julius Baer (Middle East) Ltd.; Photography Archive Research Centre, Camberwell College of Art; School of Oriental & African Studies.