The Analytical Study of the Social History of Sound Based on the Photographic Documents of the Qajar Era

Problem statement: 

The social history of senses targets public issues through the study of human senses in the context of daily life. Social photographs can represent the feelings of past people, and sound social history as a way of addressing social photographs represents various perceptions, beliefs, and listening habits of past people, based on photographic visual documentation.The question here is how the quality of the photographs as a reliable reference linked to the power of vision, can help analyze the demographic subjects in this type of text. And what additional information did the historians acquire, based on the sound social history specifically on historical photographs of the Naseri era?

it is assumed that social photos contain kind of visual data due to their graphic characteristics, which represent the social aspects of sounds in a photographic context, relying on the written documents of social history as a hypertext to provide us with more detailed information about the life qualities of past people.

This article, by using the descriptive-analytical method and exploiting the social history of senses, aims to extract sound profiles of the people`s daily life of the Naseri era (based on the photos of royal palaces and ethnographies of this time) in comparison with the other historical texts of this time.

Most of the urban sounds were in the possession of the ruling class in Nasseri’s time to establish and exercise power. The emergence of modernity in that era, by breaking the pre-modern silence, created new audio experiences in different social classes, for example, the sound of farmworkers was the major sound by moving away from the capital.