Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH, The University of Cambridge)

The British Library

Image

The third pandemic of plague (in its bubonic and pneumonic clinical forms) struck the globe between 1894 and 1959. As Yersinia pestis spread from country to country and from continent to continent, it left behind it not only a trail of death and devastation, but also a vast visual archive. It was the first time that plague would reach and establish itself in all inhabited continents. But it was also the first time that any epidemic would be photographed. As plague spread from harbour to harbour, and amongst cities, towns and villages, so did photographs of the pandemic through reproductions in the daily and illustrated press. Rather than forming a homogeneous or linear visual narrative, these photographic documents provided diverse perspectives on the pandemic, which, more often than not, were not simply different from region to region, but in fact conflicting within any single locus of infection. Moreover this photographic production came to establish a new field of vision, what we may call “epidemic photography” which continues to inform the way in which we see, depict and imagine epidemics and their social, economic, and political impact in the age of Global Health.

Persia (Iran) witnessed numerous plague outbreaks in the course of the third plague pandemic, though the presence of the disease in the region in the mid 1800s indicates that these may not be biologically-speaking part of the third pandemic. Drawing the interest of Marcel Baltazard a leading plague-expert of the Pasteur Institute, sylvatic plague in Iran’s Kurdish highlands formed an important area of research in the later stages of the pandemic.

Iran, Birjand

1905