Sevruguin, Antoin, 1851-1933

Antoin Sevruguin (1851-1933) was the first successful commercial photographer in Iran. Russian by birth (he was born in the Russian embassy in Tehran), Sevruguin nevertheless had a deep and passionate commitment to Persia and its culture. Sevruguin opened his first photography studio in Tbilisi in 1870 with Dmitri Ivanovitch Yermakov, and shortly thereafter undertook an expedition to Iran with his brothers, Kolia and Emmanuel, to document the ancient monuments, landscapes and peoples of Azerbaijan, Kurdistan and Lorestan. The photographic images from this trip supplied the first stock for the studio they subsequently established in Tehran. Sevruguin made over 7,000 glass plate negatives in the course of his career, most of which were destroyed in the early twentieth century — fewer than 700 of his negatives are known to have survived.