Discursive constructs of Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Abd-ol-Khalegh Khan’s photograph of Zell-e Soltan as seen through Gillian Rose’s discourse analysis

It has become a reality in the world of contemporary visual media that images and visual texts engage viewers and researchers with their differences and similarities—in a real or imagined way—while also constantly connecting them to other texts and encouraging them to discover and examine an intratextual relationship and interaction. Due to the different social, cultural, and political roles and effects of images in everyday life, understanding their significance and value requires embracing an emerging field like visual culture studies and analyzing images by comparing them. Conducted as comparative and descriptive–analytical research, this intradisciplinary study compared two works of fine art: Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Abd-ol-Khalegh Khan’s photograph of Zell-e Soltan. As part of this comparison, it employed the qualitative method of Gillian Rose’s post-constructionist discourse analysis to explore the intercultural interactions as well as the constructed discourses in the two images and to investigate the influence—or lack thereof—of apparatuses of power on the development of those discourses. The research questions were: “In the comparison of the artworks, what discourses are constructed and how?” and “In what way are they similar in this regard?” The study found that Velázquez and Abd-ol-Khalegh Khan have constructed, as both the artist and the subject of their piece, a different and dominant body of themselves without any influence from institutional systems and by sidelining power holders. In both images, the discourse of art and that of politics are in conflict with each other, and both artists, by adopting the same representation approach, implicitly point to and highlight the overpowering of politics by art. It seems that in this historical intercultural interaction between the East and the West, Abd-ol-Khalegh Khan was influenced, as an artist, by Velázquez’s critical approach in Las Meninas in the creation of his photograph.