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Translated Images: Late Ottoman Perceptions of Naples
Abstract
This paper examines how the Province of Naples was represented in Sultan Abdülhamid II’s (r. 1876-1909) Photography Collection and analyzes late Ottoman perceptions of the Italian province to highlight and broadly reflect upon the Ottoman interest in the region. The photographs in the sultan’s collection spread through the pages of five albums, the majority of which have captions in Italian and their translations, or rather adaptations, into Ottoman Turkish. Comparatively studying these captions has been illuminating from a multicultural perspective because this approach has provided important information regarding the intended meaning of the photographers responsible for creating the images and the received meaning by the Ottomans as consumers of the images. Each Ottoman re-working of an Italian caption signals the way in which the photograph’s intended meaning was transmitted or transformed while it traveled from one culture to another. Hence, in some cases, the language skills of the viewers of a photograph determined how they perceived and made sense of the image. Word-to-word translations were less common than adaptations into the local context and examples where the information was sometimes “lost in translation” were not infrequent. In addition to examining the photographs in question visually, materially, and textually, this paper also investigates the way Neapolitan geography was approached by the Ottoman press and Ottoman travelers to the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that the growing interest in Neapolitan scenes, geography, culture, and heritage could be linked to the Ottoman state’s agenda of urban planning, archaeology, and museology. Overall, by focusing on a particular geographical area, that is the Province of Naples, this study aims to widen the scope of scholarly discussions on Abdülhamid II’s Photography Collection that have so far concentrated on analyzing mainly the Ottoman self-representations. What has been overlooked, however, is the substantial presence of photographs that entered the sultan’s collection from abroad. Overall, my presentation addresses this lack of scholarly attention by focusing on a particular geography as an effort that hopes to pave a new trajectory for further research.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Europe
Ottoman Empire
Sub Area
None