War photography is as old as photography itself. The first pictures we have date from the Crimean War (1853-1856), which started less than two decades after the “official” invention of photography in 1839. Photographic images were also used to document the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the Great War of 1914. Even though some of the images that we have from these two last wars were actually staged, they all remain important historical documents. They provide us with concrete information regarding the logistics of the war while suggesting possible motivations and/or intention on the part of the photographer(s). In my presentation, I will examine a number of images of the Palestinian front during that are currently available at the Library of Congress as part of the albums John Whiting. Those albums present an example of photographic documentation from the Ottoman side, and the British side to a lesser extent thereafter, as they are fully devoted to Palestine and Sinai in the period from 1915 to 1917. Photographs capture a moment that already passed and, yet, remains fixed in time as it appeared to the camera when the lens shutter clicked. In this sense, photographs can tell almost as much of what we see in them as of what we do not. They display important elements to the historians, such as clothing styles, tools and weapons, and have the potential to enrich our historical imagination. Perhaps even more significantly, they capture what we could call the “aura of history.” Carefully organized, Whiting’s albums constitute a narrative of the war. The pictures appear to be carefully planed ahead of time of shooting and focus on officers more than the plight of the soldiers or to actual combat. They present us with an alternate reality aimed at feeding the viewers an ideologically framed perspective. In other words, what we see did not fully reflect the material conditions that prevailed at the military camps or the battlefield. However, the absence of an “authentic” war experience in the photos does not deem them unimportant. On the contrary, being images of actual soldiers, leaders and locations, they enable us to see the aura of the time period both as reflected in the details of the photos and in the photographic ideological intention behind them.

Khalil Raad and ottoman Photographic Propaganda This presentation deals with the photographic war propaganda commissioned by Jamal Pasha on behalf of hte Ottoman Fourth Army. The work consitutes an important turning point in the art of Khalil Raad, who was so far known for his portaiture, biblical landscapes and orientalist photography of the holy land.

Visual representations of the First World War in present-day Turkey are pervasive but partial in their depictions of the first total war. The overwhelming emphasis on the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli shrouds other First World War events in which Turks and other former Ottoman subjects participated. Nonetheless, the First World War (WWI), as visually represented by Gallipoli is ubiquitous in Turkey today. Spanning across media from film and television to high and low literature to photography and artwork, it has become a true cultural phenomenon whose ‘Spirit of Gallipoli’ (C*anakkale Ruhu) is invoked by diverse Turkish actors at state and grassroots levels with varied motivations and aims. More than being a mere Turkish phenomenon, that spirit has gone ‘global.’ Always a symbol of Australian and New Zealand national birth and nationalism, the ‘Spirit of Gallipoli’ has in recent decades and with ever-increasing celebrity been framed by certain Turkish officials and citizens as a sensation around which nations – Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand, in particular – can coalesce to both reconcile and draw attention to the horror and senselessness of war in general and WWI in particular. Consequently, in the great range of Gallipoli-based visual representations in Turkey today, one can observe a distinct antagonism between, on the one hand, Turkish state and grassroots transnational reconciliatory depictions spurred as much by the quest for tourist dollars as genuine reconciliation between WWI foes and, on the other, less prevalent grassroots ultra-nationalist anti-foreign imagery stimulated by historical enmity as well as present Turkish sovereignty concerns, and for which the ‘Spirit of Gallipoli’ is primarily a marker of Turkish eminence. Using Turkish and British archival documents and newspapers in conjunction with recent Turkish films, comics, and YouTube videos, this paper will establish why Gallipoli has come to dominate at the expense of other WWI battles in Turkey, and will explore the sometimes overlapping but often divergent historical underpinnings of conflicting present-day Turkish visual representations of the battle. Finally, I will argue that despite the primarily visual nature of the representations under discussion, audience consideration as often exhibited and determined by language choice (Turkish or English) provides an important barrier behind which alternative Turkish conceptualizations of WWI more hostile to foreigners can exist and even thrive without disrupting or devaluing meaningful and profitable globally-shared visual representations of the First World War as an ultimately reconciliatory event.