In this talk, I wish to argue that Orientalism, if understood not merely as an ideological discourse of power or as an art historical term but as a network of aesthetic, economic, and political relationships that crosses national and historical boundaries, is paramount to the understanding of nineteenth century photography. Whether studied in the context of their production and dissemination in the nineteenth century or in relation to their current afterlives as collectable objects or archives, photographs of the Middle East become meaningful and legible if they are considered in term of the geo-political distinctions and cultural assumptions of Orietalism. In claiming that Orientalism does matter to the understanding of photographic representations of the Middle East, I do not mean that such images are merely expressive of Europeans’ racial prejudice against "Orientals," or that these images simply validate Euro-imperial dominance over the region. Nor, do I wish to suggest that orientalist photography entails a binary visual structure between the Europeans as active agents and “Orientals” as passive objects of representation. Rather, I hope to offer an alternate view of orientalist photography, which focuses on nodes and ties that bind artists, collectors, and museums across historical and national boundaries which are productive of a distinctly exotic vision of the region, a vision at once embraced and perpetuated by the elite in the Middle East. Such a network theory of Orientalism concerns itself neither with the motivations of individual artists nor with the attributes of art objects, but instead studies the symmetric and asymmetric relations between discrete objects, specific individuals, and concrete practices. I will elaborate my argument by focusing on Ken and Jenny Jacobson orientalist photography collection and Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey held at the Getty Research Institute.

In 1873, the volume Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie en 1873 (Elbise-i Osmaniyye in Ottoman) was published to accompany the Ottoman Empire's installations at the Vienna World Exposition of that year. Seventy-four photographs by the Istanbul-based photographer Pascal Sébah portrayed Ottoman “types” wearing distinctive regional dress from across the empire. Eminent Ottoman cultural figure Osman Hamdi Bey and his French colleague and fellow Istanbul resident Victor Marie de Launay penned a series of French explanatory texts for the book. Costumes Populaires has been viewed by scholars as an affirmative exercise in articulating Ottoman identity through the adoption and manipulation of a fundamentally European mode of knowledge, the ethnographic survey of anonymous ethnic “types.” But in the accompanying text, the volume's authors develop a subtle discourse that previous studies have largely ignored, a discourse which in fact betrays the logic of ethnographic typology. I argue that Costumes Populaires establishes a structure of difference which functions at the level of the individual subject. The volume's authors argue that individuals' capacity to both articulate and fulfill their own distinct role in life is an essentially moral issue, and that costume retains both an illustrative and actively productive role in this process. Ottoman citizens are thus fit into a hierarchical scale based upon their ability to exercise individual will. This role carries particular implications for their status as photographic subjects: neither fully severed from ideals of agency and self-realization, nor wholly realized as full, independent subjects, Costumes Populaires' Ottoman citizens occupy an ambiguous, intermediate position between that of anonymous ethnographic “types” and individualized portraits. The photographic portrait is a hallmark of the development of the bourgeois subject in the 19th century. By constructing their vision of the Ottoman empire around an accumulation of newly individualized photographic subjects, the authors of Costumes Populaires exceeded the very structuring ideals of the ethnographic model they took on: in lieu of a passive collection of bodies mobilized for an Ottoman promotional cause, Costumes Populaires represents an eminently contemporary Ottoman political body unified in the rational pursuit of self-realization.

In her study of women and photography in the ‘Middle East’ during the colonial era, Sarah Graham-Brown notes there was intense scrutiny of women’s lives in paintings and photography which were often carried out by foreigners. However in North Yemen, safe from European encroachment, photography was largely neglected. Even though some members of the elite possessed cameras and cherished photography, there was only a weak nexus between status display and image production. Many people had reservations about photographing women – and some still do – because they were supposed to be sensually inaccessible to male ‘strangers.’ The covering of women’s bodies has arguably been the most ubiquitous subject in the anthropology of ‘Middle East’, yet has hardly been explored in relation to photography. Women’s photos are considered to be intimate belongings that must only be shared with close members of the family or female friends. Women’s photographic images are problematic because they share physical attributes with the object represented (prototype), and because they may fall prey to unauthorised viewing. It is as shameful for an unauthorised (male) viewer to see the photo of a woman as to see her in the flesh. My paper explores women’s photos’ agency and their relationality, as well as photography’s significance as a vehicle for conveying statements about the self and for reifying social distinctions. Questions as to the ways in which photography has created new relations of objectification have become more pertinent since it has become common in North Yemen’s emerging consumer society from the 1970s onwards. Based on field research in San‘a in 2008, the paper analyses the production of videos, albums, and studio portraits among middle class San‘anis. Its prime concern, the relation between the artefact and the subject, is inseparable from a consideration of new consumption practices focusing on changing styles of self-presentation.

A handful of scholars have commented on the existence of a strange subgenre of photography in provincial capitals such as Beirut, Cairo, and Jerusalem. The emerging middle class and economic ruling class in the first decades of the 20th century dressed up as Bedouin, belly dancers, Arab warriors, water-carriers and peasants. My paper asserts that indigenous Middle Eastern photography was inspired less by Orientalist imagery or mimicry of the West than by specific ideological planks of capitalism and modernity. The Arab photographic archive is variegated. Studios along with amateur photographers offered various genres of self-representation including self-Orientalizing motifs and tropes. While studios such as Krikorian or amateurs such as Marie Khazen might have “dressed up” as Bedouins the same a European tourists, the act was significantly different. To find an explanation of this self-Orientalizing photography, this paper looks to two historical “eras” that co-define one another. First, early indigenous portraiture must be understood in terms of al-nahdah al-‘arabiyah, which defined a new sense of Arab subjectivity but also laid an epistemology that naturalized modernity. Second, the rise of Arab Romanticism, which coincided with the appearance of this photographic genre, was a reaction to hegemony of this epistemology. Romanticism, that is, problematized Arab modernity’s conception of self, society and identity as defined in the preceding generation by Ottoman Arab intellectuals and reformers. But at the same time, its “avant-garde” posturing was as much a product of modernity as photography itself. Rather than attest to the exoticism or “otherness” of the Arab self, my paper concludes that modern bourgeois identity had been firmly established by the first decades of the century and permeated the middle classes of provincial Ottoman capitals. The self-exoticizing genre recognizes that the middle class and Arab Romantics saw “traditional culture” as set of objectified representation and no longer as living cultural practices. (The assertion is corroborated by the explosion of native ethnographic studies of Bedouin and peasants in the first quarter of the century; ethnographies that were heavily illustrated by photographs.) Moreover, the act of “self-orientalizing” was a gesture towards a cultural authority that was under attack and discredited not only by Western commentators, colonial authorities, and missionaries but by the previous generation of nahdah intellectuals. Therefore, the act of self-orientalizing should be understood as gesture of self-empowerment for the bourgeoisie, albeit not unproblematic, during the colonial and mandate eras in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt.

This paper will discuss what initially appears as the "afterlife" of 19th-century Orientalist visual conventions in local Egyptian vernacular photography. Throughout the 20th century, Egyptian women enjoyed getting photographed by commercial studios wearing a variety of costumes, posing as "bedouins," "peasants," "Arab sheikhs" or harem ladies clad in robes of vaguely oriental nature. While typically such photographs were produced by inexpensive local studios, similar practices of visualising the self can often be found in snapshots taken with home-owned Kodaks and arranged into private albums. Naturally, such images were not just intended for local consumption, but quite particularly for a private one. Framed on walls, they ended up decorating domestic interiors, exchanged with friends, or arranged in family and personal albums. This paper will unpack this peculiar practice. I will argue that these images ought to be read in their local historical and social contexts, in which issues of class, gender, and cultural identity played key roles. First and foremost, such portraits were commissioned or produced by middle-class urban Egyptians who felt safely removed from their "traditional" pasts. Read against other cultural texts, such imagery fits into the concomitant production of local authenticity evident in films and fiction of the period, by means of which an indigenous Egyptian modernity was asserted and cultivated. Read historically, I will argue that every generation packed this visual convention with new meanings. Early-20th century Egyptian ladies dressed as "odalisques" were emulating the western tourist, through a practice that they thought was making them fashionable and draw them closer to their western idols of femininity. Middle-class women of the Interwar period dressed as "bedouins" or "peasants," authenticating their bourgeois femininity through a highly mediated reference to a local pastoral femininity. (Significantly, they also took pictures in trousers, and then juxtaposed images "as (female) peasants" and "as men" in their private albums). In the 1950s, educated urban girls liked to pose for the camera as "bint al-balad"—a powerful symbol of traditional urban femininity expressed through a net-like facial veil—in an ethos of national pride that blended powerful political and social themes of a post-independent era with the seemingly private realm of fashion and female portraiture. Rather than enacting an "oriental" identity in any possible sense of the word, those women were making historically constructed performative statements about local authenticity that was inseparable from their self-professed modernity as well as instrumental to its articulation.