As the story goes, the famous Ottoman-Armenian photographers Abdullah Frères impressed Sultan ‘Abd al-‘Aziz with their skill by producing a flattering portrait after the Potentate’s first experience with a European photographer ended miserably. At the same time, Disdéri’s carte de visite portrait of Napoleon started “cartomania," the world’s first global phenomenon in visual culture. Istanbul studios Abdullah Frères, Vassilki Kargopoulo, and Sébah were followed by native owned studios in the Arab provincial capitals, most notably, but certainly not limited to, Jurji Sabunji and Kova Frères in Beirut and, eventually, Garabed Krikorian in Jerusalem. Like photography itself, studio portraiture was rapidly acculturated into cultural and political life of the Empire, seamlessly interpellated by the ideology of al-Nahda al-‘Arabiyya and the Tanzimat, the two intertwined juggernauts that naturalized the tectonic social, political, and economic changes underway as a result of the region’s immersion into the world economy. This paper discusses how the photographic studio portrait did not only perform the national, class, and gender ideals of new “social groups” in Ottoman Egypt, Palestine, and Syria. Rather, the multivalent role and effects of the portrait as a materialist object that circulated within new social networks was also, in Lacan’s words, a “screen-image” that acted as an after-image of changes in political economy that were already underway. On a materialist level, the portrait mediated and stabilized social relations between Ottoman functionaries, emerging elites, organic intellectuals, and burgeoning citizens through new circuits of political and economic sociability. Dialoguing with Peter Gran’s work in Rise of the Rich, John Willis’s “interactive emergence” of new social groups, and Bruno Latour’s social network theory, this presentation examines how the carte de visite shored up shifting horizontal and vertical relations within the Ottoman Arab provinces. However, we also discover that these material and social relations could transpire only because these new social groups shared an ideological framework, that of the Nahda and Tanzimat, that could be expressed visually as well as through social, political, and economic practices. Therefore, as a copula where the juridical subject meets the new nationalized, class, and gendered subject of biopower, the carte de visite could mediate the anxieties of shifting class-inflected ideologies and discourses of social reform, economic reorganization, and political governance. In effect, this paper will show that the portrait was a stabilizing materialist object and semiotic text that instantiated the ideology of the era against a torrent of social and economic change.

If modernity has a universal history and a general applicability, then this universality has always been within the domain of the cultural West (Hall: 1996). Thus, when the emergence of the modern is encountered in a non-Western locale, its effect is profoundly disturbing. It mirrors and amplifies the alienation and loss originally experienced in the modernization of the Western self. This was often the conundrum for nineteenth-century travelers to the Ottoman Empire who witnessed disorienting modernization throughout its territories even when their visit was predicated on the singular objective of finding and recovering the pre-modern. Nineteenth-century print media from the Ottoman Empire, specifically Istanbul, visually highlights this tension. In this paper, I undertake an intertextual reading of two such distinct yet related collections of visuals: the photographic postcards of Max Fruchtermann and the Sultan Abdül Hamid II albums gifted to the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1890s. Indeed, many of the photographic templates of Fruchtermann’s postcards are also found within Sultan Abdül Hamid II’s albums underscoring the multiplicity of interpretations and narratives associated with these images in varied contexts. Here, I examine the treatment of landscapes, historical monuments, and industrial and military facilities across the two collections to see how the former crafts historicized views that neatly confine the modernizing capital in the past and how the latter pushes for parity with the self-proclaimed modern polities of Europe and America. In both instances modernity remains a contested condition.

On the first of May in 1896, the eve of his fiftieth anniversary of accession to the throne, Nasir al-Din Shah was assassinated by Mirza Reza Kermani, an impoverished merchant and follower of Jamal al-Din Afghani. The regicide’s imprisonment and his subsequent hanging in August of that year was the first execution that was extensively photographed in the Qajar era. Two photographers, the well-known Antoin Sevruguin and a Qajar court photographer, likely Abdullah Qajar, first portrayed the regicide during Kirmani’s imprisonment and then photographed his execution. Through an examination of how these two series of photographs varied in their focus, aesthetic principles, intentions, and usage, this paper considers the role photography played in the modernization reforms of the Qajar penal system and the development of executions as public spectacles. This paper will also shed light on the afterlife of these photographic depictions, which were circulated during the Constitutional Revolution. At the same time, the transcripts of Mira Reza Kermani’s interviews that were conducted during his imprisonment were published in progressive journals like Sur-e Israfil. In considering the continued reproduction and circulation of the textual and photographic depictions of this series of events, this study addresses important questions about how this material was utilized by varied political groups at key moments in Qajar history. What the multi-faceted and, oftentimes, contradictory usage of these photographs shows is that different agents could deploy the same images for divergent sets of purposes, imbuing them with a sense of ambiguity, one that is certainly inherent to the nature of the photographic medium. By exploring these well-known, yet rarely analyzed, images this paper not only sheds light on an overlooked chapter of Middle Eastern photography, but also illuminates the centrality of this medium to key developments in the broader history of Iranian modernity.

When the Presbyterian American mission to Syria began publishing secular and ecclesiastic Arabic books at its Beirut press in 1834 as part of its conversion protocols, it also took to producing an often large number of less-elaborately designed and written ephemeral works. These Arabic pamphlets—which varied in content, design, format, print quality, and edition numbers—ranged from detailed medicinal guides for treating Cholera, ‘Ilaj mufid l-il-hawa’ al-asfar al-mubid (1837), to a widely-distributed translation of the passion of Christ, Qissat alam sayyidina yasu‘ al-masih (1841). By midcentury, Arab-Syrian intellectuals, some of whom were within the mission’s employ such as Mikha’il Mishaqa and Butrus al-Bustani, became more involved in the activities of the American press in particular and an emergent urban printing industry in general. Consequently, these pamphlets took on a decidedly more controversial political, literary, and religious tone, encompassing increasingly popular notions of an Ottoman/Arab identity and religious pluralism, which prefaced the late nineteenth-century Arab nahda. This paper explores the complex nature of these frequently overlooked ephemeral productions by considering the ways in which their aesthetic dimensions and textual significance paralleled widespread economical and socio-political changes, many of which were negotiated within a political public sphere. At the same time, by considering both the works of missionaries and those of local literary and politically motivated agents, this study also emphasizes the diverse roles and meanings of this ephemeral medium as a meeting point between two frequently divergent worldviews. In doing so, it demonstrates how multivalent perspectives during this period paralleled, and were negotiated within, the pages of these easily produced, disposable pamphlets, which subsisted in a religious and cultural context that placed much value on the written word and the effort involved in book production. As such, these pamphlets serve as integral representations of changing forms and functions of print culture at a time when local book production was transitioning from traditional scribal methods to modern letterpress technologies. By closely examining these booklets, particularly their seemingly unassuming nature, this paper not only highlights their ability to effectively mobilize religious, political, and intellectual ideas, but also emphasizes their significance as modes for visual innovation and experimentation during the development of Arabic printing in Ottoman Syria.