This paper examines the intertwined nature between art and politics in pre-colonial Morocco through an examination of the relationship between Sultan Abd al-Aziz and French cinematographer Gabriel Veyre and the production of photographs in the sultan’s court in the early 20th century. When the Abd al-Aziz hired Veyre in 1901, France did not have an official presence in the court. For the French government, photography represented a tool of diplomacy and a means to control the international perception of Morocco. For Abd al-Aziz, photography became a tool of political power and control, one that could be used to demonstrate political authority through the documentation of political and religious ceremonies and portraiture reinforcing his status as ruler. Through his interactions with Veyre and his use of photography, the sultan merged European technology with Moroccan traditions. In contrast to French portrayals of pre-colonial Morocco as chaotic and poorly governed, I argue that the sultan’s appropriation of European technology and visual culture demonstrates the extent to which Abd al-Aziz attempted to chart his own course through political crises of the early twentieth century. Although Moroccans criticized Abd al-Aziz’s photographs, and Europeans denigrated the art as evidence of his inability to rule and his un-Islamic practices, Abd al-Aziz was instrumental in introducing photography to Morocco. Photography studios emerged in Morocco shortly thereafter and continued to shape debates over conquest, rule, and modernization in for Europeans and Moroccans alike.

The photographic record of the Ottoman Empire includes a vast and diverse number of official images, assembled into albums for various purposes or kept in palace archives. These comprise an important archive for examining government policies, communication strategies and many other aspects of the political and social history of the empire. But the wide accessibility of photographic technology in the early twentieth century means that the official photograph record is not the only one available to historians. Focusing on a more personal photographic document, this presentation will demonstrate the extent to which the careful study of private assemblages of images may provide a more nuanced view of a historical moment than what is often found in the official record. The subject of this paper is one small and extremely intriguing photograph album from Istanbul. Although it is dated (1919), it comes down to us with no other information about its original owner or the photographer(s) responsible for the pictures it features. However by careful analysis of the individual images, the album as a constructed object, and its context in the history of photography and the historical moment of the city it marks, the album reveals a great deal about the intentions of its owner in creating it. This powerful and captivating assemblage of images also invites us to open a conversation about complicated ideas: representation, memory, and nostalgia at a particular moment in the history of Istanbul. In 1919 Istanbul was occupied by the Allied Forces and the Ottoman Empire had been divided by the victors of the First World War. These circumstances, while not directly referenced in the album’s photographs, are the lens through which we must examine the subjects and arrangement of the images in the album. Considering what has been included on its pages as well as what is omitted allows us to give voice to a personal record of melancholy and loss across a distance of nearly a century.

This paper explores the ambiguous position of Tunisian photographer and filmmaker Albert Samama-Chikly (1872–1934) during his tenure with the French Army’s film and photography service during the First World War. The adventurous son of a wealthy Jewish banker who had worked for the sovereign of Tunisia, Samama-Chikly harnessed a French education and national status to launch a career as a photojournalist around the turn of the twentieth century. But the outbreak of the Great War brought challenges to most North Africans, with hundreds of thousands forcibly recruited to serve in the French Army. Samama-Chikly, exempt from conscription perhaps due to his age or wealth, nonetheless enlisted voluntarily as a photographer and cameraman to capture scenes from the Western Front during some of the war’s most brutal campaigns. Samama-Chikly’s itinerary challenges monolithic conceptions of “Jewish,” “Tunisian,” and “Francophone” identities in the context of this colonial war. Little-studied (and not at all in Anglophone scholarship), his visual gaze has been dismissed as vain, detached, or simply a prelude to his pioneering films Zohra (1922) and Aïn el Ghazal (1924). Yet when interpreted within the wider context of his cosmopolitan, border-crossing life around the Mediterranean, I argue, Samama-Chikly’s wartime photographs reveal how WWI provoked a more diverse range of possibilities for North African politics and artistic expression.

This talk analyzes the contested meanings of the Franco-Musulman Hospital (1935) in Bobigny, France, arguing that it was a potent affective space of World War I’s legacy of trauma. An Orientalist structure designed by two French academic architects and with a façade modeled after the Bab Mansour in Meknes, the hospital was intended to serve a growing population of African and Muslim workers in the Paris region. It sought to solve the dilemma of social mixing in dispensaries and hospitals in the Paris region, an issue dating from World War I. The sponsoring agency, La Société des Affaires Indigenes et Nord-Africains (SAINA), was a surveillance-assistance agency established in 1925 and run by the Parisian police in order to regulate colonial workers’ presence in the city. A decade later in 1935, the Franco-Musulman Hospital opened to much fanfare. On the opening day of celebrations, the building was decorated with the military flags of colonial regiments, deploying a residual wartime discourse of fraternity in the service of greater France. Illustrated magazines covered the event and photography helped promote the hospital as a sign of colonial paternalism. Elite Algerians such as Abdelkader Ben Ghabrit, an Algerian lawyer as well as founder and director of the Great Mosque of Paris, advocated for it as an important medical service, while Algerian nationalist Messali Hadj saw it as perpetuating religious and racial segregation. Less visible to the camera eye but still subject to surveillance were the practices of care. North African medical personnel, including a Dr. Ali Sakka, served immigrant patients during the interwar era, providing a model of care in a context of fear and hate. The hospital’s first year of about 1700 medical records suggests that an estimated one-quarter of the patients could have been veterans, making it a significant space of memory and forgetting about the war. While drawing upon studies of Orientalist architecture, art and photography, this paper extends those aesthetic and post-colonial analyses to borrow from the poetics of space, new studies of affect and the psychiatry of architecture. I argue that the visual evidence of the hospital’s architectural space should be read alongside less visible traces of the hospital’s affective life. Such an interpretation can expand our understanding of interwar emotions and complicate the image of the colonial worker and veteran.