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The historiography of early photography has scarcely examined Islamic countries in the Near and Middle East, although the new technique was adopted very quickly there by the 1840s. Which regional, local, and global aspects can be made evident? What role did autochthonous image and art traditions have, and which specific functions did photography meet since its introduction? This collective volume deals with examples from Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Arab lands and with the question of local specifics, or an „indigenous lens." The contributions broach the issues of regional histories of photography, local photographers, specific themes and practices, and historical collections in these countries. They offer, for the first time in book form, a cross-section through a developing field of the history of photography.
Imaging and Imagining Palestine is the first comprehensive study of photography during the British Mandate period (1918–1948). It addresses well-known archives, photos from private collections never available before and archives that have until recently remained closed. This interdisciplinary volume argues that photography is central to a different understanding of the social and political complexities of Palestine in this period. While Biblical and Orientalist images abound, the chapters in this book go further by questioning the impact of photography on the social histories of British Mandate Palestine. This book considers the specific archives, the work of individual photographers, meth...
Petro-modernity is a local phenomenon essential to the history of Kuwait, while also a global experience and one of the prime sources of climate change. The book investigates petroleum’s role in the visual culture of Kuwait to understand the intersecting ideologies of modernization, political representation, and oil. The notion of iridescence, the ambiguous yet mesmerizing effect of a rainbowlike color play, serves as analytical-aesthetic concept to discuss petroleum’s ambiguous contribution to modernity: both promise of prosperity and destructive force of socio-cultural and ecological environments. Covering a broad spectrum of historical material from aerial and color photography, visual arts, postage stamps, and master plans to architecture and also contemporary art from the Gulf, it dismantles petro- modernity’s visual legacy.
This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography. The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the authors reveal the dif...
The Armenian contribution to Ottoman photography is supposedly well known, with histories documenting the famous Ottoman Armenian-run studios of the imperial capital that produced Orientalist visions for tourists and images of modernity for a domestic elite. Neglected, however, have been the practitioners of the eastern provinces where the majority of Ottoman Armenians were to be found, with the result that their role in the medium has been obscured and wider Armenian history and experience distorted. Photography in the Ottoman East was grounded in very different concerns, with the work of studios rooted in the seismic social, political and cultural shifts that reshaped the region and Armeni...
Rare Merit is a beautifully illustrated and astute examination of women photographers in Canada as it took shape in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Throughout, the camera was both a witness to the colonialism, capitalism, and gendered and racialized social organization, and a protagonist. And women across the country, whether residents or visitors, captured people and places that were entirely new to the lens. This book shows how they did so, and the meaning their work carries. Colleen Skidmore surveys the professional lives and photographs of nearly eighty women – studio portraitists, travel documentarians, photojournalists, fine artists, hobbyists, and photographic printers – from Lucy Maude Montgomery on Prince Edward Island to Élise Livernois in Quebec City, and from Margaret Bourke-White in the Arctic to Hannah Maynard on Vancouver Island. Why women? Why not women? Presenting the exceptional range and impact of their work, Rare Merit proves that women’s practices and images – knowingly omitted from founding narratives of photographic history – were diverse, compelling, widespread, and influential.
The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research. This issue features essays on works by Bolognese painter Guido Reni and his studio; a collection of late nineteenth-century images by one of Iran’s most prolific photographers, Antoin Sevruguin; Le Corbusier’s encounters with and monumentalization of the konak, a type of Ottoman house; the correspondence between René Magritte and his wife while h...
Featuring a broad selection of photographs from Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and other French partner museums, the exhibition catalogue explores the circumstances in which photography was introduced in Europe since 1839 and then practiced around the world, including the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas by leading photographers like Jacques-Philippe Potteau, Isidore van Kinsbergen, Auguste Bartholdi, Désiré Charnay, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, Lala Deen Dayal, Abdullah Brothers and Timothy O’Sullivan. It also features a selection of historical texts on photography by prominent theologian and philosopher, the Emir Abd el-Kader.
What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this boo...
This book argues that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements and, after the empire's demise, national monarchies.