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Geographies of Contact

 | 
Caroline Lehni
, 
Fanny Moghaddassi
, 
Hélène Ibata
, 
et al.

IV. Sites Turned into Sights

Framing Istanbul: Resonances of the Photography of James Robertson in Envisioning the City

Wendy Shaw

Texte intégral

  • 1 Engin Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923, 3rd Edition, Istanbul, YEM Yayınları, (...)

1The history of Ottoman photography has largely been written as a linear survey of photographers practicing in the Ottoman Empire. Although an accurate account would pay greater attention to photographers working in regional centres, including Beirut and Damascus as well as smaller cities in Anatolia, such as Izmir, the epicentre of this activity, Istanbul, has generally been the focus of such work.1 Recognizing the geographical incompleteness of this approach, this essay explores aesthetic aspects of photography in late nineteenth-century Istanbul.

  • 2 From the moment of the public announcement of photography in France in 1839, the director of the Pa (...)

2From the outset deeply implicated in the collection of scientific data as justification for the colonial project, photography entered the Ottoman Empire as documentation of ancient and Biblical sites immediately after its invention.2 By the 1850s, however, improving technologies worldwide enabled the establishment of local photographic studios within the empire, run by foreigners as well as Ottoman citizens. Unlike in Europe, where photographic aesthetics built on and competed with conventions established in the realistic painting tradition, watercolour traveller painting, and conventions for depicting the so-called Orient, in the Ottoman Empire, photographic practices developed in tandem with representational artistic practices adopted from Europe. While many practitioners of photography in the empire were Christian citizens, and thus experienced representational painting through religious art, their visual culture of modern modes of representing the so-called Orient in which they lived was conditioned by Western practices only to the extent that they engaged in European visual culture through illustrated European publications and European culture as practiced in Pera, largely populated by European expatriates.

3As photography emerged as a visual practice executed by Ottoman citizens, to what extent did it, then, rely on aesthetic conventions adopted from European practitioners and European visual practices? To what extent did it develop what might be recognized as a system of local, Ottoman signification? Rather than simply equating Ottoman photographic practice with the geographic boundaries of the empire (or empire through the metonym of its capital), this paper investigates the development of an Ottoman visual style emerging in Istanbul in the late nineteenth century. To this end, it compares the photography of James Robertson, the first European photographer who established a studio in the Ottoman Empire, with Ottoman photographers who adapted his visual practices in the construction of an Ottoman photographic gaze. The work of the British mint engraver and photographer James Robertson, active in Istanbul from 1841 to 1867, offers a liminal gaze on two overlapping aesthetic dialogues of the midnineteenth century: the interaction between manual and mechanical representation; and that between European representational conventions and Ottoman practices of photographic self-representation.

  • 3 Literally meaning “reordering,” the Tanzimat was a period of modernizing bureaucratic reform that t (...)

4Robertson arrived in Istanbul as chief engraver for the Imperial Mint, central in the young Sultan Abdülmecid’s execution of the modernizing reforms of the Tanzimat set in motion by his predecessor, Sultan Mahmud II.3 As coinage shifted to a modern decimal system easily fungible to European monetary systems, Sultan Abdülmecid hired a British engraver to revise the appearance of Ottoman coins and medallions in line with their European counterparts. Taking advantage of the relative popularization of photography enabled by improved technology as well as his integration within Ottoman society, Robertson became one of the earliest photographers to extensively document Constantinople, publishing an album of images of the city, entitled Photographic Views of Constantinople, in 1853. The same year, he established a shop in Pera where he sold prints of his work. In 1854, he took a twelve-panel panorama of the city from the tower of the War Ministry in Beyazit, taking one picture from each of the tower’s windows and combining their overlapping edges. Photographs of the city were exhibited as part of an exhibition mounted by the London Photographic Society at a gallery owned by the Society of Watercolour Painters in February, 1855, and again at the Paris exhibition between May and November of 1855. These exhibitions added pictures of itinerant street-sellers, taken in a smaller half-plate format. The 1854 panorama was first exhibited at the Paris exhibition, as well as at the Photographic Society of Scotland in 1856.

5Robertson’s fame mounted as his situation in Constantinople enabled him to engage in extensive documentation of the war in Crimea and detailed surveys of the modern Middle East. Upon his marriage in 1855, Robertson began to work closely with his sixteen-year younger brother-in-law, Felice Beato. Together, they embarked on the two-day ship journey to the Crimea several times in order to document the war in cities such as Balaklava and in Sevastopol. The following year they took a second panorama of Constantinople from the Beyazit tower, and also travelled to Malta, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Cairo on photographic expeditions in 1856 and 1857. In 1860, after documenting the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Beato left his partnership with Robertson, and in 1867, Robertson sold all of his equipment and shut down his shop in Pera.

6This short chronology frames Robertson’s participation in the transition towards new technologies of representation of Constantinople. In the shift from traditional to modern coinage and medallions, as in that from drawing to photography, Robertson mediated between established representational practices and those that would emerge in the photographic age. In doing so, he established representational conventions for Constantinople that attracted audiences, but proved volatile in serving the needs of the official documentation of empire.

7Robertson first intervened in the aesthetics of the modern Ottoman Empire in his designs for coins and commemorative medallions. The coins he designed adopted a global visual iconography by replacing the Ottoman text that had previously surrounded the central design with a laurel wreath closely resembling that of early nineteenth-century French and British coinage. Such a wreath appears on the British Ghuznee medal, awarded to all ranks participating in the First Anglo-Afghan war of 1839, as well as on the Candahar medal of 1842, at which point Robertson was a student at the mint. The design for the medallion, with an image of the fortress of Ghuznee on the front and a wreath surrounding a crown on the back, closely resembles a standard model Robertson used in his design of commemorative medallions in the Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the British Empire’s use of the medals to celebrate offensive victories, the medallions often commemorated successfully quelled rebellions or regained territories. Thus Robertson used a fixed representational paradigm in designing medals for the defense of Akka in 1841, of Kurdistan and Yemen in 1846, of Bosnia in 1849, Silistria in 1854, Kirim and Kars in 1855, Montenegro in 1862, and Crete in 1878 (Fig. 13a and 13b).

Figure 13a and 13b: James Robertson, Medallion produced in commemoration of the Ottoman victory at Montenegro, 1862. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

8Like the coins, these medallions introduced the laurel wreath as a framing device, which became a popular element in Ottoman design. Likewise, the medallions spread the association between a place, a battle, and a landscape depiction that emphasized key monuments as a summary of the identity and importance of a location. Particularly after Sultan Mahmud II’s controversial introduction of medallion portraits in 1836, Robertson’s replacement of the royal profile standard on British medallions with the imperial seal (tuğra) underscores a translation of European aesthetic practices into an underlying language of Ottoman cultural norms.

  • 4 Bahattin Öztuncay, ed., Robertson, Photographer and Engraver in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul, Vehb (...)

9Both a mint engraver and a photographer edit and translate visual forms of the real world into representational and symbolic images. As Öztuncay explains, “the engraver’s job was to take a two-dimensional design or drawing executed on transparent paper and shape it into the modeling material using sharp and pointed tools so as to give it a proper feeling of three-dimensional depth.”4 Given Robertson’s adoption of a photographic career as a supplement to his role at the mint, which would last forty years, the similarity of this practice with photography—particularly with its early interpretations—is striking. Just as the engraver translated a flat drawing into a relief that could be perceived spatially, the photographer transferred the three dimensionality of the lived world onto a flat surface. Robertson used this experience as a designer in formulating a photographic method that incorporated illustrational devices and pictorial photographic practices into the representation of Constantinople.

10An article in the Illustrated London News reviewing Robertson’s 1853 album of Istanbul photographs reflected an interpretation of photography that emphasized such modeling of light and shadow more characteristic of drawing than our contemporary understandings of the mechanical nature of photography often allow (Fig. 14).

  • 5 Quoted in Öztuncay, Robertson, p. 34.

Poets, painters, professors, will disagree to the end, as to the amount of pictorial value which can be reached by the paintings of the Sun: when his easel (to speak fancifully) is set at the angle most convenient to him, and when the pigments which are his “vehicle” have been compounded with the chemist’s most magic art. Some will protest against the elaborate truth of his penciling as too truthful, while, on the other hand, they will accuse him of falsifying shadows, to an extent savoring of caprice [...] In no. 11, which is one of the palest specimens, the numerous subsidiary domes to the Mosque of Mahomet the Second, are traced with a lightness and precision which it would puzzle the most cunning of “the Jesuits” who were so skillful in the subtleties of perspective to emulate. Most delicious, again, as affording examples of detail, are such interiors as no. 5, 8, 18—in which the lattice work and the oriental patterns in very low relief could hardly be surpassed.5

11As a photographer, Robertson became particularly known for the high quality of detail in his photographs, which favored urban scenes over the more common genre in Europe, that of portraiture.

Figure 14: James Robertson, “Mosque of Mohammed II”, Albumin Print, 303 x 260 mm, 1853. Courtauld Institute of Art.

12The trope of the urban landscape offered Robertson a means of contextualizing human experience within paradigms of the exotic already well established through longstanding representational modes of the picturesque. Since the nineteenth century, the picturesque had been one of the dominant genres of illustration in travel literature featuring exotic climes. Enabled by the increased textural nuance of steel engraving, travel literature of the mid-nineteenth century presented a wide array of picturesque scenes featuring monuments with incidental groupings of figures to provide local colour and a sense of proportion. Robertson built on this tradition, as well as that of costume albums that isolated figures from the urban scene, in order to offer an array of popular types.

13Ottoman Istanbul served as a popular subject for books that provided sequential images through which to view the city. Prints from these books could also be sold separately, making the images in them part of the visual culture and imagination of the city not only for foreign tourists, but also for the liminal foreigners resident in Istanbul, and ultimately for Ottomans who came into contact with them. Examples of such publications include The Beauties of the Bosphorus by Miss Pardoe, Illustrated in a Series of Views of Constantinople and its Environs, from Original Drawings by W. H. Bartlett (1839) ; Thomas Allom and Reverend Robert Walsh’s Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor (c. 1839) (Fig. 15). In 1844, the Maltese artist Amadeo Preziosi (1816-1882), who moved to Constantinople in 1842, created an album entitled Costumes of Constantinople, commissioned by the British Ambassador to Istanbul, Lord Stratford Canning. In 1858, he collected his already popular views of the city, including images featuring costumes and urban types, in a chromolithography album entitled Stamboul, Recollections of Eastern Life, republished as Stamboul, Souvenir d’Orient in 1861 (Fig. 16).

Figure 15: Thomas Allom, “The Atmeidan, or Hippodrome, and Mosque of Achmet,” published in Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, London, Fisher Son & Co., c. 1839.

Figure 16: Amadeo Preziosi, “Bread sellers”, Stamboul—Recollections of Eastern Life, Paris, Lemercier, 1858.

14I imagine James Robertson in 1853, the proud and thrilled owner of a photographic instrument that had only recently gained any measure of portability or commercial availability. Robertson’s visual vocabulary belonged to that of drawing and of the mint, and his subsequent photographic work suggests that he built on these experiences in order to develop a means of representing Constantinople in a manner that would be simultaneously documentary and evocative. Like other photographers of his era, he experimented with various methods to bridge the gap between the evocative image produced through painting and the mechanical nature of the camera.

15He began his experiments by using photographs as a sketch that could be painted over with watercolor (Fig. 17). While he must have admired the mechanical accuracy of the new instrument, his apparent need to color the image suggests that he found it lacking in evoking the same kind of interest and drama available in images such as those of Preziosi. After all, to compete in the same market of tourists, his images would have to awaken the same senses of beauty and exoticism available in the drawn image.

Figure 17: James Robertson, “Simit Seller”, Retouched Photograph, 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

16He attempted to solve this problem through pictorialism, using a wide aperture to focus on the foreground and artistically blur the background of his figures (Fig. 18). Thus rather than using a white backdrop that deadened the painted photographic images, he used the background landscape to evoke space while focusing precisely on the expressions of figures transformed, through photography, into real people.

Figure 18: James Robertson, “Dervish”, 1855. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

17Just as his early photographs of figures lack the power of their drawn counterparts, his early images of important monuments fail to draw the eye into the picture. Small figures seem lost and insignificant in broader frames ; monuments are documented, but at times elements are cut off or poorly situated in the picture frame (Fig. 19). As with figural images of urban types, Robertson’s photographs competed with pre-existing drawings of the city that already catalogued the important sites. Their evocative use of figures drew the viewer into the image, suggesting a scene that was both exotic and familiarly lively. Yet a similar effect proved difficult to achieve with photography. Some images reveal “ghost” figures where somebody moved because of a long exposure time (Fig. 20). While Robertson wanted to include figures in order to add local colour, the mechanical limitations of the new technology rendered the picturesque device of figures problematic.

Figure 19: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 20: James Robertson. “The Tombs of Sultan Süleyman and His Wife Hürrem Sultan,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

18He seems to have begun to solve the proble by staging figures. A close-up of two people, at the foot of the Egyptian obelisk in the hippodrome, offers a solution by combining the documentary interest of the monument with the sociological interest of contemporary costume, something which existing representational genres had done in a manner that appeared simultaneously realistic and educational (Fig. 21). Photography gave Robertson a new claim to authenticity, by allowing him to stage real people as casual bystanders at historical sites.

Figure 21: James Robertson, “Pedestal of the Obelisk in the Ancient Byzantine Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

19In order to analyse how these photographs function, it is important to consider them as staged representations. Out of an infinite array of possible angles, each photographer chooses a single image to represent a site. Moreover, while figures in the scene may look as though they provide casual and incidental insight into everyday life, they are more likely to serve a function in the image. For one thing, particularly in early images, figures needed to stay still for the duration of an image. This meant not only that they had to be posed, but the photographer had to communicate with them to stay still. Even as exposure times decreased, a photographer could choose one shot among many in which the distribution of figures in the foreground could serve an aesthetic purpose in relation to the overall scene. Robertson’s training in watercolor painting and his early interest in pictorialism remind us that his eye was trained in accordance with certain representational conventions which emerge in multiple forms throughout his photographic experimentation.

20As Robertson developed a practice of documenting the city in individual frames, he seems to have become adept at creating the appearance of casual pedestrian presence (Fig. 22) Yet when one takes a closer look at these images, the regular pattern of figures becomes apparent. Groups of figures appear at relatively regular intervals across the scenes, much like picturesque groupings that livened up engravings. Unlike earlier images of the hippodrome, which gave a dry, informative view of monuments, in a later view Robertson arranged figures to echo the rhythm of the minarets behind them. Like an engraver who had to synthesize a monument into a compact, graphic form that gained its strength from a strong sense of rhythm and a clearly differentiated fore, middle, and background, Robertson created a style that translated compositional practices of the drawing of urban space into photography.

Figure 22: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque and the Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

21To what extent can it be said that Robertson’s solution to photographic composition, which combined architectural and human form to give an effect of the casual while also dictating the pleasurable attention of the touristic eye, resonated with Ottoman practitioners of photography?

  • 6 After Sébah’s death, the business continued first under his brother Cosimi, and after 1890, under h (...)

22The most prolific, most representative, and most frequently discussed Ottoman photographers were the companies of Sébah (after 1890, Sébah and Joaillier) and Abdullah Frères, both of whom founded studios in the same era and presumably in competition with that of Robertson.6 Of Syrian-Catholic and Armenian religious ethnicity, Pascal Sébah (1823-1886) founded a photographic studio in Pera in 1857, where he specialized in studio portraits and genre scenes. Although he became well-known for photographs executed for a costume album designed for the Vienna World Exposition in 1873 under the direction of Osman Hamdi and Marie de Launey, his work included a vast repertoire of urban representations that paralleled the subjects taken up by Robertson. After working with the German photographer Rabach in Beyazit, the Ottoman Armenian Viçen (who later changed his name to Abdullah Şükrü ; 1820-1902) joined with his brothers Kevork (1839-1918) and Hovsep (1830-1908) to open the Abdullah Frères Photographic Studio in 1858, moving to Pera in 1867 after being declared official court photographers and Outstanding Artists of the City by Sultan Abdulaziz in 1863. The studio operated until 1899.

  • 7 A definitive identification of these negatives is impossible, as the Sebah studio, with all its neg (...)

23Other than working in the same city, very little evidence directly connects the Robertson and Abdullah Frères studios. In contrast, after Robertson sold everything from his studio, including his negatives, in 1867, some unsigned prints from his negatives appear in albums published by Pascal Sébah in the late 1860s, some of which even have the signature removed.7

24Despite the potential confusion of authorship created by this situation, I am going to offer the provisional hypothesis that the compositional effect of Robertson’s work appears in many photographs attributed to Sébah, but not in those by the Abdullah Frères. I start this discussion by comparing three photographs of the hippodrome (Fig. 23, 24, 25). Choosing to frame the mosque at an angle such that the minarets and the obelisk establish a rhythm for the frame, Robertson includes spaced figures in the foreground that extend the vertical rhythm across the entire image. While the figures can be interpreted as happening to be there, even in this case I would argue that Robertson selected a moment in which passers-by extended the architectural rhythm across the image. In contrast, photographs of the hippodrome by Sébah and by Abdullah Frères offer documentation of the primary monuments without supplementing them with visual attraction.

Figure 23: James Robertson, “View of the Hippodrome”, c. 1853-57. Getty Institute.

Figure 24: Pascal Sébah, Photograph of the Hippodrome, c. 1880. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art..

Figure 25: Abdullah Frères, “View of the Hippodrome and the Obelisks of Constantine and Justinian”, 1880-1893. Library of Congress.

25Nonetheless, in taking up the common Orientalist fascination with the cemetery, Sébah used the multiplication of the figure in a manner similar to Robertson’s intertwined compositional use of figures with architecture (Fig. 26). In contrast, taking up the same subject, the Abdullah Frères chose the centralized compositional model that dominates their photographic enterprise (Fig. 27).

Figure 26: Pascal Sébah, “Turkish Cemetery”, c. 1870, Albumin Print, 20.5 x 26.7 cm. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.

Figure 27: Abdullah Frères, “Cemetery”, 1880-1900. Getty Institute.

26The effect seems to have gone beyond the work of Pascal Sébah, perhaps informing that of his son Jean and suggesting that this was a considered practice passed from father to son. Robertson’s photographs of fountains populate the scenes with figures that appear at once casual and sleeping, carefully scattered throughout the frame. While the image seems to support the prejudice of “lazy” Easterners, it more likely reflects the need for hired extras to stay still during a relatively long pose (Fig. 28). Similarly, Sébah’s photograph of a fountain uses figures to extend a visual rhythm established through objects (Fig. 29). More casual scenes by Sébah and Joaillier, from the 1890s, reflect this composition without requiring the same degree of staging. Nonetheless, the variety of evenly-spaced figures suggests an awareness that the photograph does not simply document an urban location, but also offers a vignette of scenes of life that goes back to the picturesque tradition.

Figure 28: James Robertson, “Topkapi Palace Gate and Street Vendors by the Fountain of Ahmed III”, 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 29: Pascal Sébah, “Fountain of the Mosque of the Heir Apparent (Şehzade)”, late 1860s - early 1870s. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.

  • 8 Ahmet Ersoy, “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-I Osmaniyye Album,” Muqar (...)

27Ottoman photography was pulled into a more documentary mode through patronage. Thus as Sébah worked for the Popular Costumes of the Ottoman Empire book for the Vienna Exposition of 1873, their work was dictated by the needs of the patron. The image became shallow, divorcing people from the logic of environment or urban space. Photographs taken in the home of an Ottoman administrator—one can see the baseboard behind many of the figures—underscore the artifice of the frame. In contrast to the picturesque, slice-of-life quality achieved in Robertson’s work, the emphasis on documentation forced the photograph into a role of transparent, technical, and mechanical representation.8 The story it was supposed to tell was no longer that of a living anthropo logically fascinating foreign world, but of a scholarly apparatus that could catalogue, label, and implicitly control the diversity captured through the lens. In order to enter the world of these visual documents, figures must leave the picturesque narratives that they previously inhabited in order to consciously represent elements in the broad catalogue of empire.

28Thus as the Abdullah Frères catalogued the Bosphorus among the numerous images of empire shared with the world in the form of Albums donated to the United States Library of Congress and the British Library on the occasion of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the picturesque invitation offered by illustrations of the Bosphorus becomes a flat, high-contrast depiction of the contours of land (Fig. 30).

Figure 30: Abdullah Frères, “General view of the Bosphorus and Rumeli Hisari (Fortress)”, 1880-1893, Abdul Hamid Album Collection. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-81040.

29It would be a mistake to attribute this flatness simply to technical limitations or a lack of skill—the Abdullah Frères were skilled practitioners of photography, and the absence of figures in album photographs indicates a choice to move away from aesthetic practices such as those introduced in the work of Robertson, which also affected that of Pascal and Jean Sébah. Like Robertson, they could have used compositional rhythms to establish a visual rapport with landscape, even without the inclusion of figures. However, the aim of their commissioned work was not photographic or aesthetic so much as a means of establishing the photograph as part of the apparatus of state representation.

30In contrast, Robertson engaged the rhythm of painting in photography through the deployment of picturesque-style groupings of figures, or of the architecture itself. This enabled him to produce subtle and open-ended meditations on the contrasts and cultural interplays that surrounded him as West met East and modernity met tradition through his own presence as a European in the Ottoman Empire, through the technology of photography, and through the happenstance of politics. The combination of his documentary skill, his pictorialist visual poetry, his delicate integration of color enabled him to create a photograph that could simultaneously document a moment and indicate the complex and as yet unknowable futures held within it (Fig. 31). Such pictorial effects progressively disappeared from the stage of Ottoman photography as it moved from staging casual inhabitants of lived spaces towards segregating the figure from space in the mode of a scientific catalogue. One can only wonder what might have happened if the modern Ottoman gaze had lingered a bit longer in the realm of imagination.

Figure 31: James Robertson and Felice Beato, “Rumeli Hisari Fortress”, 1857. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Bibliographie

Bibliography

Primary sources

Allom, T. and Walsh, R., Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, London, Fisher Son & Co., c. 1839.

Pardoe J., The Beauties of the Bosphorus, Illustrated in a Series of Views of Constantinople and its Environs, from Original Drawings by W. H. Bartlett, London, G. Virtue, 1839.

Preziosi, A., Costumes of Constantinople, London, 1844. British Museum.

Preziosi, A., Stamboul, Recollections of Eastern Life, Paris, 1858.

Secondary sources

Ersoy, A., “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i Osmaniyye Album,” Muqarnas, no. 20, 2003, pp. 187-207.

Özendes, E., Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923, 3rd Edition, Istanbul, YEM Yayınları, 2013.

Öztuncay, B., Dersaadet’in Fotoğrafçıları, Istanbul, Koç Kültür Sanat, 2004.

Öztuncay, B. (ed.), Robertson, Photographer and Engraver in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul, Vehbi Koç Foundation, 2013.

List of illustrations

Figures 13a and 13b: James Robertson, Medallion produced in commemoration of the Ottoman victory at Montenegro, 1862. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 14: James Robertson, “Mosque of Mohammed II”, Albumin Print, 303 x 260 mm, 1853. Courtauld Institute of Art.

Figure 15: Thomas Allom, “The Atmeidan, or Hippodrome, and Mosque of Achmet,” published in Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, London, Fisher Son & Co., c. 1839.

Figure 16: Amadeo Preziosi, “Bread sellers”, Stamboul—Recollections of Eastern Life, Paris, Lemercier, 1858.

Figure 17: James Robertson, “Simit Seller”, Retouched Photograph, 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 18: James Robertson, “Dervish”, 1855. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 19: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 20: James Robertson. “The Tombs of Sultan Süleyman and His Wife Hürrem Sultan,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 21: James Robertson, “Pedestal of the Obelisk in the Ancient Byzantine Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 22: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque and the Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Kloç Collection.

Figure 23: James Robertson, “The Obelisk and Other Monuments in the Hippodrome,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 24: Pascal Sébah, Photograph of the Hippodrome, c. 1880, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.

Figure 25: Abdullah Frères, “View of the Hippodrome and the Obelisks of Constantine and Justinian”, 1880-1893. Library of Congress.

Figure 26: Pascal Sébah, “Turkish Cemetery”, c. 1870, Albumin Print, 20.5 x 26.7 cm. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art

Figure 27: Abdullah Frères, “Cemetery”, 1880-1900. Getty Institute.

Figure 28: James Robertson, “Topkapi Palace Gate and Street Vendors by the Fountain of Ahmed III”, 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Figure 29: Pascal Sébah, “Fountain of the Mosque of the Heir Apparent (Şehzade)”, late 1860s–early 1870s. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.

Figure 30: Abdullah Frères, “General view of the Bosphorus and Rumeli Hisari (Fortress)”, 1880-1893, Abdul Hamid Album Collection. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-81040.

Figure 31: James Robertson and Felice Beato, “Rumeli Hisari Fortress”, 1857. Ömer M. Koç Collection.

Notes

1 Engin Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923, 3rd Edition, Istanbul, YEM Yayınları, 2013 ; Bahattin Öztuncay, Dersaadet’in Fotoğrafçıları, Istanbul, Koç Kültür Sanat, 2004.

2 From the moment of the public announcement of photography in France in 1839, the director of the Paris Observatory and member of the Chamber of Deputies François Arago (1786-1853) associated photography with French colonial might. The Ottoman Empire became one of the earliest subjects of travel photography when the French painter Horace Vernet (1789-1863) and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet (1806-1893) began to photograph Egypt only three months after Daguerre’s process was announced. Photographer Joseph Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892) also documented the region as early as 1842-1844. Similarly, photographer Maxime du Camp (1822-1894) accompanied writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) on his trip to Egypt in 1849-1850. During his trips in 1856-1860, English photographer Francis Frith (1822-1898) gained renown for his similar photographic documentation of the Middle East, disseminated as postcards.

3 Literally meaning “reordering,” the Tanzimat was a period of modernizing bureaucratic reform that took place in the Ottoman Empire between 1839 and 1876.

4 Bahattin Öztuncay, ed., Robertson, Photographer and Engraver in the Ottoman Capital, Istanbul, Vehbi Koç Foundation, 2013.

5 Quoted in Öztuncay, Robertson, p. 34.

6 After Sébah’s death, the business continued first under his brother Cosimi, and after 1890, under his son Johannes/Jean (1872-1947), whosoon partnered witha Frenchmannamed PolicarpeJoaillier (1868-1918). After Joaillier’s return to Paris in the early 1900s, the studio continued under various partnerships, renamed in the 1930s as Foto Sabah, which remained in business until 1952.

7 A definitive identification of these negatives is impossible, as the Sebah studio, with all its negatives, was burnt to the ground in 1881. Öztuncay, Robertson, p. 81.

8 Ahmet Ersoy, “A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-I Osmaniyye Album,” Muqarnas, no. 20, 2003, pp. 187-207.

Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 13a and 13b: James Robertson, Medallion produced in commemoration of the Ottoman victory at Montenegro, 1862. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 304k
Légende Figure 14: James Robertson, “Mosque of Mohammed II”, Albumin Print, 303 x 260 mm, 1853. Courtauld Institute of Art.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 352k
Légende Figure 15: Thomas Allom, “The Atmeidan, or Hippodrome, and Mosque of Achmet,” published in Robert Walsh, Constantinople and the Scenery of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor, London, Fisher Son & Co., c. 1839.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 336k
Légende Figure 16: Amadeo Preziosi, “Bread sellers”, Stamboul—Recollections of Eastern Life, Paris, Lemercier, 1858.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 736k
Légende Figure 17: James Robertson, “Simit Seller”, Retouched Photograph, 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 180k
Légende Figure 18: James Robertson, “Dervish”, 1855. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 176k
Légende Figure 19: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 236k
Légende Figure 20: James Robertson. “The Tombs of Sultan Süleyman and His Wife Hürrem Sultan,” 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 200k
Légende Figure 21: James Robertson, “Pedestal of the Obelisk in the Ancient Byzantine Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 396k
Légende Figure 22: James Robertson, “Sultan Ahmet Mosque and the Hippodrome,” 1854. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 412k
Légende Figure 23: James Robertson, “View of the Hippodrome”, c. 1853-57. Getty Institute.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-11.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 120k
Légende Figure 24: Pascal Sébah, Photograph of the Hippodrome, c. 1880. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art..
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-12.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 244k
Légende Figure 25: Abdullah Frères, “View of the Hippodrome and the Obelisks of Constantine and Justinian”, 1880-1893. Library of Congress.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-13.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 224k
Légende Figure 26: Pascal Sébah, “Turkish Cemetery”, c. 1870, Albumin Print, 20.5 x 26.7 cm. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-14.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 380k
Légende Figure 27: Abdullah Frères, “Cemetery”, 1880-1900. Getty Institute.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-15.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 316k
Légende Figure 28: James Robertson, “Topkapi Palace Gate and Street Vendors by the Fountain of Ahmed III”, 1853. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-16.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 220k
Légende Figure 29: Pascal Sébah, “Fountain of the Mosque of the Heir Apparent (Şehzade)”, late 1860s - early 1870s. Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-17.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 432k
Légende Figure 30: Abdullah Frères, “General view of the Bosphorus and Rumeli Hisari (Fortress)”, 1880-1893, Abdul Hamid Album Collection. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-81040.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-18.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 288k
Légende Figure 31: James Robertson and Felice Beato, “Rumeli Hisari Fortress”, 1857. Ömer M. Koç Collection.
URL http://books.openedition.org/pus/docannexe/image/6062/img-19.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 540k

Auteur

Professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures at the Free University of Berlin. She is the author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003) and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2012). Her work explores the intersection between modernity, colonialism, postcoloniality, philosophy and art in the Islamic world through museums, art historiography, archaeology, religion, film, photography and contemporary artistic production. It features a regional emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey within comparative perspectives with other regions of the global south and dominant Islamic legacies.

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