Train Station of Helwan (today Cairo’s main train station), 1880. Photographed by Adelphi Zangaki studio. Ken and Jenny Jacobson Orientalist Photography Collection, Getty Research Institute, 2008r3-3263
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In celebration of the launch of the new book, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean (Indiana University Press, 2022), this panel focuses on the transformational role of photography in four careful case studies from the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The conditions of nineteenth-century modernity fundamentally altered an individual’s relationship to time, space, community, and matter, at both the macro and the micro level. Four of the book’s eleven chapters examine diverse ways in which the novel technology of photography contributed to intense aesthetic negotiation with these conditions that were changing across the globe. From the role of Muybridge’s locomotion studies in the Ottoman capital to photographs of imperial tents on the Hijaz railway to photographs of a new mosque on Cairo’s skyline, these four papers break new ground by uniting the field of Islamic art history with the history of photography.
The event is free and open to the public.
Sponsor
Center for Cultural Analysis
Islam, the Humanities and the Human
Art History Department
Department of Arts, Culture and Media
Schedule
1:30: Introduction
1:40: Participant Interventions
2:40: Break
2:50: Roundtable
4:00: Discussion with audience
5:00: End
Participants
Gülru Çakmak
Gülru Çakmak
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Gülru Çakmak is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s.
“Osman Hamdi Bey and the Long Duration of History”
Beginning in the 1880s, the Ottoman painter, museum director, and archaeologist Osman Hamdi undertook a series of paintings that depicted imposing, historical, and invariably fictitious mosque façades. This chapter discusses At the Mosque Door (1891), one of the later paintings in the series. At first sight a seemingly straightforward genre scene, the painting in fact implements a much more ambitious program, thematizing the evolution of civilizations over the duration of deep time. It engages not only with street and studio photography of its time, but also with contemporaneous scientific experimentations utilizing the medium, specifically Eadweard Muybridge's locomotion studies and chronophotography technique developed by the French physician Étienne-Jules Marey. As such, Hamdi's work reflects deeply on the possibilities and limitations of painting in opposition to photography, and proposes painting as the quintessential medium that can make visible the long duration of history that underlie the present. If photography is essentially an analytic device that can dissect the here-and-now of nature, painting is the superior medium of synthesis that can reveal nature as history, signaling exponentially longer historical processes otherwise invisible to the observing individual.
Emily Neumeier
Emily Neumeier
Temple University
Emily Neumeier Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University specializing in the visual and spatial cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean with a focus on the Ottoman Empire. She has written about the history of archaeology and cultural heritage in outlets such as the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and History and Anthropology.
“The Muybridge Albums in Istanbul: Photography as Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire”
In 1888, the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II welcomed the US ambassador to his palace in Istanbul to accept an unusual gift: an eleven-volume set of Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion. These albums were the result of Muybridge’s experiments with stop-action photography at the University of Pennsylvania, which laid the groundwork for motion pictures. While scholars have studied this moment as a landmark in the history of film, I will consider Muybridge’s reception in an international context. The discovery of the complete set of Muybridge’s albums in Istanbul, as well as accompanying archival documentation, allows for an investigation into how these photographs were pressed into service as a token of international diplomacy. The albums were sent to the sultan to gain the coveted permits for Penn’s excavations at a Mesopotamian site in Iraq. I also suggest that the photographs, participating in a trans-national dialog over scientific technology, served as the impetus for the well-known Abdülhamid II photograph albums sent to the US and Great Britain. Therefore, just as the Muybridge albums strive to archive frozen moments of time, their gifting also presents an opportunity to scrutinize a unique moment that lies at the intersection between Islamic art history and the histories of archaeology and photography.
Alex Dika Seggerman
Alex Dika Seggerman
Rutgers University - Newark
Alex Dika Seggerman is Assistant Professor of Islamic art history at Rutgers University-Newark. She is author of Modernism on the Nile: Art in Egypt between the Islamic and the Contemporary.
“Alabaster and Albumen: Photographs of the Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Making of a Modern Icon”
While it has often been framed as a pale imitation of Ottoman architectural precedents, this chapter argues that the Muhammad ʿAli Mosque should instead be understood as a quintessential product of nineteenth-century Egyptian modernity, enmeshed in accelerating and expanding networks of reproducible image-making in the Islamic Mediterranean. The Muhammad ʿAli Mosque’s status as a modern iconic monument is the result of its prominent role in the new visual systems of the nineteenth century—visual systems that were mediated through both urban and pictorial practices. The new reproducible image technologies of the era, including lithography and photography, were “reorganizing the observer” in profound ways. The modern observer no longer perceived space primarily as a pedestrian on the street would, but instead began to conceptualize her worldview through the proliferation of flat representations of places, both near and far. Although it was begun before the advent of photography, the Muhammad ʿAli Mosque was uniquely primed for capture by new image technologies that were shifting modes of seeing across the region.
Ashley Dimmig
Ashley Dimmig
Walters Art Museum
Ashley Dimmig is Wieler-Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in Islamic Art at the Walters Art Museum. She serves on the board of the Historians of Islamic Art Association and has an essay in a forthcoming edited volume entitled, Deconstructing Myths in Islamic Art.
“Tents and Trains: Mobilizing Modernity in the Late Ottoman Empire”
In 1905, during the reign of Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909), the Damascus-Maʾan line on the Hijaz Railway network was inaugurated with great fanfare. This chapter examines the ceremonies and imperial regalia deployed for the celebrations through the lens of imperially commissioned photographs by Ali Sâmi (1866-1936). Set against the backdrop of stately fabric architecture, elaborate feasts, monumental epigraphy, and royal insignia, the train took center stage as a symbol of future progress and prosperity. Rather than simply dressing the occasion for the sake of imperial spectacle, these trappings of empire grounded this hallmark of modernization in imagery that signified the longevity of the Ottoman state and the protective power of the sultan. Coupling infrastructural development with traditional regalia and fabric architecture in the landscape long tread by pilgrims en route to Mecca and Medina served the sultan’s agenda to construct and propagate an Ottoman-Islamic modernity.