This workshop explores the multiple deployments of photography in the early twentieth-century global Middle East. The goal is to understand how visual practices intersect with power, communication, and documentation. Collectively, participants ask how photography became a tool for denaturalization and the persecution of undesirable and marginalized subjects in imperial settings, such as minorities, revolutionaries, and convicts in the Ottoman and Qajar empires. How did state This workshop explores the multiple deployments of photography in the early twentieth-century global Middle East. We will discuss how visual practices intersect with power, communication, and documentation. Collectively, participants ask how photography became a tool for denaturalization and the persecution of undesirable and marginalized subjects, whether minorities, revolutionaries, and convicts in the Ottoman and Qajar empires. How did state surveillance of mobility produce knowledge about imperial subjects?
Participants will examine a diverse range of photographic genres, from family records to convict photographs, and studio portraits to complicate photography’s role in regulating class and gender dynamics as well as criminality across the region.
Questions of ownership and the ethical status of imperial archives that preserve photographs of marginalized or indigenous communities are critical to our discussions of power. How can we responsibly reconstruct the pasts of marginalized, displaced, and persecuted individuals by the Ottoman or Qajar state using photographs taken by the very same state? In what ways did photographs serve as instruments of state bureaucracy and as a form of resistance to it? In other words, how do blurred boundaries between photographic genres offer subjects opportunities to assert their identity and recreate personal or collective memories?