On his book The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910
Cover Interview of May 23, 2017
In a nutshell
Arab Imago has a dual personality. It explores the undiscovered
history of indigenista, or indigenous, photography of the Arab world. I am particularly
interested in the earliest decades of photography, specifically, nineteenth and
twentieth century studio portraiture in Arab, or, at least pre-1914, Ottoman photography.
Dedicated exclusively to native photography, the book offers
new information about lesser known photographers from Lebanon, Palestine, and
Egypt, such as Jurji Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Garabed Krikorian, Khalil
Raad, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha. The book also revisits and
offers an original reading of well-known Ottoman photographers, who operated
both in Istanbul and Cairo, such as Abdullah Frères and Pascal and Jean Sébah.
The book’s alternate personality is theoretical. It develops
a theory of reading photography and shows how integral “non-Western” photography
really is to the history of photography as a whole. A theory of reading portraiture,
then, may be able to cross borders and boundaries and take into account the
specificities of social, political, and visual histories of particular
photographic practices.
Considering the mass of uncharted material, I chose to focus
on photographic portraiture, mostly produced in the studies of Beirut, Cairo,
Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. But the theoretical arc bridges a number
of different genres of photography. While the book is dualistic, it is also integrated,
and I would hope that readers see how the material and social history of
photography in the Arab world can be read simultaneously as empirical and theoretical.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Arab Imago has a dual personality. It explores the undiscovered history of indigenista, or indigenous, photography of the Arab world. I am particularly interested in the earliest decades of photography, specifically, nineteenth and twentieth century studio portraiture in Arab, or, at least pre-1914, Ottoman photography.
Dedicated exclusively to native photography, the book offers new information about lesser known photographers from Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, such as Jurji Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Garabed Krikorian, Khalil Raad, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif’at Pasha. The book also revisits and offers an original reading of well-known Ottoman photographers, who operated both in Istanbul and Cairo, such as Abdullah Frères and Pascal and Jean Sébah.
The book’s alternate personality is theoretical. It develops a theory of reading photography and shows how integral “non-Western” photography really is to the history of photography as a whole. A theory of reading portraiture, then, may be able to cross borders and boundaries and take into account the specificities of social, political, and visual histories of particular photographic practices.
Considering the mass of uncharted material, I chose to focus on photographic portraiture, mostly produced in the studies of Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Istanbul. But the theoretical arc bridges a number of different genres of photography. While the book is dualistic, it is also integrated, and I would hope that readers see how the material and social history of photography in the Arab world can be read simultaneously as empirical and theoretical.