A new view on Arab photography

Updated 26 May 2017
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A new view on Arab photography

“The Arab Imago” offers a new perspective on the history of Middle Eastern photography from the middle of the 19th century until the early 20th.
The book dismisses “photography’s history of service to the colonizers in favor of emphasizing the history of ‘native’ photography in the late Ottoman Arab world.”
In other words, author Stephen Sheehi avoids orientalist photography, which refers to a system of representation of the real Orient shaped to fit an imaginary mold present in a Westerner’s mind.
According to the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, orientalism provided a rationalization for European colonization based on a self-serving history in which the West saw the East as extremely different and inferior and therefore in need of Western intervention and rescue.
In contrast to that, “The Arab Imago” focuses essentially on indigenous Arab photography between 1860 and 1910.
Sheehi chose these two dates because they correspond to the rise of the Tanzimat, a series of reforms promulgated between 1839 and 1876 in the Ottoman Empire, and the nahdah or Arab renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the end of the Ottomanism concept with the Turkish nationalist coup.
This period also saw the popularization of photography with the rise of the Brownie and Kodak cameras. During this period, the economy of the Arab world was opening up to the world, as Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria and Jerusalem were thriving Ottoman provincial centers.
“Photography and the photograph were enmeshed in the shifting and multilayered social networks of the Ottoman Empire. They participated in facilitating social relations among new individual classes and institutions and ideologically ‘hailed’ the subjects who found themselves so clearly represented in the portrait,” the author writes.

The new ideological vision
The book opens with an introduction to Muhammad Sadiq Bey (1832-1902) who lived in Ottoman Egypt at a time when new forms of education and national institutions were transforming the fabric of society. The camera became a perfect tool to implement the new ideological vision that restructured space and society in order to introduce new means of production and governance. Sadiq Bey was a “product of this very social order.”
When he traveled to the Hijaz in Feb. 1861, Sadiq Bey was the first person to photograph the pilgrimage and the holy sites of Madinah and Makkah. He was also the first to use modern methods and equipment to survey the Hijaz.
“The photographer and the camera captured a ‘view’ (manzhar) that was already organized ‘down to the centimeter’ by the cartographer’s instruments. This capturing of a perspective that was waiting to be scientifically registered was part of not only a project financially and ideologically endorsed by Egypt’s... own modernizing agenda, but also of the nineteenth-century Arab ‘Renaissance,’” Sheehi writes.
It is interesting that as soon as the invention of the daguerreotype was announced in the Ottoman press, Sultan Abdulaziz, the 32nd Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and his nephew, Sultan Abdulhamid, showed a strong interest in the craft and even learned photography.
It has been said that Sultan Abdulaziz was displeased with a French photographer so his grand vizier advised him to commission the Ottoman Abdullah Freres to take the royal portrait.

A picture of the Ottoman era
Sultan Abdulhamid went on to produce the most prodigious photographic project of the Ottoman era. It resulted in 51 commissioned albums containing more than 1,800 photographs of schools, factories, mosques, bridges, monuments, palaces and character types from every ethnic community. These images have been seen as the true representation of a Muslim country and its citizens at a time when Europeans favored orientalist photography. This project can be seen as “an act of technological modernization” that created new possibilities.
At the same time, photographs were beginning to play a role in business and, most of all, they had a social role as they were meant to be exchanged and displayed among friends, acquaintances and even potential suitors.
“Carte de visite” photographs used a technology patented by Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi, which marked the beginning of “a new form of photographic mass production” thanks to low costs, which made the form accessible to virtually anyone. The method of producing the small photographs involved a camera equipped with four lenses, which would create in a single exposure eight identical photographs.

Changes in social relations
However according to Stephen Sheehi, it is precisely this mechanized production of portraits that makes it so difficult to write the history of Arab photography. Despite the existence of well-known studios in Cairo, Beirut and Alexandria, the Middle East was saturated with anonymous carte de visite, the origin of which are unknown as the photographers were not known beyond the specific locality in which they worked. These portraits, nevertheless, reflect the profound changes in social relations and the political economy during the late Ottoman era in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt.
Sheehi’s book ends with a quotation from Shahin Makarius, who elevated the craft of taking a photograph to an art: ”One must do this by representing the most beautiful things in the most beautiful way. Knowing the most beautiful does not come to someone except with time and refinement of taste.”
The rediscovery of Arab portrait photography from 1860 until 1910 is indeed long overdue. My only regret concerns the style of “The Arab Imago.” Sheehi’s narrative is at times tortuous and verbose and in stark contrast with the topic of photography, which literally means “writing with light.”


What We Are Reading Today: Cold War Civil Rights

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Updated 20 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Cold War Civil Rights

  • Soon after World War II, American racism became a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America

Author: Mary L. Dudziak

In 1958, an African American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing less than two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

Soon after World War II, American racism became a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Racial segregation undermined the American image, harming foreign relations in every administration from Truman to Johnson. Mary Dudziak shows how the Cold War helped to facilitate desegregation and other key social reforms at home as the US sought to polish its image abroad, yet how a focus on appearances over substance limited the nature and extent of progress.


What We Are Reading Today: Top Ten Ideas of Physics by Anthony Zee

Updated 18 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Top Ten Ideas of Physics by Anthony Zee

Could any discovery be more unexpected and shocking than the realization that the reality we were born into is but an approximation of an underlying quantum world that is barely within our grasp? This is just one of the foundational pillars of theoretical physics that A. Zee discusses in this book. Join him as he presents his Top Ten List of the biggest, most breathtaking ideas in physics—the ones that have fundamentally transformed our understanding of the universe.

“Top Ten Ideas of Physics” tells a story that will keep readers enthralled, along the way explaining the meaning of each idea and how it came about. Leading the list are the notions that the physical world is comprehensible and that the laws of physics are the same here, there, and everywhere. 

As the story unfolds, the apparently solid world dissolves into an intertwining web of dancing fields, exhibiting greater symmetries as we examine them at deeper and deeper levels.


What We Are Reading Today: Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Updated 18 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

In “Forest Euphoria,” Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us.

In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her — and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized — and they have lessons for us all.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘You Will Find Your People’

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Updated 17 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘You Will Find Your People’

Author: Lane Moore

Most would agree adult friendship is hard. TV shows made us believe we would grow up with a tight-knit group of best friends, but real life often looks very different.

In her 2023 book “You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult,” Lane Moore walks us through this tough reality.

It opens with the line: “I really thought I would have friends by now.” Relatable, right? Moore reflects on how the ages of 18 to 22 years old are prime friendship years. After that, things get harder.

As the author of “How to Be Alone” (2018), Moore shifts from solitude to connection. She explores how making friends as adults — especially for those with trauma or rejection — is a messy, emotional process.

Friendship, she says, can feel like a game of musical chairs that started before we noticed.

The book is not a tidy guide. There are no checklists or guaranteed strategies. Instead, Moore offers her own stories — raw, funny, and deeply honest.

She speaks to those who have felt left out or always been “too much.”

For the exhausted over-givers and the hopeful hearted, this book does not offer easy answers — but it does offer comfort. And sometimes, that is enough.

Also, she dedicates it to her dog.

 


What We Are Reading Today: The Ghana Reader

Updated 16 June 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: The Ghana Reader

Editors: Kwasi Konadu, Clifford C. Campbell

“The Ghana Reader” provides historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. 

Readers will encounter views of farmers, traders, the clergy, intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers about the country. 

With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, the book conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of the country’s development as a nation and its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, according to a review on goodreads.com.