Tina Barouti on the Arab Imago: a Social History of Portrait
Stephen Sheehi. The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910. Princeton University Press, 2016. pages cm $45.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-691-15132-8. Reviewed by Tina Barouti (Boston University) Published on H-AMCA (January, 2017) Commissioned by Jessica Gerschultz (University of Kansas) The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait poles: the analytical and practical history of indi‐ Photography, 1860-1910, the title of Stephen Shee‐ genista photography in the Ottoman Arab world hi’s crucial book, urgently shifts the center of and an abstruse theorization of the multifold lev‐ scholarship to consider the indigenista photo‐ els of photography as a “social and ideological act” graph, particularly its production, discourse, per‐ (p. xxxvii). formance, exchange, circulation, and display in Sheehi’s The Arab Imago not only provides the Ottoman Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine from 1860 field of Middle Eastern photography with an intro‐ to 1910, thereby reversing historical narratives of duction to unexplored photographers, photograph‐ Middle Eastern photography, which have focused ic practitioners, texts on photography, and photog‐ on the production and perspective of the colonisa‐ raphy studios, but also sets forth a new methodolo‐ teurs, largely overlooking the contribution of na‐ gy wherein an analysis of the manifest and latent tive photographers (p. xxii). Sheehi borrows the content of indigenista photography can elucidate term “indigenista” from Latin American anthro‐ the “nature of photography” in the Ottoman Arab pologist Deborah Poole, whose examination of world. He uncovers its particular history, ideology, photography in turn-of-the-century Peru and the and social relations, which have been overshad‐ country’s processes of embourgeoisement parallels owed by those of the colonisateurs.
[Show full text]