Williams on Behdad and Gartlan, ‘Photography’s Orientalisms: New Essays on Colonial Representation’ | AMCA | Association for Modern + Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran + Turkey

Williams on Behdad and Gartlan, ‘Photography’s Orientalisms: New Essays on Colonial Representation’

Sandra Williams on Ali Behdad, Luke Gartlan. Photography’s Orientalisms: New Essays on Colonial Representation. Getty Research Institute, 2013. pp. (paperback), ISBN 978-1-60606-151-0.

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The 1978 publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism left an indelible mark on scholarship on the Middle East. In the decades since, Said’s critical analysis of the exoticization of the East and its production through European visual and textual media has informed studies of photography in the Middle East, India, and North Africa and developed into the dominant framework through which such material is studied. Scholars such as Malek Alloula and Ali Behdad have relied on the Saidian model to construct a history of photography focused on the continuation of established Orientalist visual idioms inherited from painting and the repressive function of the European lens in the East. In recent years, however, scholars such as Zeynep Çelik, Christopher Pinney, and Mary Roberts have sought to complicate this model. By looking more closely at local uses and reception of photography, their work illustrates how non-Europeans used the medium as a means of self-representation, often explicitly in order to counter European-constructed stereotypes.

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