Tina Barouti on The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910
Author: Stephen Sheehi
Reviewer: Tina Barouti
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
The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910, the title of Stephen Sheehi’s crucial book, urgently shifts the center of scholarship to consider the indigenista photograph, particularly its production, discourse, performance, exchange, circulation, and display in Ottoman Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine from 1860 to 1910, thereby reversing historical narratives of Middle Eastern photography, which have focused on the production and perspective of the colonisateurs, largely overlooking the contribution of native photographers (p. xxii). Sheehi borrows the term “indigenista” from Latin American anthropologist Deborah Poole, whose examination of photography in turn-of-the-century Peru and the country’s processes of embourgeoisement parallels that of the Ottoman world, showing that the rise in portrait photography as a social practice and a growing middle class could be found in diverse regions of the global South. The time frame of Sheehi’s text is significant in that it marks the rise of the Tanzimat, a series of reforms and processes of modernization in the Ottoman Empire, and nahdah, or renaissance, in the Arab world in 1860 and the decline of the Osmanlilik project in 1910. Composed of two parts, “Histories and Practice” and “Case Studies and Theory,” The Arab Imago contains eight chapters that are oriented around two poles: the analytical and practical history of indigenista photography in the Ottoman Arab world and an abstruse theorization of the multifold levels of photography as a “social and ideological act” (p. xxxvii).