David Low, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond
David Low, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond, London, New York and Dublin: I. B. Tauris, 2022, 272 pages, £95 (hardback)/£28,99 (paperback)
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1The invention of photography in the 19th century was widely admired and acclaimed owing, among other things, to the camera’s perceived objectivity, based on its ability to depict reality far more accurately than previous means of representation. Such an attribution, however, overshadowed the fact that the camera is actually a tool of exclusion, omitting from its frame anything deemed unworthy of being seen or recorded. As a result, the clarity and truthfulness a photograph is accredited with exist side by side with several omissions from the view. Such exclusions are not particular to the medium, rather they are also mirrored in histories of photography, where anything that is intended to be kept out of sight is excluded from the frames of narratives.
2This captures the opening discussion of David Low’s book, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond. Low’s aim in this work is to challenge the exclusions prevalent in studies on the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire and to bring back the excluded. To this end, he initially identifies several established parameters in the field such as limiting the geographical scope of the empire to the boundaries of the Turkish Republic; prioritising Constantinople as the primary site of visual production; highlighting famous photographic studios in Pera along with their distinguished clientele (i.e., sultans, Ottoman elites and Western customers); and over-relying on easily accessible collections (i.e., the Abdulhamid albums gifted to the US Library of Congress and the British Museum in London and various tourist albums).
3According to Low, these established parameters firstly exclude vernacular photography, meaning “insignificant” images of ordinary people produced by studios that were not located in Pera. As art history remains the primary paradigm in studies on the history of photography in general, such images stay outside of the frame of these carefully constructed historical narratives. Secondly, Armenian photographers of the Ottoman Empire, especially the ones contributing to visual production in the provinces, despite their significant presence in the imperial photographic industry, remained marginal in the historiography. That the non-Turkish citizens of the empire, including Armenians, were relegated at best to guest appearances in Turkish historiography, as Low puts it, is evidently not peculiar to photography. The exclusion of Armenians goes hand in hand with the exclusion of vernacular photography because of the direct connection between the two. As a result, Low’s book departs from the Ottoman capital and focuses on vernacular photographs as produced in the Armenian provinces. He crafts a more inclusive history by utilizing images taken from various collections available, for example, at the AGBU Nubar Library, the Zoryan Institute, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, Project SAVE, Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA alongside private holdings.
4Low’s aim with this book is to attend to a photography that was a product of Ottoman Armenian history. To achieve this, he embarks on a journey starting with Trebizond and proceeding with Erzurum, Harput and Van, with chapters devoted to each, spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was the era when photographic production became commonplace in the provinces. In the final chapter he takes the journey in reverse from Van to Trebizond during the genocide. His approach to his materials transcends how the subject is conventionally studied. Not only does he deliberately avoid an art historical approach to photography, but he also does not aim to write a history of photography. He rather carves out a photographic history, as he puts it, where he attends to the material realities that lie within the frames. As a result, he pictures the Ottoman Armenian world through photography, and deals with various aspects of Ottoman Armenian life in the 19th and early 20th centuries: from bantoukhds (Armenian migrants from the provinces), fedayis (Armenian armed revolutionaries), and picture brides to provincial educational institutions and their students. Moreover, he attends to the economic and social life in the various centres around which Armenian life revolved with connections to places beyond the imperial boundaries and the small Peras in each of these provincial centres where photographic production took place. He also focuses on how photography documented Armenian political activism as well as the massacres that Armenians were subjected to, and so on. None of this means, however, that the study reduces photography to a pretext for talking about other issues and photographs to mere illustrations. The photographic history that Low traces rather relates to what he calls the photographic people, by which he means how Armenians embraced photography as it spoke to their needs. It is therefore through their relationship to photography that the study addresses various aspects of Ottoman Armenian history. Low also places importance on several provincial photographers, while acknowledging the many more of whom no trace could be found. He treats them as part of the scenes they photographed and the communities they served. In this way, he puts photographers, sitters, and images at the centre of his study in order to investigate a wider community and history.
5The issue of materiality comes to the fore in several instances throughout the book. Low draws attention, for example, to how photographs acted as placeholders for the missing, as in the case of bantoukhds far away from home or victims of the genocide, and how they populated the world in their absence. The need to engage with photographs as physical objects also arises in relation to the actions that took place around them because, as Low argues, pictures took on meaning not only in people’s eyes but also in their hands. He therefore mentions how looking at photographs was a communal experience, around which people gathered to tell stories of loved ones living in distant places. Several discussions in different parts of the book about the retouching and modification of photographs, a subject that does not receive much attention in the field, also bring the materiality of images into focus. Particularly significant is his deliberations about the possibility that the famous photograph of Vostanig Adoian (Arshile Gorky) with his mother, taken in Van circa 1911, may be a modified version of an original photograph that might have included the artist’s two sisters. In the final chapter, Low discusses how, in the post-genocide period, Armenian photographic studios in the diaspora were commissioned to rephotograph and reproduce available images in the absence of negatives, from which one could normally make endless copies. Such commissions could, in some cases, entail alterations to a communal portrait, with people being erased from the picture or singled out as a separate image. By carefully examining the various traces visible in the photograph of Adoian with his mother, Low suggests that it might be a commissioned version from a family portrait, an issue that has escaped attention so far despite the popularity of this image.
6One criticism that can be brought to the study concerns the author’s take on the Abdulhamid albums. The albums appear several times in the book, accompanied by robust discussions, such as the reduction of the imperial alterity to a single Ottoman type in the images, the erasure of Armenians from the albums through the colonial technique of “photographic unpeopling”, the erasure of Armenian provincial photographers from the albums, whose authorship and contribution to the production of the images were not recognised, and so on. As such, the albums occupy an important place in the book in terms of discussions about the exclusions that were in place against the Armenians in the late 19th century. Although Low mentions how these images functioned at the time as the roving eye of the sultan over the empire, the albums analysed in the book are nevertheless reduced to those gifted to the US Library of Congress and the British Museum in London, which were part of the sultan’s attempts at image management abroad. In reality, the Abdulhamid albums correspond to a much larger collection gathered over the years in the Yildiz Palace, of which the images in the gift albums were only a part. In fact, the author mentions this larger collection once (p. 101) and refers to it as the Yildiz archives when talking about a photograph taken by the Soursourian brothers in Diyarbekir; this was the only occasion where the authorship of the photographers is visible through their stamp. It is not clear whether Low’s focus on the gift albums alone stemmed from a decision to emphasise imperial self-representation or whether Low was not informed about the extent of the Abdulhamid albums. In any case, attention to the larger collection would have enabled the author to identify other mechanisms of exclusion at work against the Armenians in this period, such as the fact that they were indeed predominantly represented in these albums, but mainly in terms of various criminal convictions related to their political activism. It would also have been possible to see how images of confiscated guns or bombs of Armenian revolutionaries found a place in these albums in the early 1890s, that is, long before the rebel albums devised by the state during the First World War years, which the author discusses in relation to their function of criminalising the Armenians as a “treacherous people”. As the authorship of several Armenian photographers, including some provincial ones, was recognised in these larger collections, this would also have enabled the author to broaden his arguments about how the Armenians were commissioned to produce state imagery. Nevertheless, the omission of the larger Abdulhamid collections is a minor drawback as the primary focus and strength of the study is to see how the Armenians themselves related to photography.
7Overall, the book is a very strong take on the photographic history of Ottoman Armenians in the 19th and 20th centuries, which challenges the marginal status accorded to them in studies on the imperial history of photography by disclosing the various ways in which photography found a home among the Armenian people. Even though the close connection between Armenians and photography has been widely acknowledged, Low’s book is the first comprehensive study to trace this connection extensively in a manner that goes beyond the conventional focus on photographers and their images. Its focus on the provinces rather than the capital city also fills a significant gap in the field. The author should be commended for his eloquent writing style, as well, which makes for a pleasant reading experience alongside an informative and thought-provoking one. This book is a must read for anyone studying the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire as it provides a comprehensive account of photographic production that has not been included in the prevailing art historical approaches in the field. Furthermore, the discussions of various aspects of Ottoman Armenian life, enriched by the extensive bibliographical sources on which Low relies, make the book an important resource for Armenian and Ottoman historians, especially when it comes to the study of imperial provincial history.
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Référence papier
İdil Çetin, « David Low, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond », Études arméniennes contemporaines, 16 | 2025, 191-195.
Référence électronique
İdil Çetin, « David Low, Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond », Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 16 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 05 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/4045 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15gml
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