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The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem - photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of its own photographers, collectors, and patrons. In this book, Stephen Sheehi presents a groundbreaking new account of early photography in the Arab world. Featuring extensive previously unpublished images, The Arab Imago shows how native photography played an essential role in the creation of modern Arab societies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon before the First World War. At the same time, the book overturns Eurocentric and Orientalist understandings of indigenous photography and challenges previous histories of the medium.
About the author
Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity and Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign against Muslims.
Summary
The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem--photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of it
Additional text
"Every so often a new book surfaces that challenges historians with a perspective so innovative that it broadens our perception of photographic history. Stephen Sheehi’s latest monograph, The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910, is one such publication, inciting us to newly consider a little known subsection of photography, transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar through an expertly rigorous discourse that carefully avoids the pitfalls of Orientalism."---Nissan N. Perez, Journal of Arabic Literature
Report
"We have been waiting for effective global histories of photography to disturb and decenter the questions we ask--not globalized histories, radiating out in a familiar narrative of export, influence, and derivation, but histories that start elsewhere. Stephen Sheehis The Arab Imago, a social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman Arab world, is a model for this. It provincializes the history we have and irrevocably pluralizes both photographies and the interwoven modernities of which they were part."--John Tagg, Binghamton University, author of The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning
