Picturing The Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond 9780755600397, 9780755600427, 9780755600410

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PICTURING THE OTTOMAN ARMENIAN WORLD

Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World Recent decades have seen the expansion of Armenian Studies from insular history to a broader, more interactive field within an inter-regional and global context. This series, Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World, responds to this growth by promoting innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Armenian history, politics, and culture in the period between 1500–2000. Focusing on the geographies of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Contemporary Russia [Eastern Armenia], it directs specific attention to imperial and post-imperial frameworks: from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Turkey/Arab Middle East; the Safavid/Qajar Empires to Iran; and the Russian Empire to Soviet Union/Post-Soviet territories. Series Editor Bedross Der Matossian, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Advisory Board Levon Abrahamian, Yerevan State University, Armenia Sylvie Alajaji, Franklin & Marshal College, USA Sebouh Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Stephan Astourian, University of California, Berkley, USA Houri Berberian, University of California, Irvine, USA Talar Chahinian, University of California, Irvine, USA Rachel Goshgarian, Lafayette College, USA Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, USA Sossie Kasbarian, University of Stirling, UK Christina Maranci, Tufts University, USA Tsolin Nalbantian, Leiden University, the Netherlands Anna Ohanyan, Stonehill College, USA Hratch Tchilingirian, University of Oxford, UK Published and Forthcoming Titles The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and ‘Medz Yeghern’, Vartan Matiossian Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzerum, Harput, Van and Beyond, David Low

PICTURING THE OTTOMAN ARMENIAN WORLD

Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond

David Low

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © David Low, 2022 David Low has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Adriana Brioso Cover image © Zaza Photo Studio. Unknown Kharpertsi family, no date. From the author’s personal collection. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-7556-0039-7 ePDF: 978-0-7556-0041-0 eBook: 978-0-7556-0040-3 Series: Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For the Hagopians and the Bilazarians

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CONTENTS List of Figures viii Acknowledgementsxiii Note on Names and Transliteration xiv Prelude: The Unfixed World xv Chapter 1 ESCAPING CONSTANTINOPLE, OR A LITTLE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

1

Chapter 2 APPROACHING THE PROVINCES, VIA TREBIZOND

27

Chapter 3 BEGINNING IN ERZURUM

53

Chapter 4 LEAVING HARPUT

93

Chapter 5 RETURNING TO VAN

123

Chapter 6 LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK

151

Sailing Away From a Conclusion

187

Notes190 Bibliography228 Index246

LIST OF FIGURES 0.1 Zaza Photo Studio. Unknown Kharpertsi family, no date. Collection of the author 1.1 Pascal Sébah. ‘Erzeroum’, Plate XX from Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, 1873. Library of Congress, Washington, DC 1.2 (Credited to) Sébah & Joaillier, Students, High School, Aleppo, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 1.3 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 1.4 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 2.1 K.E. Cacoulis. K. Yeghiazarian, Trebizond, 1890. Collection of the author 2.2 Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, Van, c.1911. Courtesy of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation 3.1 Uncredited photographer. Students, Imperial High School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 3.2 Uncredited photographer. Student, Erzurum, 1880s. Collection of the author 3.3 Uncredited photographer. (Altered version of) Students, Imperial High School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 3.4 M.G. Papazian. Laz man, Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The Zoryan Institute, Toronto 3.5 M.G. Papazian. View from the north-east of Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The Zoryan Institute, Toronto 3.6 M.G. Papazian. Harry Hekimian with an unidentified Greek doctor and Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, Erzurum, 1890s. Garin Compatriotic Union Records (Collection 284). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA 3.7 Abdullah Frères. A group photograph of the students and the teachers of the Mekteb-l Tıbbiye-yi Mülkiye (Civil Medical School), Constantinople, 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

xv 7 8 14 15 33 37 54 58 59 61 63

64

65

List of figures

3.8 H.F.B. Lynch. Class at the Sanasarian Varzharan (caption: ‘Armenian Youths’), Erzurum, 1893/94. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901) 3.9 William Sachtleben. Armenian Gregorian Cemetery, Erzurum, 1 November 1895. Sachtleben Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA 3.10 William Sachtleben. Armenian Gregorian Cemetery, Erzurum, 1 November 1895. Sachtleben Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA 3.11 George Djerdjian. Countryside north of Erzurum, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 3.12 George Djerdjian. Countryside north of Erzurum, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 3.13 George Djerdjian. Inside the Sanasarian Varzharan, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 3.14 Voskertchian Frères. Class of the Sanasarian Varzharan, Erzurum, 1910. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 3.15 Uncredited photographer. Unknown man, no date (found on reverse of M.G. Papazian carte de visite). Collection of the author 3.16 Voskertchian Frères. The Pasdermadjian Family, Erzurum, 1912. Garin Compatriotic Union Records (Collection 284). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA 3.17 Alexandre Papazian. The Saroyan family of Bitlis (Aram, Lucine, Verkine, Takoohi, Cosette, Zabel, Henry), Erzurum, 1905. Courtesy of Charles Janigian/Forever Saroyan, LLC 3.18 Alexandre Papazian. Satenig and her sister Ardemis are emigrating to the US from the Abdurrahman Aga neighbourhood of Erzurum by renouncing their Ottoman nationality, 14 August 1906. Ottoman State Archives, DH.TMIK.M.243.49 4.1 A. & H. Soursourian. The Vaznaian family of Harput (parents Kevork and Aghavnee ‘Guzel’ Vaznaian, with children Hovaness, Maritza, Merhan, Victor, Avadis, and Mgerditch), c.1912. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Maritza Soorsoorian 4.2 Uncredited photographer. View of the Golden Plain with Hussenig and Harput Kaghak, 1900s. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA

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69 74 75 81 81 82 84 85 85 89

91

93

95

x

List of figures

4.3 H. Soursouriants. Avedis Jamgochian from Agn, 1880 or 1881. The Jamgochian Family Collection 4.4 Soursouriants studio stamp. The Dildilian Collection, courtesy of Armen T. Marsoobian 4.5 Uncredited photographer (likely H. & M. Soursourian). Students, Imperial High School, Mezre, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 4.6 Uncredited photographer. Harput (handwritten album caption: ‘Bakery in Harpoot’), c.1903–11. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Kenar Aboyan and Tamar Der Vartanian Boghosian 4.7 Uncredited photographer. Krikor Krikorian of Hussenig, Worcester, MA, c.1890s. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA 4.8 Uncredited photographer (likely H. & M. Soursourian). Koobatian Family of Hussenig (Kirkor, Araxie, Mary, Myran, John, Agavny, Markar [in the photo], Sahag), 1907. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Agavny Koubatian Bagdigian 4.9 A. & H. Soursourian. Unknown woman, no date. K.S. Melikian Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 4.10 J.A. Dansereau. Annakh Azerumian of Harput, Arzuman Srabian of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, c.1906. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Virginia Bethany 4.11 A. & H. Soursourian. Sourp Varvar and Boys’ School, Hussenig, 1907. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA 4.12 Uncredited photographer (likely H. & M. Soursourian). Parsonage and Girls’ School class, East Harput Kaghak, no date. Harvard University, Houghton Library, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives, ABC 1–91, Box 17 4.13 A. & H. Soursourian. Tlgadintsi and graduates of the National Central School, 1910. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 5.1 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Khisarji Kevork’s family, Van, 1910s. Armen Shahinian collection, courtesy of Houshamadyan 5.2 H.F.B. Lynch. Varakavank (caption: ‘Monastery of Yedi Kilisa’), Van, 1893. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901) 5.3 Uncredited photographer. Khatch Poghots, Aikesdan, c.1900. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Vart Shirvanian Hachigian 5.4 Uncredited photographer. Sarpach Khecho, Van, no date. ARF Archives, Watertown, MA, box 30, photo 32

97 98 101

104 106

111 114

115 117

119 121 123 125 132 133

List of figures

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5.5 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Sourp Krikor Monastery Orphanage for Girls, Van, 1907. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Vart Shirvanian Hachigian 136 5.6 M.G. Papazian. The Gakavian Family (seated, from left, Vosgehad, Haroutiun, and Aghavni; standing, from left, Dikran, Set and Hrant; in front, Vahram), Van, 2 April 1906. Christine Gardon collection138 5.7 Bertam Dickson. Armenian woman revolutionary, Van, c.1908, Royal Geographical Society, London 140 5.8 Uncredited photographer. Kayl-Vahan’s fedayi group, Russian border region, no date. ARF Archives, Watertown, MA, box 30, photo 47 145 5.9 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. ‘The boys of Avantz village’, Van, c.1913. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Seroon Dilbarian Yegeshian, Genocide Survivor born in Avantz 145 5.10 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Goergizian Clan, Van, 1908. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Annie Goergizian 146 5.11 Uncredited photographer (likely Hovhannes Avedaghayan). Men from Shadakh, Van, no date. Courtesy of The Arshile Gorky Foundation 147 5.12 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Varakavank, Van, c.1910. Vasbouragan. (Venice: St Lazzaro Mkhitarian Dparan, 1930) 148 6.1 Uncredited photographer. Armenian jewellers’ association after the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution, Van, 1908. Harutyun Marutyan collection/Harutyun Marutyan, Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van (Yerevan, Gitutyun Publishing House, 2013) 153 6.2 D. Voskertchian et frères. Group of friends, Erzurum, c.1910. Voskertchian Family collection, with thanks to Kevork Imirzian 154 6.3 Alexandre Papazian. Armenian Protestant Church, Erzurum, 1914. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Helen Paragamian, granddaughter of Rev. Kirk Yasharian 155 6.4 Alexandre Papazian. ABCFM meeting, Erzurum, July 1912. SALT Research, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Courtesy of ARIT 157 6.5 Uncredited photographer. Aikesdan, Van, 1915. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris 165 6.6 Uncredited photographer. Koobatian family of Worcester, Massachusetts, March 1917. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Agavny Koubatian Bagdigian 173

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List of figures

6.7 K.S. Melikian. Azniv and Sarkis Deranian, no date. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA 180 6.8 M.G. Papazian. The Gakavian Family, Van, 2 April 1906 (altered version). Christine Gardon collection 181 2.2 (detail) Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, Van, c.1911. Courtesy of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation184

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Books are like photographs in that the crediting of a single individual can imply purely solitary enterprise and can risk obscuring the work of other contributors and instances of collective effort. I therefore wish to acknowledge and give my thanks to the following for their work and their support. Boris Adjemian, the board of Études arméniennes contemporaines and the AGBU Nubar Library; George Aghjayan, Mary Choloyan and the ARF Archives; Zeynep Akçakaya; The Arshile Gorky Foundation, especially Parker Field; Kathryn Babayan and The University of Michigan’s Center for Armenian Studies; Shulamith Behr; Bruce Berberian; Houri Berberian; Michael Berkowitz; Vigen Galstyan; Christine Gardon; Zeynep Gürsel; Frances Hagopian and Tony Messina; Earl Jamgochian; Nevdon Jamgochian; George Jerjian; Gabriel Koureas; Armen Marsoobian; Harutyun Marutyan; Daniel Ohanian; Hazal Özdemir; Sam Reid; James Ryan; Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives – Suzanne Adams, Tsoleen Sarian, Marta Fodor and, above all, Ruth Thomasian; Brian Sewell; Armen Shahinian; Stephen Sheehi; John and Judy Soursourian; Vahé Tachjian and Houshamadyan; Gevorg Vardanyan; Hrag Vartanian; Taline Voskeritchian; Tom Welsford; The Zoryan Institute, especially Megan Reid, Alison Rodriguez and all involved in digitizing the Cole Collection. I wish to acknowledge the kind support of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the Knights of Vartan Fund for Armenian Studies, and to thank Marc Mamigonian in particular for all the gracious help he has given. My wholehearted thanks to Yasmin Garcha and Rory Gormley at I.B. Tauris for their work in support of this project, and to Amanda Kay and Joanne Rippin for their diligence during the production stages. Very special thanks go to Vazken Davidian and Yaşar Tolga Cora, each for their great scholarship and great friendship. And finally, my thanks and my love go to my family, above all to my parents, and to Bec and Leo, my own world.

NOTE ON NAMES AND TRANSLITERATION This work is in most part about Ottoman Armenians and therefore largely transliterates names in accordance with Western Armenian phonetics. When dealing with Russian Armenians, Eastern Armenian phonetics are applied. This leads to some apparent disparities – the same name might be rendered as Krikor in Western Armenian but Grigor in Eastern. Exceptions to the rule occur where an accepted form of a name already exists in English (for example, Grigoris Balakian). Deference to existing forms in English also leads to some names appearing in slightly different forms (we encounter, for example, Mgrdich Sanasarian and Mgerditch Vaznaian). My approach to place names is a little different. Were we to use the terms understood by Ottoman Armenians, the names of two of the places under examination here would be Garin and Kharpert. I instead use Erzurum and Harput, for the reason that these are the names (or at least standardized versions of the names) that we see in use on photographers’ mounts (Van, meanwhile, is the same in every language). They are names, importantly, that apply to both cities and their wider provinces (Garin, on the other hand, refers to only a city, not a province). The same principle of adhering to the terms employed by photographs is applied to other places, thus my preference for Constantinople over Istanbul and Trebizond over Trabzon. I do not completely abandon local Armenian names. They appear notably in conjunction with the commonly used and classically derived Armenian suffix ‘-tsi’ to indicate origins and belonging, this study being about Garnetsis (people from Garin/Erzurum), Kharpertsis (from Kharpert/Harput) and Vanetsis (from Van).

PRELUDE: THE UNFIXED WORLD

Figure 0.1  Zaza Photo Studio. Unknown Kharpertsi family, no date. Collection of the author.

Little is fixed when it comes to photographs, as much as the photographer tries. We can sometimes see them at work, invisible though they are. They leave small traces of themselves behind in the photographed scene; breadcrumbs perhaps, clues to their movements and actions that day. In one family photograph, for instance, we might notice how the hands of each of the children, whether in the open or in their pockets, appear to be occupied in a similar manner. It seems as though

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their restlessness might have threatened the freezing of the moment and that an inducement from the photographer was required to keep them still, the bestowed treat held in hand for later, the feel of it and the thought of it sedating them. In this way, the photograph was made; some blurring indicates that the children could not be calmed entirely, but the photographer was largely successful in holding the world still for just long enough to capture its forms. The world, however, cannot be held still forever, it keeps moving. At some point there has been a further intervention, an endeavour to remove a section at the left of the frame. We can still make out the edges of an eviscerated figure – a sleeve, a foot – almost as if that person squirms, resisting the impulses of the later mark-maker in much the same way as the children refused to wholly bend to the desires of the first photographer. It is a suggestion that there is no guarantee of permanence in photography. Such a thing, if it exists at all, is beyond the power of the photographer. That figure is reliant always on what happens next, for their products to survive, for people to keep them, look at them and think about them.

Chapter 1 E S C A P I N G C O N STA N T I N O P L E , O R A L I T T L E H I S T O RY O F P HO T O G R A P H Y I N T H E O T T OM A N E M P I R E

The history of photography is a history of disappearances and exclusions. It is a history that mimics the occlusive actions of its subject. Like the camera, it leaves outside the frame all that it does not want to see, all that it does not want to record, while all the while trading in ideas of truth, clarity and revelation. It tends to offer neat and ordered narratives, and only on rare occasion are we presented with something muddier and more difficult to pin down, as when Walter Benjamin opens his ‘little’ history of the medium in a haze, writing of a ‘fog’ surrounding and shrouding the medium’s beginnings.1 It is in stark contrast to the conventional moment of clarity with which many histories begin, best witnessed in the frequent employment of painter Paul Delaroche’s alleged pronouncement upon learning of the new medium in 1839, ‘From today painting is dead.’ It is not so much the statement itself that is important, Stephen Bann tells us, but rather its regular reiteration by historians. As the history of photography’s most oft-repeated phrase, it becomes a shorthand signifier for the medium’s ‘radical novelty’ and a bold new beginning. In place of ‘From today painting is dead’, we read ‘From today photography is alive.’ Its deployment serves to signal what photography is not, betraying ‘a deep-seated need to cut photography off from the history in which it was engendered’.2 The history of photography forms itself into what Bann terms a ‘tunnel history’, created when historians, in dogged pursuit of their scholarly object, become blind to other possible forms of history and the wider histories beyond their own specific narratives. Delaroche’s words are made to operate, in short, as an exclusionary declaration of identity, with the history of photography stating where its parameters lie and what it refuses to recognize as part of itself.

The birth of photography precipitated departure. Within weeks of François Arago’s 1839 announcement of Louis Daguerre’s invention to the French chamber of deputies, the first photographic ‘explorers’ – including Noël Paymal Lerebours, Pierre Joly de Lotbinière, as well as French painter Horace Vernet and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet – were heading eastwards upon their

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Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World

Excursions Daguerriennes, to use the term Lerebours gave to his landmark 1841 publication.3 A wide, lucrative market was created, and via numerous means – prints, books, the illustrated press and the great universal exhibitions of the nineteenth century – photography became a primary way by which largely urban mass audiences in the West gained visual access to ‘the Orient’ and the wider world, thus coming to ‘know’ it.4 Oliver Wendell Holmes described photography’s distillation of the world into image-objects – an extraction of ‘form from matter’ – that allowed viewers to see distant corners, indeed seemingly to tread in those parts themselves and form an intimate connection to them: ‘I pass, in a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.’5 Photographs retained this element of magic, but the knowledge that they offered was essentially predicated on an understanding of them as pieces of incontestable objective truth. These were held to be, in the words of Auguste Salzmann who was awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855 for his recent depictions of Jerusalem, ‘not narratives, but facts endowed with a conclusive brutality’.6 Salzmann belonged to the generation that followed in the wake of the earliest pioneers, a generation that included Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, Francis Bedford, James Robertson and Felice Beato, ‘avatars of art, science, adventure, and opportunism’, entangled in a variety of discourses and enterprises.7 Yet it was art that won out as these figures were inducted into aesthetic and connoisseurial histories of photography over the course of the twentieth century. Abigail Solomon-Godeau can be found lamenting an art history of the medium that had set about removing photographs from their original orbits. ‘The tendency to lump together willy-nilly under the unifying rubric of art’ a multitude of diverse photographic practitioners, she declares, ‘has resulted in the neglect, if not obfuscation, of important questions of intent, context, and production.’8 It was a tendency that only further domesticated and naturalized their narratives, for, contrary to Salzmann, narratives are precisely what photographs present. The constructed nature of photography’s visions of the East passed largely without notice or comment for most of the camera’s history, until Edward Said, emphasizing ‘representations as representations, not as “natural” depictions of the Orient’, asserted that the image of the East consumed in the West was one specifically produced by the West, and produced as part of its wider political consumption of the region.9 Just as such representations should not be thought of as natural, so too should they not be considered politically neutral but rather implicitly linked to the imperial circumstances in which they were created, bound up in those power relations and implicated in the establishment and maintenance of Western dominance. Orientalism was both born of and helped to construct a vision premised on the East being ‘other’: an inferior, degraded version of the Western ‘self ’. Photographically, it comprised a complex set of representational strategies propped up by the medium’s rhetoric of truth. In particular, we might draw attention to social-scientific visual practices, frequently in the form of ‘types’, consistent and rigid frontal views of figures displaying the particular physical characteristics and

1. Escaping Constantinople

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cultural traits thought to define a given group, inspecting the body for material signs of difference.10 The proposition presented by such images was one of non-Western cultures existing at earlier stages of human development.11 While studio practice saw, in this way, indigenous people turned into signs of ‘otherness’, depictions of the world beyond the studio frequently witnessed their disappearance. The picturing of landscapes, monuments and colonial encampments, by ‘showing so much of the world to be empty, was unconsciously assimilated to the justifications for an expanding empire’ suggests Solomon-Godeau.12 Ali Behdad writes of this as ‘photographic unpeopling’, the elimination of local people from views that attests to a concern not for living, contemporary cultures but for an idea of the ‘faded glory’ of the East. It is an operation at work in the metropolis as well, as Behdad demonstrates with a James Robertson view of Hagia Sophia, set within a largely empty Constantinople city space.13 Photographs like Robertson’s conjured a city of romantic fantasy that impressed itself on Western travellers long before they saw the place with their own eyes, and when they did finally arrive in the city it was not through their own eyes that they saw it but through such images. Orientalist photography was a form of visual appropriation that cannot be divorced from colonial acquisitiveness. Photographs constituted instances of imperial rhetoric that allowed for the possession of the East in imagination and in fact, playing a role in the enactment of authority over colonized people and places, its powers and its politics all the while masquerading as ‘brute fact’. Such works, according to Linda Nochlin, ‘cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the particular power structure in which [they] came into being’.14 In her assessment, there lies the suggestion of the cloak of invisibility under which power has historically been allowed to operate, working away quietly amidst the supposed objectivity of photographs, not addressed critically, not confronted. The historiographical turn in the wake of Said revealed the blind spots of previous writing on photography, its failure to acknowledge the perspective and positions from which pictures are made. It had itself embraced something akin to the Western Orientalist viewpoint, an embrace that had allowed historians to understand for so long constructed visions as natural emanations or as aesthetic renderings. This serves as a crucial lesson in the way historians’ viewpoints can merge with those of their subjects; it is not simply photographs that we need examine with a critical eye but histories, paying heed to the perspectives from which they themselves are constructed. The study of Orientalism, however, has changed with age, the brazen young firebrand giving way to the dully respectable elder statesman. Orientalist practice has become so widely accepted as an aspect of photographic production in the Middle East that it has become, in many quarters, the central and indeed only aspect of that history. According to Michelle Woodward, the Orientalist approach is so prevalent that it verges on cliché,15 while it is the ‘elephant in the room’ for Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem, a norm that goes unquestioned.16 It has morphed since the days of Said, Nochlin and Solomon-Godeau, from a vital, radical rethinking of images and their role in knowledge production to something trite and formulaic that prefers the application of overarching theory to close scrutiny

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Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World

of photographic sources, often failing to engage with historical and geographical contexts and the specificities of production and dissemination.17 Hampered by presumption and preconception, it tends to focus on its own set of concerns to the detriment of other facets of historical photography, and even some of the best work in the field has the habit of forming itself into a tunnel history. We witness an overreliance on well-known, accessible collections, the Pierre de Gigord Collection and the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Collection – both held at the Getty Research Center, and both composed largely of tourist albums – being called upon above all, elevated to the status of authoritative holdings that disclose the inherent truth about picture-making practices in the region.18 Yet analyses so heavily focused and circumscribed offer self-fulfilling arguments and advance only our understanding of specific collectors’ sensibilities and interests (it stands to reason that a study of the collection of Pierre de Gigord, whose creation Ali Behdad expertly skewers as ‘an un-selfreflexive, not to mention unapologetic, form of exoticism’, will produce evidence of exoticism in photography).19 At the same time, collections are not quite as monolithic as is supposed, for on top of the selections made by photographers and collectors come those of scholars.20 At the heart of this lies one essential act of selection, the decision to focus on Western colonial perspectives. The gaze of the Western world, even when examined critically, serves to re-inscribe the West as the foundational site of photography and excludes – denies even – the presence of local and indigenous photographers with their own approach to image-making as part of a domestic system of production.21 It is no surprise to find this as a common trait of writing on the Ottoman Empire. There are distinct lines of correlation between this approach to reading colonial imagery and a dominant vein of mainstream Ottoman historiography, the wider paradigm of the ‘Eastern question school’ in which the Ottoman Empire is exotic, moribund and essentially passive, existing only as a factor in Great Power politics, acted upon yet never acting itself.22 But just as historians such as Donald Quataert have taken pains to reinstall a sense of Ottoman agency in wider historiography, so too has a strand of the history of photography developed an interest in domestic Ottoman production, as well as questioning Western hegemonic constructions through a focus on cross-cultural exchange and contestation.23 In a shift of perspective, 1839 becomes a moment of arrival rather than departure. The announcement of Daguerre’s invention in the Ottoman newspaper Takvim-i Vekayi in October of that year becomes a new foundational moment, as does the appearance a few years later of a Monsieur Kompa, a student of Daguerre, and his production of what are reported to be the first daguerreotypes made in Constantinople. Little is known of Kompa beyond what is contained in an 1842 advertisement announcing that he has arrived in the city ‘and is being accommodated at a Péra tavern called “Belvü” where he also performs his art, particularly on Sundays when he displays his talents for those who come to witness them at a charge’.24 The site of Kompa’s tenure in Constantinople is both unsurprising and worthy of note. Péra was the diverse and highly Europeanized section of the city where foreign embassies and businesses were based, as well as the hotels that accommodated the Western visitors such as Kompa who naturally

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gravitated towards the area; it served as the empire’s foremost contact zone and space of transculturation (employing Mary Louise Pratt’s terms to indicate a site of encounter and exchange between people from different cultures).25 In time, the district became photography’s permanent home, with studios established along, or in close proximity to, its chief boulevard, the Grande Rue de Péra, run first by Europeans and subsequently by Ottoman subjects once they started taking to the medium in the 1850s. We see, for example, the emergence in the field of the famed Abdullah Frères, brothers Vichen, Hovsep and Kevork who worked initially for a German chemist named Rabach before, in the space of a few short years, going from apprentices to masters, taking over the studio in 1858.26 Hailing from an Ottoman Armenian family that had been in Constantinople since their migration from the Ottoman city of Kayseri in the early seventeenth century, the Abdullahs were part of a preponderance of Ottoman Christians, particularly Armenians, populating photography at this time; other notable practitioners include Pascal Sébah, born in Constantinople to a Syrian Catholic father and an Armenian mother;27 Vassilaki Kargopoulo, an Ottoman Greek;28 and Boghos Tarkulyan, the Ottoman Armenian known professionally as Phébus.29 The question of why Christians should have been an over-represented in this way has not been answered to any satisfying degree. Religion is frequently cited as the reason, and certainly there are accounts of orthodox Islamic pronouncements against photography’s depiction of human likenesses. However, these appear to be little more than individual episodes; there is nothing to suggest a broader cultural rejection of the medium.30 The new Ottoman practitioners were responsible for a wide output, serving patrons both domestic and foreign. They were photographers to the Ottoman court while being involved also in the production of photographs today branded Orientalist. Their photographs litter the albums residing in the Getty collections and, indeed, studios themselves were tourist attractions, as Ali Behdad observes, with Murray’s handbook advising its readers that they would find in an Abdullah Frères photograph ‘one of the most valuable curiosities that can be carried away from the capital of Turkey.’31 Tourists would purchase views and sit for portraits, evidence for the lure of the latter being provided by Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), who, despite being accompanied on his 1862 tour of the region by his own photographer in the person of Francis Bedford, sat for portraits at the Abdullah Frères studio.32 The resultant photographs represented souvenirs twice over, the name of the studio, embossed upon the front and reverse of the photographic mount, seemingly as important as the image. And so it is today, for studio names have retained their power. The Abdullah Frères et al. dominate narratives of the medium; they are the ever-present signposts by which we chart a course through the history of photography or, put otherwise, the ‘usual suspects’.33 These are the photographers that allow Constantinople to be depicted as a ‘colorful center of the art of photography’.34 That very phrase ‘the art of photography’, in regular use, and the insistence on narrating the medium hagiographically through certain practitioners, are the first clues that indicate a history framed in art-historical terms. Photographers become noteworthy for their ‘technical skill and aesthetic sensitivity’, loose descriptors that are not given adequate definition.35

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The claims staked in an art history of photography can become tenuous in the extreme, such as when Engin Özendes reports that Pablo Picasso owned prints by the Abdullah Frères, adding, on the thinnest of visual evidences, that one of the photographs acted as source material for a 1914 sketch by the Spaniard.36 This is subsequently repeated elsewhere to argue for the Abdullahs’ place within a Western representational tradition, a strange argument that approaches history backwards and neglects Picasso’s interest in non-Western image-making.37 It is highly reminiscent of history’s treatment of Auguste Salzmann, removed from the context of archaeology in which he operated and reborn as a proto-Modernist artist.38 At the same time, signs emerge of histories mimicking their object of study, with Mary Roberts noting the parallels between Bahattin Öztuncay’s book The Photographers of Constantinople and the Ottoman installation at the 1867 Exposition Universelle.39

Sultan Abdülaziz was quick to recognize the role of international exhibitions in statecraft. During his reign they became a primary site for cultural propaganda aimed at improving the empire’s international standing. Indeed, his was one of the first states to adopt the format, mounting the 1863 Sergi-i Umumi-i Osmani (Ottoman General Exposition). Similarly, he was attuned to the particular language of these fairs, their distinct media and formats, and so became the first of the Ottoman sultans to employ photography. State commissions from the Abdullah Frères played key roles in 1863 and again at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867, where the brothers’ portrait of Abdülaziz received pride of place at the centre of the Ottoman display, prominent among a group of leading figures from the Ottoman Empire and France. According to Mary Roberts, the photographs acted as ‘a visual assertion of the ideals of affiliation and alliance’, reinforced by Abdülaziz being present in person in Paris, an honoured guest of Napoleon III.40 Projects became more ambitious from that point. Commissioned by Abdülaziz for the 1873 World Exposition in Vienna, Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie is a photographic album that, without ever leaving Pascal Sébah’s studio, takes the viewer on a journey across the empire, replicating, to a certain extent, the format of the imperial excursion established in Western photographic practice (Figure 1.1). In a similar act of redeployment, the photographs utilized a Western anthropological vision that presented frontal studies of Ottoman ‘types’, ‘typical’ representatives of Ottoman ethno-religious groups, chiefly the empire’s millets (the confessional communities that existed with a degree of autonomy in a hierarchical state system) in the form of Armenians, Greeks, Jews and others. It did so in the service of a counter-narrative that claimed for the Ottoman state, as an empire of vast geographies and demographics, a place among the Great Powers. They are what we can term, after Mary Louise Pratt, auto-ethnographic images, the Ottomans borrowing from and engaging in dialogue with the established forms and idioms of power, but doing so to their own ends, to speak from their own perspective and to contest established perceptions.41

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Figure 1.1  Pascal Sébah. ‘Erzeroum’, Plate XX from Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, 1873. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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The engagement with and selective adaptation of Western modes reached its apogee with the albums commissioned by Sultan Abdülhamid II in the early 1890s (Figure 1.2). It is these albums above all that have become a primary focus of the history of Ottoman photography, and even, according to Mary Roberts, ‘central to creating a definition of Ottoman photography’.42 A number of the famous studios were involved in the commission, including the Abdullah Frères, Phébus and Sébah & Joaillier (the Sébah studio being run after Pascal’s death by his son

Figure 1.2  (Credited to) Sébah & Joaillier, Students, High School, Aleppo, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Jean in partnership with Frenchman Polycarpe Joaillier); involved too were the first Ottoman Muslim photographers, then emerging from the military schools. The result was fifty-one massive, luxuriously bound albums, containing over 1,800 photographs, which were sent to the USA for exhibition at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an act whereby Abdülhamid demonstrated how he had inherited from his predecessor an understanding of the camera as a diplomatic instrument. Aiming yet further, towards a more permanent form of public edification, the albums were, after their Chicago presentation, sent as gifts to the US Library of Congress, Washington DC, while a similar set was presented to the British Museum in London, as if acknowledging the particular accumulation of knowledge that marked the modern state and photography’s role as ‘the agent par excellence for listing, knowing, and possessing, as it were, the things of the world’ during this ‘great period of taxonomies, inventories, and physiologies’.43 Yet once again we are dealing with an auto-ethnography, the image offered for scrutiny being one of Ottoman devising. As an Ottoman depiction of the Ottoman realm, the albums have been dubbed an ‘imperial self-portrait’.44 The central idea of the albums as presenting a radically different image of the Ottoman Empire was distinctly stated at the time by none other than Abdülhamid in what has become a famous pronouncement in the history of Ottoman photography: ‘Most of the photographs taken [by European photographers] for sale in Europe vilify and mock Our Well-Protected Domains. It is imperative that the photographs to be taken in this instance do not insult Islamic peoples by showing them in a vulgar and demeaning light.’45 They are words that have been a gift to historians, a nascent critique of Western Orientalist practices from the mouth of the sultan himself.46 Meanwhile, the image that the sultan intended to insert in its place was best described by Sir Philip Currie, the British ambassador to Constantinople, upon taking receipt of the albums in 1894. In communicating the news to the British Foreign Office, he stated that the albums set out to demonstrate ‘what progress has been made in literature and science in Turkey since his Majesty came to the throne, and to show how greatly he is interested in the advancement of learning and education in his Empire’.47 Education certainly stands at the fore of the sultan’s image of ‘progress’, the albums containing hundreds of photographs of uniformed schoolchildren and new school buildings, relating to state institutions at various levels, both military and civilian. A new society, modernized and regularized, is suggested by these subjects and their manner of depiction. Above all, it is evident in the students, always presented in pairs, the stance of each one mirroring that of their colleague within the frame, and the arrangement of each frame mirroring that of countless others in the collection, the motif replicating itself endlessly (interrupted only for certain small subsets that focus on female education, a school for the deaf and the dumb, a tribal school). These full-length, frontal depictions echo each other while also conjuring another echo, that of the Western anthropological ‘type’ and the Ottoman state’s own 1873 rerendering of that format. Echoes are conjured for the express purpose of being banished, the albums’ ordered vision challenging the Western colonialist enterprise and its associated imagery,

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thus ‘speaking back to Orientalist discourse’ as Zeynep Çelik has influentially argued.48 Its picturing of ‘Ottoman modernity’ asserted the place of that empire in the world order. ‘In this new visual vocabulary’, Wendy Shaw tells us, ‘being Ottoman was defined less through exoticism than through a universalism intended to show it as participating in a supposed global visual culture coded through European norms’.49 As is regularly noted, the albums are devoid of any direct representation of the man whose name they commonly carry. However, the figure of the sultan looms over and haunts their pages for, as suggested by William Allen, his ‘presence is attested to by his possessions’.50 Abdülhamid’s tuğra, his unique imperial monogram and the sign of his authority, is prominent throughout.51 It appears within photographs, adorning buildings, and it appears above photographs, playing the same role on the album page as it does within the built environment. It is an indicator of the sultan’s power; that to which it is attached is marked as belonging to him, being part of his realm and subject to his authority. The project, in this way, can be read as an assertion of the sovereignty of this absent ruler. Meanwhile, another absence has elicited only brief comment, chiefly from Allen. In his early, pioneering analysis of the albums, he remarks upon the ‘intriguing’ omission of Armenians from their pages. The omission is ironic, he suggests, considering the fact that they were made by Armenian photographers.52

The Tunnels of History We thus see established the parameters of a history of photography in the Ottoman Empire, the subject congealing around certain key concerns: the famous studios, Western consumers, the sultan and the Ottoman elite. It is a history that has largely settled into two subfields, being, as Edhem Eldem observes, ‘insistently focused on the Orientalist gaze and on its assumed opposite, modernism’.53 These are the poles of enquiry, the twin tunnels through which historians plough, blind to other possible forms of history. With the continued focus on these concepts exhausting the field, sucking the oxygen from the study of photography in the region, other forms of photography are neglected, with vernacular photography in particular vanishing ‘behind the smokescreen formed by these two appealing concepts’ (Benjamin’s ‘fog’ taking on the air of a human-made hazard and visual impairment).54 The neglect of the vernacular – given tentative definition by Eldem as a form of photography ‘appropriated and accepted by a sizeable proportion of the non-elite local population’55 – is a problem not unique to the study of photography in the Ottoman Empire. It is rather one prevalent in the wider field that has imported, alongside art-historical method, the dominant hierarchy of that form of history, one separating modes and genres on a perceived scale of value. This being the case, we might refer to the terms utilized by Norman Bryson in his study of still-life painting to describe art’s spectrum, with at one end megalography (the depiction of those things deemed to have stature, to be ‘great’) and at the other rhopography (‘the depiction of those things in the world which lack importance,

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the unassuming material base of life that “importance” constantly overlooks’).56 The vernacular is the rhopography continually shunned by an art-historically inflected history of photography. It pertains to the images produced by and for those lacking ‘importance’, the studios that do not lie along the Grande Rue de Péra, the clients and consumers who do not belong in the palace or the Western hotels. Or, putting it otherwise, the vernacular is quite simply what does not belong to history, its absence stemming from something deeper than mere neglect. Geoffrey Batchen summons the image of a deliberately sidelined – and despised even – form of photography; it is the abject, what has been ‘expelled from the body of a repulsed photo history’.57 The vernacular is what must be excised in order for photography to fulfil its destiny as an artform, the messy and meddlesome mass of images that will, if allowed, disturb and disrupt the carefully designed narratives and delineated spaces of history. While this exists as a wider problem in the history of photography’s tunnels, there seems little denying that the Ottoman field presents a marked set of limitations. Imbalance is so much a part of it that even ostensible studies of the vernacular do not take us far from the path of established histories. Nancy Micklewright, for example, looks at domestic portraiture, addressing ‘the lesser known corpus of images produced by (or for) the Ottomans themselves’, and yet takes as a focus Ali Sami. A product of the military schools and an ardent supporter of Abdülhamid, his various roles included director of the exhibition hall in Yıldız palace, chief photographer of the Ministry of the Navy and official court photographer, notably photographing the visit to the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898.58 Even under the guise of escaping the mainstays of history writing, we remain rooted to its central concerns and tied still to elite circles, to the extent that we might consider vernacular histories as they stand as largely only extensions of existing histories. Their bounds remain the same – their conceptual bounds and even their geographic bounds, for it becomes noticeable just how regularly and completely we are returned to the imperial capital. The powerful lure of Constantinople is demonstrated by Esra Akcan in her examination of albums of panoramic cityscapes and their construction of a distinct mode of viewing urban space.59 Instructive diagrams trace the journeys that sequenced album photographs describe as they replicate the city and recreate a movement through its spaces. What becomes clear is the circular nature of these journeys, how they tend not to take us very far, their paths turning back on themselves and returning us to the point of origin. They are diagrams that might be demonstrative of something larger, beyond the albums in question. They might equally be taken as maps of our own journeys through the history of Ottoman photography, journeys that keep us within the tunnel of the imperial capital, containing and constricting what we are able to see. A photographic fixation with the city, developed first by photographers and collectors, is now perpetuated by historians, both those who focus explicitly on the city and those who fail to live up to their promise of a more panoramic approach. As an example, Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem’s Camera Ottomana begins with a map suggesting the wealth of photographic activity across the empire, yet the edited volume that proceeds

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from that point is burdened by the weight of the capital. The book finds it difficult to escape Constantinople and the central problem of the field that it itself expertly diagnoses, how the city’s ‘crushing presence […] dwarfs our perception of photography in the provinces of the empire’.60 Adherence to established concerns obscure other modes of photography, that much is clear. Moreover, it pushes out the material that histories are ostensibly intent on studying. The field that has arisen as a necessary counterbalance to the Orientalist approach has come to resemble, to no small degree, some of those very studies of Orientalism by replicating their problematic elements. That is to say, the examination of ‘Ottoman modernity’ has become just as narrow a line of enquiry, itself adopting a form of tunnel vision. The distortion that we have already identified as being at work in Orientalist critiques, caused by over-reliance on certain collections, is duplicated in the study of Ottoman state photography, the Abdülhamid albums becoming, in very real terms, the counterpoints of the Pierre de Gigord Collection and the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Collection. The attention lavished on these albums is itself an act of cherry-picking that distorts our understanding of photography in the empire. Meanwhile, even our understanding of those albums is subject to distortion, with pre-determined theory privileged and visual evidence selected accordingly. The modernist argument, very much the accepted wisdom on the albums, does not tally with a great deal of the material found in the albums once they are examined carefully. Indeed, the remarkable thing is how very unremarkable many album photographs are, how similar they are to what can be found in Western collections. Constantinople, as it is in tourist collections, is a city of mosques, palaces, fountains – a place romantic, exotic, timeless, awash with the vestiges of the past, exuding those characteristics and tropes long foisted upon it by the Orientalist imagination. Photographs in the Abdülhamid albums that do not readily lend themselves to the prevailing argument are downplayed or discounted entirely. Wolf-Dieter Lemke, for example, seems keen to wish them away, interfering as they do with his discussion of Ottoman photography and modernity, when he suggests that the makers of the albums sometimes ‘accidentally chose motifs which … served the thirst for the exotic and the picturesque’.61 In this way of thinking, the picturing of the modern is a conscious decision but the picturesque, or anything resembling the Western vision of the East, can only have occurred by chance. It is a prime example of the way in which commentaries that emphasize Ottoman agency also frequently give that agency strict limits. It is abundantly evident that such images were not accidents but constructed just as consciously as others within these albums. The presentation of palaces, mosques and monuments, while sitting at odds with the modernist argument, is perfectly in keeping with the era of Hamidian rule that embraced the political potential of history and mined the past for legitimating symbols.62 It was not simply modern development that it presented as evidence of its equal standing along with other nations, for the albums looked back as much as they looked forward, evoking a glorious past and attempting to reify that glory in the present day.

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The sultan’s albums share with tourist albums common sources, the famed studios of the capital, and at times deal in comparable city subjects. Indeed, they utilize some of the very same images from those studios, images which, numbered as they are, indicate their origins in the studios’ public catalogues, a communal pool of images from which all could choose and make their own.63 A single image could thus perform a variety of roles, and yet, just how divergent are these rival renderings of the capital? In the setting of his albums, the sultan’s images clearly lack the melancholia associated with Orientalist imagery but share certain other qualities. Esra Akcan notes the construction of a ‘peaceful, beautiful, contemplative image’ of the city in the sultan’s albums, with a sense of order and calm pervading the works of the state, one that verges on the dream-like, bringing the sultan’s city into line with the city of Orientalist fantasy.64 We thus begin to see a space of overlap, the common ground between modes of photography supposedly diametrically opposed. The sultan’s vision, as much as the tourist’s, hinged on the promotion of the city as a timeless space and demanded carefully framed views as a consequence. By neglecting this aspect of the albums, commentators pass up on opportunities to consider what has been removed from view, a notable exception coming from Akcan’s statement that the photographs ‘predictably seldom portrayed the frequent fires, minority revolts, or other evident signs of tension within the Ottoman Empire’.65 And so we find once again the stirring of a sense of absence, of unwanted things pushed out of state imagery. Akcan’s observation carries more strength and clarity than Allen’s, and yet like Allen’s it flares into view only briefly. As the essay returns our gaze back to the ostensible subject of the Bosporus, there appears an unwillingness to pursue the implications of the statement, even a sense of exclusion being laid on exclusion.66 Evidently, an element of Wendy Shaw’s assertion, that ‘[i]nstead of portraying the empire as a romantic, historic, ethnographically different place, the Abdülhamid Albums controlled the gaze by using the modern medium to focus upon aspects of the empire that displayed modernity’, is erroneous, for it is clear that the albums do, in part, present the empire as a place of the romantic and historic. Yet the other part of Shaw’s claim – that the empire is not defined as an ‘ethnographically different place’ – is correct. We arrive here at the most neglected – and problematic – aspect of the albums. If we look back at the anthropology of the 1873 album Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, we find its intermingled ‘types’ standing side by side in depictions of the various regions of the empire, suggesting an imperial conglomeration and a diverse yet unified state.67 By contrast, the Abdülhamid albums reduce the display to just one Ottoman ‘type’, maintaining the anthropological format to produce full-length portraits of near-identical uniformed students enrolled in state schools across the empire, a new ‘type’ that stands as the embodiment of a new homogenous Ottoman identity. Only a few deviations occur, notably in a subset of images of students in tribal attire enrolled at the Aşiret Mektebi in Constantinople, the so-called ‘School for Tribes’. The photographs become meaningful in a before-and-after sequence featuring a Kurdish student, with clothing acting as a discursive marker that first opens (through tribal garb) and then closes (through uniform) a space of difference (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). Apt visual expression is in this way given to a social engineering project that aimed to

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Figure 1.3  Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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Figure 1.4  Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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turn ‘tribesmen into Ottomans’, educating the children of the notables of Kurdish and Arab tribes in order to spread the values of the modern state and bring groups considered alienated into the central sphere of influence.68 The photographs are legible because they appropriate recognized Western colonial tropes, not simply in the form of the anthropological mode but more specifically through its temporal discourse that saw tradition and ‘backwardness’ as the inverse of modernity and progress.69 The before-and-after format is the clearest manifestation of that discourse, one put to use in numerous colonial environments, such as at the ‘Indian schools’ of the USA.70 The appearance – and disappearance – of tribespeople in the Abdülhamid albums becomes part of the performance of the empire’s modernity, a modernity that was felt to be, along the perceived lines of the Western model, intrinsically wrapped up in a colonial outlook (colonialism, as Selim Deringil writes, was ‘seen as a modern way of being’).71 After all, this was precisely the variety of message on display at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the hosts mounting a display of white settler cultural superiority that placed ‘savage’ Native Americans and ‘civilized’ Celts and Teutons on opposite ends of a scale of values.72 The Ottoman Empire participated in this discourse even in the process of challenging it. Drawing on Ussama Makdisi’s concept of Ottoman Orientalism, we might see the albums as exhibiting ‘explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East’.73 The before-andafter double image stands as a double rejection, with modern imperial identity defined not only against the Western conception of the East as ‘other’, as is commonly asserted, but also against the empire’s own, internally conceived ‘other’. In this way, the photographs actively redeploy Western Orientalism, and it is difficult to avoid concluding that by doing so they participate in their own power project. What disappears with the tribal body is the very idea of difference. The beforeand-after sequence is the clearest manifestation of a discourse of power emanating from Constantinople, a discourse that once understood can be recognized in other album photographs. Exterior views of school buildings perform a similar operation, standing as the architectural equivalent of the photographed students. Frames are dominated by the clean lines of standardized governmental architecture, itself suggestive of the imposition of order upon ‘wild’ regions and the controlling presence of the state.74 Nothing further is visible, the photographs cropped so closely that the land itself disappears from view, along with any other visual information from the locale. As suggested by Stephen Sheehi, a flattening process is at work as the photographs ‘vacate’ their own localities, removing any suggestion of the particularities of different spaces and those that inhabit them, instead making Ottoman central control the primary subject matter.75 That these places should be named and identified as geographically diverse parts of the empire is of vital importance to the albums’ power claims; just as important is that they should be barely indistinguishable from one another. While the photographs, unlike those of the previous project Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, were actually produced in the provinces they claim to represent, those provinces

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disappear in the process of being pictured, thus making the Abdülhamid albums seem just as bound by the capital as their predecessor. Every image of a provincial city, every portrait of its students, becomes at heart a portrait of Constantinople, the centre of power. Everywhere is Constantinople and Constantinople is everywhere. Edward Said’s omission of Ottoman rule, among other imperialisms, from his discussion of Orientalism was not meant to imply that rule to be ‘either benign […] or any less imperialist’, only that it did not possess the refined clarity and coherence of the British, French and American imperial experiences.76 The inconsistencies of the Ottoman project were in part a result of its being developed late in the empire’s history and assembled from and with a selection of philosophies, rationales and tools imported from abroad, making it, in Selim Deringil’s eyes, a ‘borrowed colonialism’.77 My aim here is not to put a name to the power nor to define it. It is enough to state that what we are looking at bears distinct relation to the colonial imagery of the West; we can surely, on the evidence of the Abdülhamid albums, include photographic practice among Ottoman borrowings. Certainly, the state employs the language of colonial image-making and does so with the overt intent of participating in a discourse of power.

Just as clear as the workings of power in the albums is the rejection of any such notion by many of those who write about them. This appears an odd proposition for a subfield that emerged in response to Orientalism, thus evolving in part from post-colonialism’s recognition of the image as political construction. Yet the political aspect is, in many cases, accepted only to a certain degree and on a certain basis. Power becomes a limited and shifting concept in analyses, exercised beyond and between imperial borders. That it should exist within Ottoman borders is rarely taken into consideration, and seldom are the photographic products of the Ottoman state themselves recognized as ideological acts. Regularly positioned as a critical response to power, the albums are not thought of as an expression of power in themselves; or rather, they are positioned as a benign – heroic even – form of power, power that only exists as response to Western dominance and only manifests itself as the assertion of the right to self-representation. True, Abdülhamid is described as autocratic, and his use of photography has been described in terms of surveillance and ‘panoptic effect’, but these concepts, in the absence of proper consideration of the internal composition and workings of the empire, stand as somewhat abstract notions.78 Once again, writing on the history of photography history follows a wider trend. Responses to the ‘Eastern question school’ have addressed the clear failing in the manner in which the empire is represented and in response have asserted a sense of Ottoman agency. Yet they themselves can prove curiously denuding of agency, recognizing the Ottoman state’s power in resisting Western incursions while granting it little power in other areas, neglecting its role in events and processes within the empire’s borders.79

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Much of the commentary on the Hamidian albums operates on the basic premise that has characterized much wider Ottoman historiography, the ‘simple dichotomy of Western imperialism/non-Western resistance’ as Makdisi terms it, a premise that dictates and limits the conceptual and historical framework through which we approach the albums.80 We might return to the sultan’s order: ‘Most of the photographs taken [by European photographers] for sale in Europe vilify and mock Our Well-Protected Domains. It is imperative that the photographs to be taken in this instance do not insult Islamic peoples by showing them in a vulgar and demeaning light.’ What we now appear to have here in these oftrepeated words is our own ‘From today painting is dead’ moment, a rhetorical signalling of ‘radical novelty’ that seeks to characterize and set the limits of the history in hand. Ottoman photography is what Western photography is not. In the history of photography’s tunnels, products of the state, read only as a rejection of Orientalism, become anti-Orientalism: not expressions of power but acts of resistance. Wendy Shaw, for example, puts forward the notion of the ‘innocence’ of Ottoman photography, positing a practice without basis in the sort of conventions and, importantly, ideologies discernible in Western-made images.81 She attempts to draw a sharp line of demarcation when she states that the Hamidian albums ‘represent the empire through an imperial perspective (not a colonial one)’, but the nature of the proposed difference is not clear. The statement seems not so much to make a distinction between different modes of power as to reject the very notion of Ottoman state power. By taking oppositional form in this way, studies of Ottoman state photography end up in a strange historiographical furrow, both paralleling the study of Orientalism and harking back an older historiographical mode, the form of apoliticized study that Orientalism largely displaced, and which lingers only in the work of writers and collectors such as Ken Jacobson who, as Ali Behdad states, ‘elide politics […] in favour of a return to business as usual aesthetic analysis’.82 Indeed, the shift detectable in the Abdülhamid albums – a shift in favour of the erasure of difference, of unity in uniformity – is put in pictorial terms as an art-historically framed question of the evolution of style and modes of depiction. The albums’ ‘translation of the ethnographic alterity representing the empire into strictly a modernist vocabulary represents a shift in selfrepresentation’, Shaw tells us.83 The dismissal of the empire’s ‘alterity’ becomes accepted as simply a change in visual vocabulary, the political construct of the ‘modern Self ’ masked as an aesthetic attainment. A flattening process might thus be seen to be enacted not simply by photography but by the history of photography too, as commentaries collude in and contribute to the rendering of the imperial world as uniform. Specificities fall by the wayside; the fact that the Abdülhamid albums present diverse places inhabited by a variety of imperial subjects – native populations – is forgotten. Faced with this broadly depoliticized and dehistoricized realm, we might make the same demand that Linda Nochlin did of Orientalist imagery and declare that Ottoman state photography ‘cannot be confronted without a critical analysis of the particular power structure in which these works came into being’.

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There are vast gaps in existing accounts – the absence of certain people and places from images finding echo in their corresponding absence from our histories, largely present only in the form of oblique references and observations made in passing, those faint whispers that we have heard from Allen and Akcan. Ahmet Ersoy, by contrast, makes a clearer statement, giving a name to what is missing from state photography and indicating the identity politics behind the erasures. Examining the 1886 Hamidian photographic project that documented Söğüt, the birthplace of the Ottoman state, he observes the way in which images were shaped ‘by the ruling elite’s unwillingness to modify the essentially Sunni Muslim (and increasingly Turkish) character of official imperial identity’. Importantly, he makes note of the project’s deliberate ellipses, the way in which the ‘sizeable non-Muslim populations native to the region (most notably the Greeks and Armenians), which had also been critical actors in the unfolding of early Ottoman history, are consistently left outside the camera’s frame’.84 The Abdülhamid albums are this, writ large. Commissioned just a few years after the Söğüt project, they apply the same logic to the entire empire, forming the strongest visual enactment of the exclusionary tones of the era. While they subject Ottoman Muslim groups, such as Kurds and Arabs, to a form of colonial photography that remakes them in the image of the central state, Ottoman Christians are erased via another colonial mode, that of ‘photographic unpeopling’. Put another way, the former are forced into the image while the latter are forced out, the ‘modern Self ’ embracing and ‘reforming’ certain subjects while disavowing others. Ersoy’s is a rare statement of absence, that rarity giving some indication that what is missing from state photographs is also missing from commentaries. State imagery, as Ersoy suggests, was shaped by the identity politics at work in the late Ottoman Empire, ideologies broadly rendered invisible as writers take on, to one degree or another, the perspective of the state and accept the ‘naturalness’ of its vision.85 State albums serve not only as a persistent central focus of the history of Ottoman photography but also as a model, dictating the mode of and perspective on that history; in short, historians themselves, in an echo of nineteenth-century photographic practice, leave non-Muslims ‘outside the camera’s frame’. An examination of the manner in which Armenian photographers are depicted in the historiography shows the myriad ways in which they have been silenced as actors and the extent to which their historical presence has been obscured, diminished and distorted.

The Violence of History If we are to ask the question, hitherto largely ignored, as to what occurred between 1873 and 1893 to bring about the great shift from diversity to uniformity in Ottoman state imagery, then Bahattin Öztuncay provides some kind of answer in his book The Photographers of Constantinople. In a notable passage, he draws attention to an incident after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 in which Kevork Abdullah supposedly photographed Russian leaders, hosted them at his

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home, and expressed joy at their recent victory. It is an incident that resulted in the Abdullah Frères losing their status as photographers to the Ottoman court, and yet this is a minor detail in Öztuncay’s narrative, but an aspect of a wider sea change in the relationship between Armenians and the state. He makes reference to the Armenian community’s loss of their previously held position as the ‘loyal millet’; not stated, but instead heavily implied, is the new role Armenians occupy, for the period marked the decisive juncture at which they came to be viewed as a dubious entity within the empire, increasingly linked with foreign power and characterized as treacherous. Blame is placed on Armenians (Öztuncay loudly citing an Armenian historian to underscore the ‘fairness’ of the claim) for sending their own delegation to the post-war Conference of Berlin, an action that ‘contributed to this poisoning of relations’.86 Kevork’s disloyalty is but part of a wider Armenian betrayal of the Ottoman state. Öztuncay, perhaps unconsciously, gives some clues to the tectonic shifts underway in the empire, particularly how defeat and decline led to a reimagining of the empire and the identities of its constituent groups. The Ottoman state was increasingly understood not as a multi-ethnic plurality but in terms of the dominant group, as a Muslim space and, increasingly, a Turkish national space. This was the lens through which the empire saw itself and presented itself to others, and the influence on the photographic projects of the late era, with their strategies of inclusion and exclusion, seems clear. However, it is not something generally remarked upon, owing to the fact that the lens remains – it is the lens through which imperial history was and continues to be written, producing narratives that tend towards the privileging and elevation of figures of Ottoman Turkish/Muslim identity, while diminishing and vilifying Armenians. In essence, Öztuncay tells the origin story of his own historiographical discourse. At the very outset of The Photographers of Constantinople, Öztuncay states his desire to ‘restore’ to history Vichen Abdullah and Vassilaki Kargopoulo, both of whom are presented as court photographers who converted to Islam and who have been subsequently neglected by history for this reason. Here we witness the first stirrings of an unsavoury alignment between identity and historical worth, further brought out as Öztuncay pairs hagiography with obloquy, employing Armenians as a dialectical foil. The central contrast he establishes is between Vichen Abdullah, ‘arguably the greatest of all Ottoman-period photographers’,87 and brother Kevork, who, ‘if truth be told, was more passionate about Armenian nationalism than about photography’.88 But again, we are not restricted to individuals here, for Vichen and Kevork are but avatars. ‘One consequence of [Vichen Abdullah’s] conversion’, Öztuncay writes, ‘was that he was almost completely ostracized by his former community, with the result that in many 20th century publications about Abdullah Frères, Vichen Abdullah is glossed over if not completely ignored.’89 It is a claim of great historiographical injustice based, despite the reference to ‘many’ publications, on just two cited sources – a biography and a short encyclopaedia entry, both expressly on the subject of Kevork – and a number of leaps of the imagination. It is one leap to argue that examining Kevork is in itself an act of obscuring Vichen, another to suggest that the alleged obscurement of Vichen is a

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calculated response to a religious conversion, and one further still to suggest the two cited sources to be expressions of those writers’ (presumed) identities and indicative of the (presumed) will of a wider community. Worse is to come, for Öztuncay speaks of this assumed collective position in terms of extreme political ideology, the supposed neglect of Vichen being ‘distressing evidence that the bigotry and fanaticism advocated by Kevork is still alive and thriving even today’.90 It is an astonishing comment, one that can only lead us to conclude that his is a history written along ethno-religious lines. It is difficult, in these circumstances, not to read some of his portraits of other Armenian photographers as a stream of micro-aggressions. While none reaches the depths of infamy reserved for Kevork Abdullah, numerous lesser-known Armenian photographers receive distinctly unflattering portraits, portrayed as dubious and duplicitous personages. They include Garabed Pabuchian who ‘stands out particularly because of his penchant for pretending to be more than he was’, scolded by Öztuncay for supposedly making inflated claims about his achievements and for assuming the moniker Nadir, with both the name and the signature logo by which it was presented owing a clear debt to the Parisian photographer Nadar (an admonishment that ironically ignores the fact that Nadar himself was a master of this form of self-invention and self-promotion).91 There is also a notable appearance by the Caracache Frères, whom are inexplicably referred to by the more Armenian-sounding ‘Karakaşyan brothers’ and are said to have had ‘at least one somewhat shady side’ to their business, with ‘bootlegged copies’ of photographs by the major studios being found amongst their works.92 From out of Öztuncay’s portraits often steps the photographer of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular perception: dishonest, opportunistic and pretentious, an image related in no small way to the social stereotypes surrounding those who populated the profession.93 The fundamental figure of mistrust is thus not so much the photographer as it is the Armenian. What we are faced with are variations on a theme, for the photographer who presents the work of others as his own and the photographer who supports nationalist causes exist on a continuum, representing varying degrees of Armenian duplicity.94

There is a tendency, as Ronald Grigor Suny has shown, for Ottoman history to be narrated ‘almost exclusively from the point of view of the dominant people in the empire’.95 It is often a teleological form of history that looks back on empire through the lens of the modern nation state. It is a tunnel history, in other words, that demarcates its arena of action – implicitly or explicitly – in accordance with notions of identity that took root in the late empire and which informed the establishment of the Turkish Republic, presenting Ottoman history as unfolding in a distinctly, and even exclusively, Turkish space.96 This is commonly termed a Turkish nationalist historiography, but it is important to note the wider traction and pervasiveness of this approach. In short, there exists something of a standard position that distances non-Turks from Ottoman history.

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Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World

Time and time again, we find Armenians being awarded some mark of ‘foreignness’.97 Never framed as Western when the focus of the history of photography lay purely on Western image-makers, they now find themselves becoming so once the attention comes to lie on domestic production. Armenians, it seems, lack authenticity; they are not Ottoman enough, or even not Ottoman at all. Meanwhile, Muslim Turks belong fully to Ottoman history, a position made most evident in the generally accepted interchangeability of the terms ‘Ottoman’ and ‘Turkish’.98 Micklewright’s depiction of Ali Sami and his milieu provides an excellent example. Ali Sami is ‘one of the best-known of the early Ottoman photographers’, despite the fact that his photographic career began in the 1890s.99 Continuing in this vein, Micklewright describes how ‘the Ottomans themselves began taking pictures’ during this era, how ‘a military education and employment by the court was initially the route by which Ottomans learned the new art’, and the even more loaded proposition that ‘Ali Sami and other Ottoman photographers took control of the camera’.100 The birth of photography among Ottomans thus becomes clearly situated in the particular historical juncture of the Hamidian period when the first Muslim photographers emerged from the Imperial School of Engineers. Micklewright also tells us, in a stock formula we find repeated in other studies: ‘Local photographers had been at first primarily Greek or Armenian, but Muslims also began learning how to take pictures.’101 Within the succinct space of a single sentence we are given a condensed narrative of the tunnel history of Ottoman photography, an elliptical statements that brushes – and indeed rushes – past Greek and Armenian practitioners, emphasizing their temporariness and their peripherality to the central narrative via a process of linguistic erasure. The emphasis placed on the ‘emergence’ of Ottoman photography from the military schools might lead us back once again to Abdülhamid’s order, made famous by the history of photography. It appears even more as a ‘From today painting is dead’ utterance, becoming a rhetorical staging of an inaugural moment designed to delimit its subject. With the sultan’s proclamation, the birth of Ottoman photography is marked: ‘From today Ottoman photography is alive.’ A recognition of this reinforces Roberts’s assertion that the albums are ‘central to creating a definition of Ottoman photography’ and furthermore helps us to understand what exactly is being defined, for it is nothing short of the empire itself that is given form. It is a conceptualization predicated upon pushing Ottoman Christians, most notably Armenians, into the background and bringing Ottoman Turks to the fore as the ‘true’ agents of Ottoman photography and indeed the ‘true’ Ottomans: ‘From today Ottoman Turkish photography is alive.’ This serves as the thrust of histories of Ottoman photography, even those that attempt to foreground the empire’s non-Muslim population. There is even a wistfulness and a nostalgia for a lost cosmopolitanism to Engin Özendes’s work as she looks at Christian photographers and describes wider Armenian – and also Greek and Jewish – contributions to the Ottoman Empire. However, these actors take part in a history that is not their own. By limiting the geography of her study to modern Turkish borders while expanding the temporal bounds beyond 1923 into the Republican era, Özendes blurs the lines between empire and republic and

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suggests Ottoman history unfolding in a ‘Turkish’ domain. Not properly belonging to an Ottoman Turkish space, non-Turks do not properly belong to its history; they are guests in Ottoman Turkish lands, making at best guest appearances in history. In such circumstances, the final Muslim rise to ascendency can only appear as history taking its ordained path. It is given the force of historic event, presented as ‘natural’ and even laudable. Indeed, this can be the only interpretation of Micklewright’s declaration that ‘Ali Sami and other Ottoman photographers took control of the camera’. It finds an echo when Özendes describes later events, telling us that ‘in virtually every city a studio was named “Zafer”, the Turkish word for victory’, conjuring an image of Muslim Turks taking their rightful place in the medium and in the marketplace after 1923, finally allowed a free and unfettered existence in their national space. For all others there is silence. The great increase after 1923 of Muslim-run studios is reported; unreported is the corresponding decrease – in fact, the near disappearance – of non-Muslim businesses. This is rendered unproblematic, for amidst the ‘natural’ space of the nation, theirs is not a guaranteed, permanent presence and their final departure does not need to be narrated or explained. It is endings rather than beginnings that lie thickly shrouded in the fog of the history of photography. While beginnings are accompanied by fanfare, departures are unceremonious. Armenian practitioners quietly disappear from the scene, slipping from the stage in order to make way for the new era and to allow Turkish photography to come fully into being. The fact that departures were in large part extremely violent is not acknowledged. This is the silence that forms the other side of the coin of the ‘mythicized’ nationalist historiography in the Turkish Republic as described by Fatma Müge Göçek, for it is a dual proposition, valorizing Turkish achievements as it erases the violence committed against other groups.102 At times, it is an erasure that takes the form of ungainly sidesteps and distortions. The updated version of Özendes’s history devotes a rare passage to Armenian provincial photographers in the form of the Dildilian family of Marsovan.103 However, Özendes’s account of that history is noticeable for what it lacks. She reports the family’s forced conversion to Islam and yet substantially alters the nature of the event by relocating it to 1910; in reality, it occurred five years later, in 1915.104 This adjustment, and the final description of how the Dildilians ‘emigrated’ in 1922, results in an inadequate account of the family’s history and an obfuscation also of the wider Armenian experience of those years.105 Is it not this invisibility – the invisibility of violence and the invisibility of those removed through violence – that stands as the true ‘elephant in the room’? That very phrase ‘elephant in the room’, used by Çelik and Eldem to describe the unquestioning adherence to, and consequential ubiquity of, the concept of Orientalism in the field, also brings to mind a great historiographical blind spot, having been employed by Donald Quataert in reference to what he terms the ‘taboo’ topic in Ottoman history writing, ‘the slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915’.106 It is, it turns out, Çelik and Eldem’s volume that tells us what it is that our histories lack. Making reference to missing provincial Armenian, Greek and Jewish photographers, it states that ‘war, destruction, and massacres seem to have wiped out most traces’ of this cultural heritage, thus suggesting that these voids

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Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World

have impaired and skewed our understanding of Ottoman photography.107 Yet this assertion of what is missing is itself missing – missing from the main body of the text. It lies excluded in the quiet spaces of chapter endnotes, an oblique reference declared to be of secondary concern. Buried and fleeting though it is, the statement does hint at a reason why our gaze is constantly fixed on Constantinople, for it indirectly suggests that we return to the city not simply because it was a place of significant production but also because it was not, relatively speaking, a place of significant destruction. The unstated, and quite possibly unintended, implication is that even were we not to rely on institutional collections we would still be dealing with an officially sanctioned archive, the archive of what state violence has allowed to survive. Destruction, while immense, was not complete. Material has survived, survived to find itself targeted in other ways, not physically but semantically and intellectually through misrepresentation. While we have seen a number of ways in which Armenian photographers have been erased and diminished, more accentuated still is the treatment of Armenian subjects, who have proved far easier than photographers to excise the history of Ottoman photography. Where they appear, they do so as part of cleansed histories and they do so not as Armenians. In one instance, we find Nancy Micklewright suggesting, quite rightly, that we must understand the particularities of the Ottoman context. A wedding photograph from Mersin is used to illustrate this point: The couple wears contemporary western dress, but other, less visible, aspects of their marriage, as well as their larger social realities, would have been completely different than the circumstances of a couple photographed at the same time in London. Without access to this kind of information, generally only provided by a relative or written documentation accompanying an image, understanding the social relationships pictured in a photograph is extremely difficult.108

No mention is made of the specific history behind the photograph and the only clue to the sitters’ identities as Armenians lies in their names (which, in another instance of exclusion from the main text, are found in the image caption alone). More problematic still is the suggestion, chiefly but not solely through the words ‘[w]ithout access to this kind of information’, of a lost history, one that cannot be known. Thus a photograph dating from 1920 is gazed upon as if it were a cave painting, the mysterious product of long distant, anonymous people who have left behind them few indications as to the nature of their existence, few clues as to how their works should be interpreted. Yet the story is there for anyone wanting to tell it, it being a simple matter to trace the photograph back to its source (a source openly declared by Micklewright and yet selectively employed).109 While the image has been transferred, its history has been jettisoned, a history, it must be noted, that touches upon family experiences in the massacres perpetrated against Armenians before, during and after the First World War. Micklewright’s account excludes a history of violence in favour of its own form of historiographical violence. The photograph becomes an empty shell, its subjects visible yet invisible; appearances

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without meaning, they become disappearances, the forced vanishing of Armenian subjects from Ottoman history. History is formed by violence and becomes itself a form of violence. Taner Akçam writes of the ‘hidden violence’ of communication. For him, writing on the Ottoman Empire that makes no mention of Christian populations stands as a sign of a collective silence that banishes certain subjects from public discourse, notably the events of 1915: ‘We discuss everything under the sun while “ignoring” this black hole – or, to be more precise, this hole, or absence, actually defines our existence.’110 It is worth repeating that this discourse – or perhaps as we should now term it, this silence – is not unique to Turkey but has found a home elsewhere among other historiographies not averse to discursive exclusions. Indeed, exclusions speak to one another and echoes begin to abound; it becomes difficult to read Akçam’s words in our own context without thinking back to what is denied by the history of photography in its established form, the excluded vernacular that Geoffrey Batchen terms ‘the absent presence that determines its medium’s historical and physical identity’.111 It becomes clear that we are here dealing with a confluence of exclusions. The Armenian and the vernacular, they are the abject that must be forced out of history – Ottoman history, the history of photography – so that those histories might have definition and coherence as rarefied and exclusive spaces. They are the other narratives, the other possibilities that histories dispense with to enter their tunnels, and the history of Ottoman photography must dispense with both. In this context, Batchen’s words concerning the photographs that have been ‘expelled from the body of a repulsed photo history’ begin to take on an unintended significance, expulsion carrying a clear resonance in the history of the late Ottoman Empire. This resonance is truly suggestive and leads us to conclude that the exclusion of vernacular photographs from Ottoman history is not a simple consequence of the disdain for ‘lower’ forms that has been inherited from art history. The exclusion hinges instead on the vernacular’s connection with people expelled from the body politic, people that, having been removed from Ottoman society and Ottoman space, are removed also from Ottoman history. We might begin to understand how histories become closely tied to the elite circles of Constantinople, so closely tied that they appear to barricade themselves into that city. It is the only history to be written within the current rules. A vernacular and provincial history of Ottoman photography cannot be written because, if we accept the vernacular as the forms of photography practised outside elite circles, then it is to the empire’s shunned populations that we would have to look. With this understood, to leave the capital city and to address the vernacular photography produced in the provinces is to confront what history has repressed and to reach for a more inclusive narrative.

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Chapter 2 A P P R OAC H I N G T H E P R OV I N C E S , V IA T R E B I Z O N D

How might we begin to craft another history, one that sees the return of the excluded and the disappeared? Such a history might take 1839 as not simply the year of Daguerre, Arago and Takvim-i Vekayi but also of the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane, a decree that was the first plank in the era of Ottoman reform known as the Tanzimat. Photography, from this perspective, arrived in a changing Ottoman world, shaped by new political and social formulations. The Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane and its successor, the 1856 Hatt-i Humayun, which largely acted as a recapitulation of the earlier decree, declared an end to the theocratic order and ostensibly put in its place a system of inter-religious equality in which the diverse array of imperial subjects would be bound together by a collective identity known as Ottomanism. They were reforms made at times of crisis and in the wake of conflicts that laid bare the empire’s systemic failings – the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), the Russo-Turkish War (1828–29), the conquest of Syria and a portion of Anatolia by the Egyptian Khedive Mehmet Ali Paşa (1831–32), and later the Crimean War (1853–56). As Donald Bloxham notes, the decrees carried the distinct feel of public relations exercises, the improvement of the lot of Christian subjects an effort to appease the Great Powers of Europe and garner the support needed to prop up the ailing empire, particularly in the face of aggressive Russian expansionism.1 The fact that decrees acted more as statements of equality than as implementations helps in part to explain the failure of the reforms they promised. The very restatement of aims in 1856 served as a tacit admission of failure but without there being any accompanying acknowledgement of the reasons behind that failure. The era brought about some material improvement in Ottoman Christian lives, although with regard to Armenians it can be argued that much reform was precipitated from within, the cultural, economic and political flowering of the Armenian renaissance bringing about changes in community governance.2 The state reform movement, however, did not bring about the wholesale change to which it aspired and even, in some senses, made matters worse. It broke down the structures under which Ottoman subjects had co-existed in circumstances that, while essentially unequal, were sustainable and marked by a degree of tolerance. At the same time, it failed

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to replace those structures with viable alternatives, loosening the protections Christians had once enjoyed while creating the impression among some sections of the empire that they were gaining an advantageous position through the favour and intervention of foreign powers, thus contributing to an atmosphere in which they became more targeted. All this, however, is but a lead-in to our history, which is set in the years of the Tanzimat’s demise, the subversion of its philosophies and the fallout from its aspirations. The philosophy of Ottomanism had but a few years left to run when it was given photographic expression by Pascal Sébah in Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie in 1873. If the proclamation of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 marked Ottomanism’s attainment of solidity at long last, the suspension of that constitution in 1878 by the new sultan Abdülhamid II signalled its melting away. The Abdülhamid albums of the 1890s take part in a new imperial vision, and as sources they hint at some of the history that triggered the change of direction, not so much in what they show but rather in what they do not. Represented in Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, but absent some twenty years later, are such provinces as Bosnia and Danube, absent for the simple reason that they no longer existed as formal parts of the empire, lost to new independent states and autonomous territories after Ottoman defeats in the Balkans in the 1870s. Further land was lost in the east to Russia in the war of 1877–78, with Russian Armenian generals and volunteers being amongst those who delivered defeat to the Ottoman Empire. As land was lost, so was population, thousands of Armenians becoming Russian as the border shifted under their feet, part of a wider diminishment of the Christian presence in the Ottoman Empire.3 There occurred at the same time a corresponding movement into the empire, an influx of Muslims fleeing the Balkans and the Caucasus that not only contributed to the tipping of the demographic scales but also, with refugees carrying with them memories of dispossession at the hands of Christians, helped fuel a shift in sentiment already well underway.4 Attention increasingly turned to the Ottoman East, where the amorphous zones of ‘Armenia’ and ‘Kurdistan’ met and overlapped in lands abutting the Russian Empire.5 As well as finalizing a post-war loss of territory, the 1878 Treaty of Berlin made stipulations for the protection of the Armenians, increasingly isolated, exposed and targeted for attack, largely by local Kurds. For Armenians, this internationalization of the ‘Armenian question’ brought hope of reform and protection; for Kurds and the Sublime Porte (a metonym for the Ottoman central government), it prompted an apprehension that events in the Balkans would repeat themselves in the east, bringing Christian Armenians into a position of dominance and paving the way for a future Armenian state.6 Armenians, in this way, became linked in the imagination to Tsarist power and nationalist aspirations, a dangerous internal element that posed a threat to the integrity of the empire. Suspicion only grew in the late 1880s as Armenian political groups started to emerge, largely amongst Russian Armenians, with the aims of defending Armenian communities from Kurdish attack and reminding foreign powers of their treaty obligations. As the memory of past territorial loss became ingrained in the imperial psyche, where it fed an anxiety about imperial dissolution, Abdülhamid continued with his task

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of reform, but it was reform increasingly predicated on a pan-Islamist policy that sought state unity and stability on the basis of Muslim solidarity. It was for the sake of this policy that the state turned a blind eye to Kurdish exactions while also seeing in them an additional benefit. The Hamidiye, Kurdish militia regiments, were formed in 1890, largely from the very same Kurdish tribes responsible for pillage, as part of a state policy that aimed, as Deringil states, ‘to kill two birds with one stone – to cow the Armenian population and to secure the loyalty of the Kurds’.7 The regiments played a significant role in a major land grab enacted through violence and coercion and supported by the legal mechanisms of the state. Reduced to a form of serfdom, an estimated 100,000 Armenians emigrated from the Ottoman East between 1870 and 1910, with the land they had occupied being used for the sedentarization of Kurdish nomads and the settlement of Muslim refugees from the lost territories. Violence, expropriation, immigration and assimilation added up to a project of population engineering that substantially altered the demographics of the region.8 Particularly destructive were the widespread massacres of Armenians in the mid-1890s, massacres that perhaps claimed 100,000 lives. Robert Melson asks us to read the events through the ‘field of action and perception that might have been experienced by the sultan and his state’, one in which Armenians came to be seen as threats to the established order: given the disintegration of empire due to minority activities, and given the location of the Armenians on the border with Russia, their contacts with the  European powers, and above all their renaissance at a time of trouble for the Ottoman Empire, the ground or context against which they had once been perceived shifted, and what had once been seen as a loyal and useful minority came to be seen as insurrectionary and provocative.9

Amidst the substantial departure from the ethos of the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane and Hatt-i Humayun, an element of those decrees did survive, for Abdülhamid came to be heavily invested in ideas of public relations – what Selim Deringil describes as his project of damage control and image management.10 His photographic albums played a part in this, and it becomes absurd to position them as solely a rebuttal of Western Orientalism; this they no doubt were, but to see them purely in those somewhat abstract terms is to dull the historical specificity of their statements. Echoes of the photographs can be found in accounts of the era, helping us to locate them at a particular juncture and recognize their purpose. We find their traces in the American journalist and preacher George Hepworth’s account of a conversation with an Ottoman official in which the state of education in the empire is detailed, with particular attention paid to the Aşiret Mektebi, as well as schools for girls, and for the deaf and dumb;11 we find them too in the tour arranged by the sultan for the British writer and Conservative politician Mark Sykes, in which the Aşiret Mektebi was one of the ‘interesting sights’.12 The parallels between these accounts and the Abdülhamid albums are significant and these

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episodes are, above all, rendered meaningful by their contexts, with Hepworth’s conversation occurring during his investigations into the Armenian massacres of the mid-1890s and Sykes’s tour taking place in 1903 at a time of violence and unrest in Ottoman Macedonia. Viewed in this light, the Hamidian photographs belong to a concerted project to shape Western opinion during times of imperial crisis and international attention. With this understood we might conjecture that in part the albums were formulated as a response to the news stories circulating at the time of their commission, such as that of the abduction of a young Armenian girl from her village on the plain of Mush, north-east of Diyarbekir, by the Kurdish chief Musa Bey, an event that proved a great cause célèbre in the West and a watershed moment in the ‘Armenian question’.13 Its notoriety owed much to the involvement of former (and future) British Prime Minister William Gladstone, whose account of the abduction was presented in lectures and widely published, including on the reverse of a photograph of the Armenian girl that was printed in London.14 Meanwhile, also in circulation were corresponding portraits of Musa Bey that the Kurdish chief had happily posed for in the Abdullah Frères studio in Constantinople, with one of their telling manifestations being in the pages of the British illustrated journal The Graphic above the caption ‘The Condition of Armenia’ (these photographs, unsurprisingly, are not to be found in studies of that studio).15 This is the history displaced by the Abdülhamid albums and their vision of order. However, it is also a history that is obliquely present, offering the possibility that it might be salvaged from the margins to which it has been pushed. The Aşiret Mektebi and the Hamidiye regiments were part of the same state project that sought to deal with ‘troublesome’ populations and reclaim the eastern provinces, with the concrete link between the two being that the Kurdish students attending the former were the children of chiefs leading the latter. Depictions of students brought into the Ottoman fold at the Aşiret Mektebi thus have their counterpoint in the unpictured suppression of Armenians in the border region. The photographs become placeholders, to use Ariella Azoulay’s term, substituting for images that were not made, and perhaps could not be made, thus providing a presence for an absent element of history.16 Locating Armenians in the history of Ottoman photography requires such shifts in method and perspective, here a reading of the archive ‘from below’, in the words of Allan Sekula, ‘from a position of solidarity with those displaced, deformed, silenced or made invisible’.17 Put otherwise, it is to the margins of the image that we must look; it is by searching for what has been excluded from the frame that we might uncover histories of exclusion and dispossession. Probing state photography for what has been refused and veiled and making connections between the seen and the unseen – relating what lies within the photographic frame ‘to other facts, to material realities’ – provides an opportunity to renegotiate what is represented according to Stephen Sheehi, a rethinking of the means of knowledge production through which we can emancipate images and, with them, the histories they have displaced.18 We might even recognize the way in which this is encouraged on some level by the products of the state themselves; after all, the

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Aşiret photographs, by virtue of the before-and-after format that makes reference to unseen events and processes, actively encourage the viewer to consider what occurs outside the photographic frame.19 Such photographs erase but they also point to a method of retrieval, suggesting the need to examine the circumstances under which photographs were made – to consider what lies outside the frame and what influences and pressures were exerted upon that frame. It is a task that all photographs demand, and yet it is made all the more vital here in the context of albums that have doggedly strived to produce a flattening effect, removing detail and specificity from the world they present, and to erase people visually, an erasure that cannot be dissociated from their material destruction. We might speak of using state imagery for the purposes of constructing a counternarrative and unearthing a hidden history, and yet these can be inappropriate and problematic paradigms. While ‘counternarrative’ implies the dominance and perseverance of the Hamidian narrative, it risks misrepresenting the original chronology. The albums were themselves the counternarrative, their image of order deployed against both general Orientalist representations and the specific reports of violence coming out of the empire. Equally, the term ‘hidden history’ presents difficulties, suggesting as it does a process of unearthing, whereas in reality, as Ariella Azoulay writes, ‘these things aren’t hidden things or histories but rather open secrets’.20 We only need think back to Donald Quataert and Taner Akçam to understand this to be true of the history we deal with here, our supposed ‘hidden history’ being simply what lies shrouded by collective silence, the elephant in the room. In addition, these terms carry the suggestion of obliqueness, proposing their histories as refractions or tangents, sideroads leading off established narratives. This becomes especially apparent in the tracing of violence against Armenians in the corner of Hamidian photographs, a reading that risks restricting the very people we seek to rescue to a marginal historical existence, a shadow of the official record, a disruption of the state narrative.21 Preferable would be a more concrete retrieval and recuperation that places our subjects at the centre of the stage and speaks of the particulars of their experience, but dealing as we are with active erasure, such a process appears as unworkable as it is necessary.22

In Trebizond There are to be traced in the albums, however, quiet, unheralded presences, notably in a photograph from the city of Trebizond on the Black Sea coast (today Trabzon); officially credited to Sébah & Joaillier on the album page, it carries another name printed on the photograph itself – K.E. Cacoulis.23 A provincial practitioner thus quietly raises his head, and by doing so he suggests the presence of a multitude of others, for he was surely not the only such contributor to the albums; indeed, they would appear to have heavily relied on such practitioners for, even without the evidence of Cacoulis’s name, it is difficult to imagine that such a project, covering thousands of miles of Ottoman territory from Salonika to Sana’a, could have been the work of the famous Constantinople photographers

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alone. It seems evident that, in order to properly comprehend the production of the albums, the involvement of these other photographers needs to be acknowledged. It is surely important, too, for understanding the wider working practices of the Constantinople studios and recalibrating our conception of them, especially germane in light of the status they are afforded as artistic originals and the contempt shown to less well-known photographers who are said to have appropriated their images. There is clear evidence that the relationship between studios at different levels of the market was, at times, quite the opposite, that the borrowings in fact went in the other direction. Cacoulis’s involvement in the albums was noted by William Allen in one of the earliest analyses of the albums, and yet the implications of his observation and the possibilities for further investigation it suggests have, like Allen’s related comment on the absence of Armenians, been largely ignored.24 At the same time, one wonders what such a study would achieve. After all, Cacoulis’s work on other Hamidian state projects has received fleeting attention, and this has only served history’s established concerns. Cacoulis is drawn not as a practitioner serving a provincial community but solely as a contributor to state projects; he is, in other words, an incidental actor in the sultan’s own photographic story.25 It is at best a highly circumscribed means of approaching an Ottoman Greek photographer who was a fixture of late Ottoman Trebizond, being traceable in the city from at least as early as 1881 and remaining in business there for four decades.26 This is the history we begin to uncover when we start to pull at the threads of state imagery. More than a path to yet another look at the famous studios or yet further examination of state production, the momentary glimpse of Cacoulis has the potential to lead us out of the orbit of these dominant concerns and towards a history of provincial photography that has been hiding in plain sight. Searching the albums further, we find more idiosyncrasies. Uniformity is accompanied – and thus questioned and undermined – by variations and peculiarities that can be counted alongside the clash of the Cacoulis and Sébah names, confirming the album photographs as the products of many hands and many studio sites, being only later filtered through the imperial capital, brought together and ordered by a central organizing impetus in order to create a sense of visual consistency and to project the prescribed image of empire. It is this infinite variety, rather than the regularity and uniformity of the albums, that now speaks to us, and speaks of the previously undisclosed presences. The photograph testifies to a life, Walter Benjamin maintained while looking at David Octavius Hill’s portrait of a Newhaven fishwife, for in it there is ‘something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real and will never consent to be wholly absorbed in “art”.’27 His words echo here; he specifically deals with the power of presence a sitter possesses in a photographic image, but for the moment his words might be made to fold back towards the photographer as we recognize the traces of real lives that are to be found in the Hamidian albums. From minute neglected details, there start to emerge indicators of unique existences, and from us in turn there emerges a desire similar to Benjamin’s, to know the names of unknown photographers,

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to know the lives of people who, we might say, will never consent to be wholly absorbed into the anonymizing project of the state. Lying embedded in the official record are clues to the vernacular, faint, gossamer strands of reality that could lead us out of the labyrinth. Let us follow them to Cacoulis’s studio and see what manner of image he produced when not employed by the state. A carte de visite portrait by him carries the date 17 March 1890, thus announcing itself as a contemporary of the Abdülhamid albums (Figure 2.1); yet there the similarities end, for as a single print pasted onto board, small enough (10 × 6.3 cm) to fit in the hand, it is dwarfed on numerous scales by the hundreds of Hamidian photographs in leather-bound albums, of a size requiring a table to support them (each one around 48 × 63 cm). It is here, in this seemingly smaller photographic world, that Cacoulis commands the stage, his name and the words ‘Photographic Studio, The Black Sea, in Trebizond’ appearing on the face and the reverse of the card in French and Greek. Over Cacoulis’s proclamations on the reverse side, his sitter, signing his name K. Yeghiazarian, has added in Armenian his own mark and inscription: ‘To my all-loving mother.’ Another hand has added a second inscription at some later date, telling us that Yeghiazarian was born on 17 February 1857 in Garin, giving the Armenian name for the city of Erzurum, lying to the south-east of Trebizond. The portrait is an unassuming object, seemingly innocuous and commonplace, the product of a provincial studio overlaid with

Figure 2.1  K.E. Cacoulis. K. Yeghiazarian, Trebizond, 1890. Collection of the author.

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domestic sentiment. Yet it serves as a mighty disrupter by immediately conjuring up a world pushed out of the Hamidian albums and out of the history of Ottoman photography; indeed, it disrupts precisely because of its ordinariness, an ordinariness that testifies to the dismantled world of the Ottoman Empire. It suggests another path to follow, one that might lead us away from exclusive narratives and the megalography of state production towards a rhopography of the vernacular in which we might encounter the people and objects that have been locked out of our present histories. Is the task, then, one of restoration? We might ask whether such work is truly possible or even desirable. As we follow the mountain roads that lead us from the Cacoulis studio on the Black Sea to the interior of the Ottoman East, to Erzurum, Harput and Van, we collide with history’s limitations. On the Armenian plateau, the fog envelops entire lives and decades of photographic production. Generally speaking, photographers are hidden figures, featuring little in surviving records. Like the photographers of Ottoman Arab lands studied by Stephen Sheehi, the subjects of this study might be said to have left ‘little evidence of their lives except their names on scattered cardboard mounts’.28 Such small details become signs of large absences, the holes in our histories that cannot be easily filled. And yet the accumulation of small mentions – on prints and mounts, in memoirs and memory books (houshamadyan), in state records, in commercial listings – can build into glimpses of lives. Above all, glimpses are offered by their photographs – with them we are given the opportunity to see through their eyes. A history comes into sight, one that can never be definitive, remaining always hazy, fragmentary and elusive, but one that, nevertheless, starts to form around surviving material and starts to present a picture of a world. An aim of restoration also becomes problematic in being weighted by a sense that all our histories require is some refocusing and modification of their content, for us to find a place for the missing within their existing structures. Were anyone minded to do so, Cacoulis could certainly be implanted into an art history of photography. After all, he consciously presents himself as an heir to that history’s key figures, the reverse of his mount being adorned with three profiles, each naming and honouring a ‘founding father’ of photography: Louis Daguerre (top), Henry Fox Talbot (middle) and Nicéphore Niépce (bottom). There was, no doubt, an element of marketing here, Cacoulis exhibiting these pioneers in much the same way as his Constantinople counterparts display the sultan’s seal, summoning a prestige factor that might entice customers to the studio. At the same time, there is nothing to suggest the history of photography, as it was narrated by Cacoulis’s mount card, held any particular resonance for his sitter; indeed, Yeghiazarian signals his lack of interest – or at least his priorities – by the way that he has, with his inscription, obliterated part of the narrative, including a good portion of Daguerre’s head (over which he has placed his own name no less). We might surmise that what Yeghiazarian wanted from Cacoulis was not an artwork at all but a practical object that spoke of him, a good likeness presented in a form that was legible and could be readily understood and used by its intended recipient.29 It is not as singular, animating forces that photographers are important but as members of communities and as the chroniclers and representatives of

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communities; it is in relation to those communities that they come into focus. Certainly, photographers were talented individuals in possession of skills rare in the region, and what might be gleaned of their lives and practices helps us to build a picture of the photographic medium. Yet while we reflect on their uniqueness, it might be more enlightening still to think on the ways in which they were typical. What they pictured with their particular skills was, for the most part, the people that they lived amongst, people whose lives reflected their own. Photographers did not exist outside the scenes they pictured but were very much part of them, part of the same world. When we set out to rediscover forgotten photographers, we do so not for their sake alone but in order to examine a wider community and a wider history. Benjamin’s dictum as he originally posited it remains true. We might allow ourselves to search photographs for traces of the photographer, to discern their presence on the scene, their own life and their own approach to image-making, but the photographed subjects are not to be denied; they place themselves in the frame to testify not to the photographer’s existence but rather to their own. They testify, too, to other lives, those for whom photographs are intended, those who look upon them and keep them, those for whom they are meaningful and hold special power. From photographers to sitters to viewers, the portrait of Yeghiazarian hints at the multiple agents of photography – to the variety of lives from which photographs spring, with which they come into contact, and in which they play a part. Thus the objects we encounter seem to insist upon another form of history, not an art history of photography and quite possibly not a history of photography at all. We might think instead of a photographic history, one that begins to open up once we accept the basic premise that photographs are intensely meaningful objects in people’s lives, for with that we create the possibility that they might be so too in our histories. Privileging photographs as sources and placing them at the centre of our work allows us to imagine different ways of approaching the past – to contemplate, as per Tina Campt, ‘what kind of histories we can write through images’.30 It is to see where photographs might lead us when we are willing to be attentive in their presence, to study their forms and their language, to consider how they appeared and how they acted. It is to find virtue in looking at and indeed living with photographs, surrounding ourselves with them and letting them enter into a dialogue with one another.31 They can be sources, certainly, as we investigate a time and a place, but perhaps more than that they can be our material – the very fabric from which our histories are woven.

Another History, Another Tunnel Our focus has come to settle on a fragmented and dispersed array of photographs, largely to be found in the hands of private individuals, families and community institutions, thus examples par excellence of the vernacular, defined by Geoffrey Batchen as those photographs that occupy ‘the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy’.32 Their preservation stems from an insistence common in vernacular photography, the commonly held desire of communities to preserve

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the vestiges of their past.33 Yet this insistence takes on a particular form when it comes to people who have to grapple with dispossession and disappearance. As bell hooks writes of the place of photographs in African American communities: ‘[w]hen the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation may become an obsession’.34 Collections contain materials that have survived the  deadly assault upon the communities and the culture that produced them, the communities and the culture for which they now speak, operating beyond the  bounds of dominant narratives.35 Only on rare occasion do such photographs break out into the open. One isolated example is a photograph made in the city of Van around 1911/12, a portrait of mother and son Shushan and Vostanig Adoian (Figure 2.2). Its existence in the public realm is due to its later use by Vostanig, by that time an artist in the USA working under the name Arshile Gorky. The family portrait served as source material for two canvases – monumental pieces that he worked on over a period of decades – and for a great number of drawings, works that served as studies for the two canvases while also existing in their own right as navigations of and negotiations with the boyhood photograph.36 The photograph has gained prominence through its relation to these works, being published in almost every monograph and exhibition catalogue devoted to the artist (providing a variant on the induction of the photograph into a discourse of art). It has become messily intwined with the artist’s oeuvre, Gorky’s repeated recreations of the photograph making him almost the author of his boyhood photograph. We find, for instance, Peter Balakian stating that in Gorky’s life ‘the photograph offers an unambiguous autobiographical source’.37 And if the photograph cannot be seen without recalling its painted counterparts, then it is also difficult to extract it from the perceived mood of those works, a mood of profound personal grief on one level, persistent community trauma on another. One of Gorky’s biographers, Matthew Spender, has said: ‘Armenians of the Diaspora recognize in these works degrees of suffering about which those who are not Armenian know nothing.’38 So emblematic have these works become of the Armenian experience that their character seems to rebound back into the photograph, returning to the source and setting up home there with the full weight of its trauma.39 Heavy indeed are its accumulations, and beneath the thick layers of accrued historical impasto the photograph itself seems to lie obscured. Positioning the photograph as an ‘autobiographical source’ at least serves to anchor it in a context and a concrete history, ‘in a time and place’; however, for Balakian it is ‘in relation to the catastrophic event that would shape Gorky’s life’ that the photograph sits.40 The evocation of future events calls to mind Roland Barthes, for whom the mood of photographs is inevitable loss. As he memorably pronounces while examining a photograph of Lewis Payne made on the eve of his execution, finding there the image of a living man infused with the spectre of his death: ‘I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.’41 While not exactly

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Figure 2.2  Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, Van, c.1911. Courtesy of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation.

replicating Barthes in terms of tense, Balakian certainly evokes a Barthesian mode of viewing, a mode that allows him to gaze upon a photograph from 1911 and read events that occurred at a later date. Barthes’s influence is felt again when we find his famous punctum employed by Kim Theriault as a central motif in her study of the artist, positioning Gorky himself as a punctum.42 For this most famous of

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photographic concepts to be, highly unusually, applied to a painter, one with a limited relationship to photography, surely demonstrates the degree to which the Adoian photograph – and specifically a Barthesian reading of the photograph – has adhered itself to studies of Gorky. This might be considered a testament to the legacy of Barthes and the pervasive influence he continues to exert over the study of photography, yet the larger, more burdensome legacy that such writings carry is particular to Armenian history. It is writing that takes place, to reuse Balakian’s words, ‘in relation to the catastrophic event’, that event being the Medz Yeghern (Great Crime), the Aghed (Catastrophe) or, more commonly, the Armenian Genocide (most often dated 1915–16, ‘1915’ becoming a common metonym).43 It is the seismic event – or process to give it a more accurate descriptor – of modern Armenian life, one that claimed as many as 1.5 million lives, destroyed communities and for the most part brought Armenian existence in their historic homelands to an end. It is also a ‘non-event’, with the traces of the crime, according to Marc Nichanian, being one of the basic targets of obliteration; genocidal destruction is in part the destruction of itself as an historical event.44 Its place as non-event continues to be reinforced by enduring systematic denial, simultaneously a minimization of the devastation and a shifting of responsibility onto the victims, with Ronald Grigor Suny summing up the denialist position as: ‘There was no genocide, and the Armenians were to blame for it. They were rebellious, seditious subjects who presented a danger to the empire and got what they deserved.’45 While it has its origins in nationalist discourse, denial has been tacitly accepted by much of the outside world due to the prioritization of political relationships with Turkey and an amnesiac worldview that renders geographically ‘distant’ events as marginal to Western experience and memory.46 The genocide – its occurrence and its denial, the two being inextricably intertwined – has had a profound effect upon ‘Armenian’ historiography.47 Under the pressure of denial, a dominant trend in Armenian-recounted history prioritizes the genocide and seeks to assert the veracity and historical fact of that process. The result is that the genocide becomes an obscurant pall, shrouding great swathes of history. The history of photography lies with other discarded histories in, to use Vazken Davidian’s words, ‘the vast and diverse abandoned tracts of the Armenian Ottoman historical past that have been relegated to a historical wasteland’.48 Indeed, we might conclude that the subject of Armenians in photography is neglected by Armenians as much as anyone, albeit for very different reasons. In the small field that does exist, meanwhile, the dominance of the genocide is again felt, for genocide imagery is one topic that has received attention.49 Studies have tended to follow particular historiographical modes, notably with their focus on European photographers, above all Armin Wegner, the Expressionist poet who documented in photographs and texts his experiences in the Ottoman Empire while serving as a German army medic during the First World War.50 At times, they further take on tropes particular to writing on war photography by focusing on a male photographer protagonist who, in the words of Allan Sekula, ‘becomes the sole subject, the exemplary sufferer, the risk taker,

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the heroic embodiment of courage and moral outrage’.51 It should perhaps come as no surprise to find accounts of Wegner’s exploits conforming to this archetype, for his own self-mythologizing paved the way. In the script of his magic lantern lecture, for example, he is found declaring: Each time I talk about the terrible pictures of the tragedy of this people, the horror of which has perhaps made your eyes at times turn away from the screen, I see myself again among the starving and dying in the refugee camp, feel their imploring hands in mine, summoning me to plead for them once I was back in Europe.52

Wegner situates himself as the protagonist, a casualty of war who traumatically relives his experiences; he simultaneously denies, through their appointment of him as their spokesperson, Armenians their own voices. The acceptance of the Wegner myth has sometimes required that the complexities of his biography be minimized; only more recently have they been subject to closer scrutiny, not least his wartime efforts in the employ of the German Propaganda Service, producing articles and presenting lectures that closely adhered to and supported the Ottoman narrative of treacherous Armenians.53 It is a myth accepted not, ultimately, for the purposes of art-historical narrative, for there is something deeper at work. In the context of the Armenian Genocide and its denial, the heroic figure put forward by Sekula takes on additional tasks as an arbiter and authenticator of history.54 Most telling in this regard is an oft-quoted passage from Wegner’s Der Weg Ohne Heimkehr (‘The Road of No Return’), a book based on his wartime letters, published in 1919: In the last few days I have taken numerous photographs. They tell me that Jemal Pasha, the hangman of Syria, has forbidden the photographing of the refugee camps on the pain of death. I carry these images that horrify and indict hidden under my cummerbund. In the camps of Meskene and Aleppo I collected many petitions, which I have hidden in my knapsack, in order to bring them to the American Embassy in Constantinople, since the postal service will not deliver them. I do not doubt for a moment that I am thereby committing an act of high treason, and yet the knowledge of having helped these most wretched people at least in a slight respect fills me with a feeling of greater fortune than could any other deed.55

It is a perfectly condensed rendition of the heroic Wegner persona, the man who at great risk to himself breaks unjust laws for a just cause, striving to bring a hidden truth to light. Importantly, the passage also acts in the realm of attribution and provenance, situating photographs in the specific time, place and circumstances of production, precisely the sort of grounding that is felt necessary for them to become evidence and assume the role of truth-conferring documents.56 Indeed, in ‘images that horrify and indict’, we have the central rhetorical staging of this particular field, a regularly repeated phrase that tells us what it is that commentators want photographs to be: clear, unambivalent documents of ethical and even legal fact.57

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It is a phrase that places Wegner’s photographs in the realm of the ‘secular icons’ of the Holocaust addressed by Cornelia Brink, photographs to be understood ‘as straightforward and unambiguous reality, not as a specific photographic rendering of that reality open to analysis’, and deemed to ‘make a moral claim to be accepted without questioning’.58 The comparison is not without its relevance, for it is precisely in relation to the Holocaust and Holocaust imagery that photographs depicting the Armenian Genocide tend to be positioned. ‘While documentation can support the evidentiary burden of the genocide claim,’ Leshu Torchin writes, ‘it is the deployment of the Holocaust imaginary that renders the Armenian atrocities culturally legible as genocide.’59 The invocation, both implicit and explicit, of the Holocaust speaks of a desire to situate Armenian Genocide images in the realm of collective imagination and understanding that allows the events rendered through them to be recognized as genocide and, moreover, for those photographs to be assigned the historical currency of Holocaust ‘icons’, accepted as ‘ethical reference points’.60 Thus we find Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian beginning their study by recalling ‘the image of the Jewish boy with his arms raised in the Warsaw ghetto’,61 while Sybil Milton declares that the ‘best of [Armin Wegner’s] images are comparable in quality to Margaret Bourke-White’s Buchenwald photographs’.62 A memory of photographs from Vietnam is also stirred, and it is particularly interesting to see Geoffrey Robertson reversing the equation, asking us to view those images through the lens of Wegner’s words and images rather than vice versa: ‘Photo-journalism can encapsulate a crime against humanity – the iconic examples from Vietnam, of a young Vietcong suspect having his brains blown out and a naked girl fleeing from her napalmed village, are in Armin Wegner’s phrase “images that horrify and indict”’.63 Despite the inversion, the desired effect remains the same, that Wegner’s images take their place in the world’s visual memory banks. More recent studies of Wegner have started to acknowledge the ambiguities of his work. Emmanuel Alloa writes of his embellishment of the visual record (along with his accounts of his wartime experiences), Wegner co-opting copious images from a variety of sources, many pre-dating 1915, in actions that might suggest his own doubts that photographs could provide what was desired of them. Lacking the material to show what he wanted to show, he engaged in forms of creative construction.64 Jay Winter, meanwhile, describes Wegner as being ‘intensely aware that what he showed were the traces of the aftermath of the suffering’. ‘We therefore have no choice but to draw inferences from these terrifying photos as to what happened before’, Winter writes, ‘[a]nd it is there, not in what the photograph shows but in what it does not show that the deepest horror may lie.’65 We begin to be alerted to what might be considered an essential predicament of reading photographs related to the Armenian Genocide, that in circumstances characterized by denial, lack and absence, readings hinge on extrapolations and importations. Building on Nichanian’s theories, Marie-Aude Baronian describes how the ‘nonevent’ of the Armenian Genocide has also become ‘a kind of “non-document”’. With

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destruction and denial, visual representations of the genocide either do not exist or do not circulate, producing a blank space where a public visual repository might otherwise have existed and, furthermore, complicating Armenians’ own access to the catastrophic past. ‘This explains the rather complex relation Armenians have towards images in general’, she writes, continuing: there is, in a way, a constant desire to reconstruct and legitimate the past by any ‘visible’ means available, precisely because the Armenian Catastrophe is characterized by the way it remains unrecorded and unrepresented. Armenians are thus caught in an inextricable archival paradox: they have to produce (visual) evidence precisely because the evidence has been destroyed and negated.66

Armenians, according to Baronian, have come to rely upon the oblique means of private images to connect with and to communicate this most traumatic chapter of their past. This is the image as ‘prosthesis’, operating in place of and as substitute for the missing ‘direct’ image (and clearly chiming with Azoulay’s concept of ‘placeholders’). Baronian analyses the work of particular visual artists, including Atom Egoyan’s A Portrait of Arshile, a short film about inherited memory formulated as an address to Egoyan’s son, named Arshile after the painter. The story of Arshile Gorky’s life is delivered in voice-over to home movie images of the young boy, with the Adoian photograph forming a central plank in that life story, an image that is overtaken by catastrophic events (‘You are named after a man who seven years after the photograph was taken would hold his mother in his arms as she died of starvation’) and around which memory coagulates, Gorky’s own memory and, by implication, a wider collective memory inherited by and circulated among Armenians. Just as Gorky’s story shifts locus in the film, becoming part of wider Armenian experience and narrative, so too might we understand the way the artistic practice in which Egoyan is immersed itself balloons outwards. The process described, of recreation and redeployment, of ‘displaced images that wish to grasp a displaced history, that wish to place this tragic history into a memoryspace’, can be seen as part of wider Armenian interactions with photographs in a space of slippage between public and private. This can be read in Nefissa Naguib’s case study of private Armenian family albums, showing how individual and family narratives come to nestle within wider collective narratives, invariably coloured by the genocide. Such nestling can be quite literal, with private family photographs kept alongside published images, the ‘distressing photographs of human pain’, an interspersal that aids and signifies the diminishment of boundaries between the two.67 It can be taken as another example of the image as a ‘prosthesis’, betraying the desire for visual representation, public images becoming stand-in depictions of the family’s own experiences as well as aspects of a wider commonly remembered past. More interesting still is the adoption of the private photographs of others, with a portrait of an Armenian merchant family, to whom the owner is not related, coming to hold significance for her and the neighbours with whom she views it. It is ‘[a]t a mundane level […] an image folded up to everyday worlds’, while on another

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level ‘it evokes a deep feeling of communal attachments to a shared expressed story of enduring loss’.68 Vernacular photographs come to be adopted as symbols and testaments of a greater history, a history deemed otherwise unrepresented and unrepresentable, and it becomes important to consider the ways in which photographs gain currency and a purchase on collective memory, how they act as the shared reference points that communities cling to and cohere around, locating in them a common understanding of history.69 Yet we must also take time to reflect on what is lost when photographs become generalized symbols of a violent history and a vanished world. Although such discussions are few, dwarfed in number by those that deny Armenians a place, it is apparent that we are dealing with something akin to parallel histories. The people and events, and more particularly the violence, persistently obscured in established histories of photography are found placed at the very heart of ‘Armenian’ accounts. Photographs are read through the concerns of dominant modes of historiography; they are vessels that are emptied and filled in accordance with the foci and blind spots of those modes. On the ‘Armenian’ side there exists a ‘lachrymose conception of history’, to use the term first deployed by Salo Baron in his analyses of Jewish historiography to critique a perceived overemphasis on periods of Jewish suffering, and recently imported into the Armenian sphere in reflection of a similar concern that violence has come to dominate the narration of Armenian history.70 The lachrymose defines through destruction, shedding subjects of agency and achievement. In this way, photography, a field of substantial Armenian endeavours, becomes chiefly the site of their annihilation and their catastrophe. Perhaps more appropriate still, for it seems especially important in the context of viewing photographs, holding implications for the Barthesian mode, would be to introduce Michael André Bernstein’s criticism of ‘apocalyptic history’ and its observable tendency to ‘foreshadow’ the events of the Holocaust, weaving intimations of the catastrophe to come into accounts of pre-Holocaust life.71 Bernstein deals with a form of history that introduces violence where none was present, conjuring it from the future so that it might haunt and rewrite the past. Doomed from the start, and indeed transformed into avatars of doom, lives become robbed of their reality, thus substantially diminishing the possibility that we might achieve meaningful insight into those lives and the world of which they were part. A central implication of the dominance of these modes is that much ‘Armenian’ history has developed its own tunnel and teleology, with the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians occurring as surely, in just as ordained a fashion, as the emergence of the Turkish state in the parallel historiography. It is a history that, hinging on destruction, heads ineluctably towards it, propelled by a sense of inevitability, the decades leading up to 1915 read as one long prelude to ultimate disaster.72 To place photographs ‘in relation to the catastrophic event’ is to place them in relation to a future of which they knew nothing, and to find violence in them is, too often, to bring violence to them through our own knowledge of that future. By doing so, we in effect nullify those images, rendering them silent specimens under glass, generalized signs of their own passing and pastness. To perceive a photograph as an artefact is, as Allan Sekula writes, ‘to reinvent it, to superimpose

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a new meaning on the past, and therefore to obscure or mutate all earlier senses of the object’.73 It might be instructive here to bring in debates on the ethics of viewing images of violence. Such debates have played little role in discussions of Armenian Genocide imagery, for with their underlying proposition, either stated or unstated, of lack, commentaries become concerned with another proposition, the problem of not looking or not being able to look. However, an acknowledgement that vernacular images have become prostheses, placeholders and ersatz depictions of violence necessitates that the field takes on some of these considerations and problematizes the dominant mode of viewing. In this light, we need to consider whether narratives of violence are a form of perpetration. There is surely an accusation to be made against these traumatic stand-ins similar to that raised by Andrea Liss in relation to the ‘abject documentary photographs’ of the Holocaust, that ‘such photographs do not always bring the viewer to look, to really see, nor can they be counted on to create empathetic bonds between the contemporary subject and the person from the unimaginable past’.74 Photographs threaten to become not the sites of engagement with the past but barriers to it. What is shared by the two approaches to photographs – one in which the Armenian past is erased, the other in which it forcefully returns – is a tendency to divorce them from their milieus. After all, the origins of the Adoian photograph are as neglected as those of the Hamidian photographs. The questions asked by Hrag Vartanian about who might have made it and what it tells us about the wider Armenian tradition of studio photography constitute a rare enquiry;75 otherwise, its self-evident ‘truth’ as a product of the forces of Armenian history or their embodiment in the person of Gorky himself have resulted in its own qualities becoming obscured. Thus we find ourselves once again faced with the issue of the loss of context, and it can be argued that there are photographs held in Armenian circles that are just as in need of being re-established within their own histories as the much-studied products of the state. The maker of the Adoian portrait might be grouped with the photographers who contributed to the Abdülhamid albums, placed among the ranks of neglected and invisible provincial practitioners, thus offering another opportunity for photographs, when studied carefully, to act as entry points into the world that produced them and in which they circulated. It is a process that requires us to attend to photographs. And as we turn towards photographs so might we also turn away from the future, for just as there is a virtue in looking so too might there be one in blindness. In order to contemplate properly the people and the photographs of the past, we should close our eyes to what we know about the future.76 If the future does play a role, then it is not the future as we know it to have transpired, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s concept of ‘liquid temporality’ providing a much-needed antidote to retrospection that helps us to consider how photographs ‘show us not only the past in which they were taken but the present and the futures contained in that past, futures that their diverse subjects may have been envisioning’.77 Thus it is their own futures that subjects look towards, those they imagined, anticipated, hoped for, and, yes, feared, but even the feared futures bore no resemblance to what we now recognize as the past, its extremes having been unimaginable for all but a few in the years before 1915. To think about imagined futures and to put the unknown future to

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one side is not to dismiss or diminish the Armenian Genocide, nor is it to shy away from it as an occurrence. Rather it is, as with Michael André Bernstein’s concept of sideshadowing (which similarly muses on other possible futures), to face that history, to confront its ‘human cost […] by reminding us of all that its cominginto-existence made impossible’.78 Above all, however, that human cost is to be addressed by keeping in mind the present moment of photographs and the living world of their making and their circulation. This is to ponder their ‘earlier senses’ before they were reborn as artefacts, to think of their own purposes, qualities and textures, their evidentiary and affective power. They were never meant to be the remnants of the dead and the destroyed, and are not by nature memento mori; they are vestiges, certainly, but vestiges of a different order. As John Berger puts it, ‘the photograph is a memento from a life being lived’.79

An Ottoman Armenian phenomenon Cacoulis’s mount may have invoked the spirit of the early amateurs and their painstaking ‘art’, but the format he employed had utterly changed the medium, turning it into a professional practice of mass-production. Introduced by André Disdéri in the 1850s, the carte de visite was an industrialized format that produced multiple portraits from a single camera exposure.80 Its streamlined system predicated on the formulaic repetition of set poses, props and conventions brought down prices and made photographic portraits accessible to a greater number, producing an explosion of images with the same formal make-up, each one interchangeable with myriad others. This standardization, Deborah Poole explains, made the carte of particular use in long distance communication, helping ‘to shape feelings of community or sameness among metropolitan bourgeoisies, aspiring provincial merchants, and upper- and middle-class colonials scattered around the globe’.81 Sitters surrendered themselves to the levelling patterns of modernity and the production of the generic, uniformly clad and uniformly pictured bourgeois body, the ‘new man’ of the carte de visite.82 In spite of being subjected to generalities, sitters did not see themselves as reduced in stature; quite the reverse, in fact, for photographs served as a status symbol and certificates of subjecthood, the means by which an increasing number could claim a place in the social and political order. Cartes transferred to the mass market the aesthetic conventions of painted portraiture, notably the full-length pose, and allowed photographed individuals to play with identity and slip among the noted figures of the day, such as those royal, political, military and cultural figures who formed the visual hall of honour Disdéri published in regular instalments, his Galerie des contemporains.83 That Galerie shows the way in which, by translating appearances into objects that could be passed from hand to hand, collected and held privately, Disdéri’s format transformed people ‘into portable objects of private devotion’, thus creating ‘a new form of cultism’.84 Geoffrey Batchen is keen to emphasize its ‘sentimental’ aspect, the ‘amazement that can be induced by even the most ordinary and predictable of

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photographs, precisely because of the distinctly physical nature of photography’s connection to its subject’.85 Some of this can be traced in the portrait of Yeghiazarian, where we find complementary and overlapping Western modes, photographic and sartorial codes echoing and reinforcing one another, the framing of the carte de visite but another cloth that clads the modern man and presents him to the world. Photography thus signalled itself as the domain of the Ottoman Empire’s new urban, non-Muslim bourgeois class. Remaining in Trebizond in the form of Leon Surmelian’s recollections of growing up in the city, we find such connotations bound up too in his description of his grandfather’s portrait on display in the family home: ‘Many of the Christian men in those early days still wore the native garb, but my grandfather in the picture was dressed like a European gentleman.’86 He recounts, in addition, his grandfather’s roles as a progressive community leader and owner of the city’s first European-style factory, what is termed a fabrica, a fully-mechanized flour mill. In Trebizond thus, through Yeghiazarian and Surmelian, we see how portraits sat within a wider familiarity with and connection to the Western world; yet at the same time we have strayed from the global levelling effect of photography into a very specific context, how it acted when transplanted into the Armenian realm and specific Armenian lives. The duplicating effect of the lens can mask inherent difference. As a globalized medium, photography repeated its forms across the world, and yet it spoke anew in each place of repetition, redefined by the circles in which it was produced and in which it circulated. ‘Ottoman photography was an Ottoman phenomenon’, is Stephen Sheehi’s vital observation; it ‘must be understood as a product of its own history’.87 He indicates the necessity of situating photography within a particular experience, and we might similarly speak of a photography that was an Ottoman Armenian phenomenon, a product of its own history. Returning to the preponderance of Armenians in photography, in the form of both photographers and sitters, we might recognize the shape of Armenian society as a major developmental factor. Photography emerged as an urban enterprise in sections of the larger commercial centres that we might describe as small Péras, contact zones in miniature where Western visitors – merchants, consuls, missionaries and various others – rubbed shoulders with Ottoman subjects, notably an emerging bourgeois class. That these subjects were chiefly non-Muslims was due to matters of shared culture, including but not restricted to religion; it also hinged on the over-representation of non-Muslims in commerce, owing to their relative predominance in cities and their established entrepreneurial practices, in part the result of them being shut out of other sectors of the Ottoman economy.88 Photography became rooted in these sites of commercial and cultural overlap. It would be too easy, however, to think of Armenians as little involved in this process, the passive recipients of a Western import. In truth, the spread of the medium was indebted to their activity and mobility. The Abdullah Frères studio clearly emerged, as has been seen, from the brothers’ apprenticeship with the German chemist Rabach, and yet it cannot be dissociated from Kevork’s years spent at the Murad Raphaelian school in Venice, Vichen’s work as a painter for the Ottoman court, or the

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brothers’ study of photographic techniques in Paris.89 And the story of the Abdullah Frères flows directly into that of Yessayi Garabedian, a man who would become the Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem and founder of that city’s first photographic studio and school. In 1859, while still a priest at the St James Monastery in Jerusalem, Garabedian spent six months in Constantinople, learning photographic techniques from the Abdullahs (and also quizzing the Austrian ambassador on the new collodion process).90 This begins to tell us something about the Armenian networks of mobility and belonging that played a vital role in their progress as photographers and the spread of the medium in their communities. The Kayseri-born Garabedian was able to establish himself in Jerusalem and to travel to Constantinople because they were cities to which any Ottoman Armenian could belong. Under the millet system, to belong in a place one needed only to belong to one of its communities, meaning that, as Issam Nassar shows, ‘an Armenian who was not born in Jerusalem would have felt at home in the city simply because there was already an Armenian community that would have welcomed him as one of its members’.91 This was not particular to Constantinople and Jerusalem but true across the empire. To be an Ottoman Armenian was to be able to traverse the vast terrain of empire. Constantinople and Jerusalem were major centres of Armenian life and places that Dickinson Jenkins Miller, in his early, pioneering study of Armenians in photography (scholarship that is only now being added to), identifies as being crucial to the passage of photography to the Armenian communities of the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire.92 He also mentions a third source, the Russian Empire, showing that to be an Armenian was to be part of wider networks still. Armenians were spread across the region, their historic homelands straddling imperial and national borders, while a merchant history stretching back centuries meant that they were to be found further afield still in diasporic communities. Armenians, in short, had cemented themselves in a long chain of cities and Armenian life had many ‘centres’; in addition to the Ottoman trading ports of Constantinople and Smyrna (Izmir today), we can point to Tiflis (Tbilisi today) and Baku in the Russian Empire, as well as places of Armenian existence in Europe – notably Venice and, increasingly as the nineteenth century progressed, Paris, London and Manchester. The latter three were all visited by Garabedian in 1863, journeys that allowed him to develop his photographic knowledge further, journeys that were possible in large part because of the existence in those places of Armenian communities.93 He would not have belonged to those places as he might be said to have belonged to Jerusalem via the millet system, but a similar principle of access applied, diasporic connections giving him points of entry into those cities. Carving out a role as agents between cultures, Armenians forged a strong diasporan presence in the sites of contact and nodes of exchange, the urban, cosmopolitan settings of large commercial centres that acted as stations along long-established trade networks.94 In addition to the existence of diasporan communities, the absence of a national centre, in political terms at least, led, in Vahé Oshagan’s reading, to the development among Armenians of a ‘xenophilia’, a proclivity towards the adoption of Western modes.95 They thus became points of reception and onward transmission, interlocutors facilitating the passage

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of commodities, technologies, knowledge and philosophies. Diasporic centres in this way formed their own contact zones, hubs where Armenians who had travelled and been in contact with various cultures came into contact with each other and the wider networks of which they were part, prompting further transmission. The shape of Armenian society thus meant that Armenians were exposed to Western developments and were inclined to adopt and to transfer those developments. Photography stood prominently among these, and Badr El-Hage writes of an Armenian ‘esprit de corps’ aiding the medium’s passage: ‘From the very beginning, when they became integral to the production of photography in the early 1860s, their activity resembled a family of bees building a beehive. Brothers participated in the work. The craft was transferred from fathers to sons, or from one brother to another, or from one family to another by way of marriage.’96 This is quite true, and yet photographic production and the transfer of photographic knowledge was not limited to what Mohsen Yammine, in a similar vein, calls ‘photographer families’.97 It was transferred between families and spread along the lines of Armenian networks, and did so with relative ease, for while the medium had numerous demands – in terms of mechanical apparatus, material supplies, scientific knowledge and technical know-how – it did not require any sort of substantial infrastructure (its spread was aided by but was never wholly reliant upon the century’s advances in transportation and communication technologies). In short, photography seemed to superimpose itself perfectly onto the Armenian world; mobile people who themselves lacked a centre proved to be the perfect instruments and agents of the free-flowing, uncentred medium of photography. Armenians were well placed to take on photography. Yet the nature of Armenian life as detailed here only really accounts for the possibility of the medium’s spread; it does not fully explain why it should have been embraced by and taken root in Armenians communities in the way that it did. Just as we cannot restrict photography to families, we likewise cannot restrict it to photographers. Beyond ‘photographer families’ we might want to speak of ‘photographic people’, a group amongst whom photography found a home because it spoke to their needs, needs stemming from the very fact of their dispersal.98 The camera was an instrument that mapped itself onto the dispersed Armenian world, and in tandem Armenians used it to map their world, to trace its lines and tie it more closely together. Of the innovative technologies of the nineteenth century, it can be argued that it was photography that had the largest presence and most substantial role to play in the daily lives of Ottoman Armenians. The camera was their steamship and their railway; it was how they encountered and made contact with the world beyond their doorsteps. Its importance as a tool of communication for a dispersed people cannot be underestimated, and indeed it acted as a binding agent for many during the numerous great uprootings of the industrial age. Marcus Aurelius Root recognized this fact early on, writing in 1864 that photography’s capacity ‘to draw closer, to strengthen and to perpetuate the ties of kindred, of friendship, and of general respect and regard’ was of special importance during a time in which the ‘exigencies of life […] necessitate the dispersion of relatives, born and reared under the same roof, towards various points of the compass, and often to remote

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distances’.99 Photography sustained novel, long-distance relationships during a time in which friends and families became separated by whole continents. There was a wider Armenian migration afoot during this era, a mobility not only of the bourgeois but of bantoukhds, the sojourners and migrant workers from the provinces who spent years living and working in the same major urban trading centres of the region – chiefly Constantinople, Smyrna and Adana (in the region of Cilicia on the Mediterranean) in the Ottoman Empire and Baku and Tiflis across the Russian border.100 Bantkhdoutioun had long been a part of Armenian life and men of working age had migrated in this way for generations. Yet as the nineteenth century progressed, their numbers grew; importantly, the range of their migrations grew also, and what had been a regional phenomenon took on the aspect of vast dispersal that had characterized the trading diaspora, with the USA becoming a major destination. To these economic migrants must also be added those who left their homes and communities fleeing violence and oppression. Of course, the line between the two was not distinct; Armenians had, since well before the nineteenth century, frequently existed at a nexus of community formations, not only in a trade diaspora but a victim diaspora also, the former at times growing out of the latter, and this was no less the case amid the array of forces at play during the late Ottoman period.101 What might be said, however, is that the victim strands of the diaspora only grew stronger as the violence levelled against Ottoman Armenian communities by the state and its proxies achieved a new intensity.

This was the world of Armenian lives onto which photography mapped itself, with first the carte de visite and later its successor formats. Even with the carte’s departure, the sense of repetitious formula remained as studio photography continued to be built on reiterations and restagings, employing certain consistent tropes and compositions. This is the variety of vernacular we find among Armenians, largely far removed from the inventive, distinctive vernacular that has been traced in other geographical contexts.102 In place of idiosyncrasy, the repetitions of studio portraiture provide familiar rhythms, essentially, as Tina Campt recognizes in mid-twentiethcentury archives of the African diaspora, the structure of a collective language.103 It is a vernacular of certain set modes which, understood and accepted by those who use them, form the basis of a communal system; within this structure, however, the capacity exists for individual actors to present their autonomous performances, for personal tales to be told. This became especially so as the later, larger photographic formats – such as the cabinet card (approximately 16.5 × 10.75 cm) – created more room inside the frame. This amounted to more leeway for photographers and sitters to break with convention, more space for their own narrations, thus extending photography’s subjunctive and sentimental potential. The photograph, now a stage for the individual to assert themselves more forcefully, also pulled in the other direction, for with its extended space it was of a sufficient size to include multiple actors, and so performed both networking and individuating operations. Families, friends, church groups, professional associations, school classes, political parties

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and others can all be found using the photograph as a forum for the expression and enactment of group bonds. As the scope of the photographic frame broadened, so did the scope of the studio. In the late nineteenth century, as might be imagined by the brief history outlined, photography in Armenian circles started to escape its origins, becoming more pluralistic. Studio patrons were no longer confined to the Europeanized trading or fabrica-owning strata of society, while women came to play a greater role, especially as migration emptied the photographic stage of its men. The photographic studio thus becomes a place to consider the variety of Armenian lives, of vital importance if our aim is inclusion. Were we to write a history only of the heavily bourgeois carte de visite in Armenian communities, we might risk producing another exclusionary history and risk, furthermore, reproducing the prevalent anti-Armenian stereotype of the advancing merchant, middleman and comprador, a figure who might have existed in some form but certainly did not represent any great majority of Armenians.104 At the same time, there is a danger that the broadening scope of photography – along with the very fact that we write against exclusionary histories – fools us into believing that ours is indeed an inclusive history. We must contend with the fact that the camera was partial; it could never fully divorce itself from its roots and retained its preference for the monied and the male – ‘the portrait of the gentleman’ had cemented itself, as Christopher Pinney writes, as the ‘default setting of nineteenth-century photographic apparatus’.105 Despite the doors of the studio opening ever wider, there were always those locked out. Therefore, while we might speak of a subjunctive potential, photographs remain to a certain extent reflective of an existing social hierarchy, being in this way ‘sociograms’, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term.106 Geography was always a factor shaping Armenian lives and it becomes necessary to be attuned to the particularities of place (especially given the flattening effect of the Abdülhamid albums) and to anchor photographs in those particularities. The character of places, their daily concerns and activities, had a great bearing on the nature of their photographic production. As we examine Erzurum, Harput and Van, there emerge specific concerns relating to, respectively, education, migration and politics. The places in question are not unique in these concerns and stand instead as accentuated instances of what can be found informing photography across the Ottoman Armenian world; indeed, they can be found at work, to one degree of another, in each of the regions of this study and above all it is migration that comes to dominate – or mobility – human movement feeding, informing and propelling photographs. It is a mobility that ensures that, while we address three specific sites of photography, we also address the many places with which they communicated. Our subject becomes a complex and diverse sphere of photographs in circulation within and between places of Armenian habitation, in the historic homelands and far removed from them, and at work in specific circumstances, the photograph everywhere an act, an image and an object that gathered people together and held them fast to one another. Mobility thus pertains as much to photographs as to people, the two mirroring one another. There lies a suggestion of this in Cacoulis’s carte de visite as its

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references to two places of origin – Trebizond (the photograph) and Garin/Erzurum (Yeghiazarian himself) – start to speak of movement and spatial dislocation. The carte proposes itself as a memento of a person away from his home, either working in Trebizond or, what might be more likely, passing through that city on his way to some more distant place via the Black Sea steamers. It is because he travels, we might assume, that the photograph exists, indeed that the photograph itself travels. The act of sitting for the portrait, inscribing it and sending it to his mother might be read as a gesture of love on Yeghiazarian’s part; in turn, he seems to ask for the photograph to be looked at, kept and touched, in short to act as a token of her love for him. After all, it is to his ‘all-loving mother’ that Yeghiazarian addresses his portrait; the love, as he assigns it, is hers. The photograph has the potential to be for both of them a manifestation of their attachment to the other and a concrete link that binds them together. The actions that might be performed around the picture, actions that seem to be anticipated and baked into the making of the picture, underline the importance of materiality and the need to address photographs as physical objects. It is not simply in people’s eyes that photographs take on significance but also in their hands. Action and gesture trigger the work of photographs, transforming them, as Margaret Olin writes, ‘into presences that populate the world like people and act within it to connect people’.107 Photographs take on lives of their own, or take on the lives of others, becoming fetishes and talismans, imbued with a power that at times borders on the mystical. Remaining in Trebizond, we find Leon Surmelian describing how, upon the death of his uncle, the body is laid out in the family home in the sunny upstairs room where his (Surmelian’s) grandfather’s picture is on display. This already tells us much about the place of the portrait in everyday life, positioned in what is evidently a room important to the family, the site of rites and rituals, for which the picture is a kind of participant or witness. Not on the occasion of the wake, however, for on that day the portrait is covered with black gauze so that the grandfather cannot see the body of his dead son.108 The contrast is stark; the portrait on the wall has life where the human body below has none. It stands as an instance of what Walter Benjamin saw as the meeting of opposites, the precision of modern technology producing a magical effect.109 The portrait is more than an image, more than an object even; it is an incarnation, to all intents and purposes the man himself. Perhaps reincarnation would be more apt, for Surmelian informs the reader that his grandfather is dead, murdered, serving as a reminder, a warning perhaps, that violence cannot be removed from our considerations.

‘It is in the nature of historical records to transmit to posterity the memory of extraordinary events, rather than of the ordinary flow of life’, writes Salo Baron, striving for a reconfigured form of history that prioritizes the latter over the former.110 In reality, however, the dividing line between ‘extraordinary events’ and ‘the ordinary flow of life’ was not strictly delineated, not, at least, for many Ottoman Armenians in an era that witnessed the ‘banalization’ of state

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violence.111 For them, violence was not a discrete aberration that flared briefly between periods of peace but instead increasingly an aspect of the everyday – experienced amidst and as part of the ‘ordinary flow of life’.112 Yet few Armenianmade photographs actually attempt to depict violence directly. We might speak, as Stuart Hall does in the context of black settlement in Britain in the 1950s, of there being a deceptive aspect to the ordered appearances of photographic portraits. Something has been ‘constructed out’, a history that lies ‘beyond the frame’. ‘Every photograph’, he writes, ‘is a structure of “presences” (what is represented, in a definite way) and “absences” (what is unsaid, or unsayable, against which what is there “represents”).’113 Thus the project of contextualization does, to a certain extent, require the acknowledgement of histories that photographs themselves did not acknowledge. This is not to contradict the central stipulation that genocidal violence be excluded from our readings; it is the unknowns of the future that ought to be held in abeyance, not what is known in the present day of the photograph but goes unrepresented. As it was with the Abdülhamid albums, we find ourselves needing to look to the margins, to take into account those events and forces outside the frame that were a reality for those inside the frame. Such interventions must remain on the level of the appropriate, bringing to bear on the photograph only what would have been part of the knowledge and experience of those involved, what they themselves would have understood of the world they lived in. We also at times witness the way in which violence, although it might not have been a consideration in the making of a photograph, creeps in, intruding upon it as surely as it intrudes upon lives, supposedly ‘ordinary’ objects becoming suffused with calamity for those that look upon them. We find this in Surmelian’s account, his thoughts moving swiftly in a stream of consciousness from the dress of his grandfather in the image to the death of his grandfather in a massacre, and then on further to the appropriation of the family fabrica.114 There might again be the risk of contradiction, for at work here, with Surmelian projecting onto the portrait the later death of its sitter, is a form of the retrospective gaze whose employment I argue against. Yet here it is the retrospective gaze of an Ottoman Armenian, one that existed in the moment and in the context of the pre-genocide Ottoman Armenian world he inhabited (Surmelian writes in the guise of, and with the outlook of, the young boy that he was). Nevertheless, the passage does highlight the semantic mobility that is just as much a feature of photographs as physical mobility, with new contexts and circumstances of viewing giving rise to new readings.115 It intimates, further, at the way in which photographs will shift in the aftermath of the genocide. To pursue the ‘earlier senses’ of photographs is not to deny this aspect of photographs or its particular importance in Armenian circles; rather, it is to accept that photographs had existences before the world changed and to believe that by understanding those existences we might take a step towards understanding that pre-genocide world. That said, the admittance of the genocide into our considerations can only be deferred, not put off entirely. It must in due course be arrived at as we follow our histories through and learn what became of photographers and the communities that they pictured, and what the events meant for people’s relationships to and

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interactions with photographs. Perhaps, however, it is no arrival at all; perhaps it is a delusion to believe we can ever depart from cataclysm. The genocide is, in truth, with us all along. It is a tumult whose reverberations cannot so easily be contained by simple chronological sequence, and even before we reach 1915, and even as we endeavour not to let it overwhelm us, we must contend with its legacy. Its presence can be felt with every missing detail, for it seems impossible to dwell on incomplete histories without an awareness of why those histories are incomplete. Similarly, it is there in the absence of pictures, in the limited number of photographic sources available to us, in stark contrast to the wealth of pictures that studios created. Behind every photograph that has survived and that we are able to look upon, we must know that there stand many invisible others, born of the same places and born of the same language. The survivor objects in this way become placeholders for innumerable counterparts that have been lost to violence, that have vanished without trace. This does not, however, define our history, nor does it define our objects. Photographs are inherently unresolved, ripe always for renegotiation. The expanse of the frame that gave freedom to photographers and sitters imparts the same to us; unconstrained, our eyes, hands and minds can roam at will (led by that ‘unruly desire’ of which Benjamin writes). These are the actions that can reactivate photographs. We can uncover what has been entrusted to photographs and what has been seen in them, even what has not been seen in them, what only appears to us now with repeated viewings, for there remains an element of the random, with people, objects and minutiae encroaching or behaving in a manner unintended and perhaps unobserved at the time.116 To recognize such details now can be to place ourselves in a certain relationship to the past, to achieve a perspective from which we examine not its lingering traces but its own present day unfolding. When photographs are approached with openness, curiosity and humility, we find nestled within them pieces of a world and the capacity for something of that world to return and to live for a moment before us. Ariella Azoulay urges us to abandon the outlook that positions photographed subjects as the remote objects of study and to employ instead ‘a present continuous mode with those considered “past”’.117 The act of viewing becomes about opening up a shared space of connection, those who dwell in photographs speaking to us as we might speak to them. Photographs thus possess the capacity to bring the past to life rather than leading it to its death; they need not be solely the sites of loss, lack and lachrymosity, for they also offer opportunities for retrieval, engagement and communion. Today they ask to perform still the roles they were made for years ago, to act within conversations and exchanges, to bring people together, to bind the world.

Chapter 3 B E G I N N I N G I N E R Z U RUM

The photographer in Erzurum hadn’t received adequate instructions, or else he hadn’t properly understood those he had been given. The traces of the failure and confusion would be on display ever after in the mammoth collection of photographs bearing the sultan’s seal, the Erzurum portraits carrying small, curious details (Figure 3.1). Here, a shimmering space at the centre of the image witnesses the evaporation of studio props. To the left of a soft demarcation running vertically between the two standing figures, a chair leg stands alone, the rest of the seat disappearing into the backdrop, consumed by a columned balustrade that is composed of paint and yet seems to belong to a higher order of reality; to the right of the line, a fragment of a plinth receives the same treatment, becoming similarly isolated as the rest of its structure vanishes. From this central hybrid chair-plinth object, the ghostly zone rises up the centre of the image to what appears to be a tear in the upper section of the backdrop; that this form echoes the folded drapes to the right becomes apparent. Indeed, all these jarring details are phantasmic repetitions; what appears piecemeal, half-faded, at the centre of the frame is seen complete at its edges; there chair, plinth and curtain stand intact and whole. The recurrences reveal the photograph to be a constructed composite. The photographer evidently pictured his student subjects not in pairs, as did other photographers commissioned for the albums, but individually. The mistake was rectified later by another pair of hands in Constantinople, hands plying their trade in one of the capital’s famous studios, hands that brought the individual portraits together, grafting them onto one another so that they conformed to the overachieving compositional format of the albums. It was a process aided by the fact that the students, despite being pictured separately, were posed in the same manner, their forms echoing each other almost perfectly, and positioned in near exact relation not only to the photographer’s props and backdrop, but also to the small mounds of the snow that lie at their feet, the deposits of one of Erzurum’s notorious long winters. With this must surely come a recognition of, on the one hand, the methodical skill of the photographer and, on the other, his reliance upon a standardized, repetitive studio practice. In the final album image, the students are indeed presented in pairs, each rigid stance echoing the other in the frame,

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Figure 3.1  Uncredited photographer. Students, Imperial High School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Figure 3.1 (detail).

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the very image of uniformity. The composite photograph now provides, in quite a literal way, an indication of the Abdülhamid albums as a construction, the work of many practitioners, brought together and ordered by a central organizing impetus to project the desired image of empire. It contains, at the same time, a note of the unique, for that lingering central seam draws our eye to the particularities of the scene, suggesting itself as a loose thread that might be pulled upon and followed back to a provincial studio to learn what lies behind the careful image of order.

Arriving in Erzurum Many of those travelling to Erzurum would have done so via the 200 miles of road that wound their way from the port of Trebizond.1 An ancient trade route, it had started to experience a significant revival in the 1830s thanks largely to a British desire to develop a shorter route to Iran and the advent of the steamship service between Trebizond and Constantinople.2 The road would have been shared with pack animals laden with raw materials from Tebriz or commercial goods from Europe, the main users of this important stretch of commercial highway.3 Passing through the towns of Gumushane and Baiburt, it finally led to Erzurum, a city disparaged by many travellers upon their arrival, such as Sir Robert Graves, the British consul there in the 1890s, who declared that ‘[w]ild and picturesque though the surrounding scenery may be, the city itself, from whatever point one views it, is sombre and unattractive’.4 Graves arrived via the Erzinjan Gate, one of four main gates in the new ramparted outer walls of the city built in the period of peace between 1855 and 1877. Erzurum, no longer a small walled city and citadel contained by Byzantine walls, had embraced its extramural suburbs as well as vacant surrounding sites in order to create a modern incorporated city space.5 Here in the western part of the city, between the Erzinjan Gate and the Harput Gate in the south-western section of the wall, the military high school was to be found, part of a great expansion in military education first prompted by the conflict in the Balkans and later hastened in the wake of defeat to the Russians in 1878.6 The school exterior was photographed in the early 1890s for the Abdülhamid albums. Student portraits were created too, but it cannot be said whether these were the result of the commissioned photographer bringing his props and backdrop to the school or of the high school students travelling to his studio; either way, the making of the photographs necessitated journeys across the city. The Armenian quarters lay on the northern side of town, what had previously been suburbs, first established during times when Christians were forbidden from dwelling within city walls.7 They were now, with the expansion of urban space, within the city walls and part of Erzurum proper, lying in proximity to the Olti Gate and its road to the newly Russian province of Kars, along which thousands of Armenians had joined the retreating Russian army in 1878. Here in these quarters was to be found the Armenian church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, and the marketplaces and schools of the community. Notwithstanding its forays to other parts of the city, it was this north-eastern section of Erzurum that acted as the

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primary site for photographic activity. In particular, our focus is on a sweep of the city, a curve from the north to the east where the Armenian quarters met and merged with the section of foreign presence, the contact zone of Erzurum, its own little Péra that helped to make the city one of the most cosmopolitan in the region.8 Other descriptions of the city find here precisely those qualities that some thought to be lacking. Russian Armenian intellectual A-Do (Hovhannes Ter Martirosian) assigns a general beauty to Erzurum, adding that ‘a few streets even give the impression of a European city’ (hastily adding, however, that it is an impression based on comparison with other cities in the region that he had journeyed through).9 The busy Gumruk road is no doubt one of the streets to which A-Do refers. Wide enough to accommodate caravans arriving via the Tebriz gate in the eastern wall, the Gumruk road was an important artery and much of the infrastructure of this commercial hub was to be found around it in the district known as Gümrüğün Yedeve, including the inns, khans and foreign consulates. The latter played a particular role in the lives of Christian communities; having secured the right to protect their co-religionists in the Ottoman Empire, the foreign powers expanded their roles of guardianship over the course of the nineteenth century to cover the right to intervene on their behalf and to set up schools for their education.10 The French, Russians, Austrians and British all had a presence in this part of Erzurum, involving varying levels of consular, missionary and educational work. So too was there an unofficial American presence, with a station of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), established in the city in 1839 and cemented with the building of an Evangelical church, referred to as Zhoghovaran (meeting place) by local Armenians, off the Gumruk road in 1847.11 It was this north-eastern part of the city where, without doubt, the photographer commissioned for the Abdülhamid albums was to be found, and seemingly a high proportion of his clientele as well, such an Armenian student who poses for a carte de visite portrait in the 1880s, a photograph that becomes valuable as a typical product of this studio (Figure 3.2). That we are in the same studio is clear from the number of props and aspects of décor that correspond exactly to what we see in the later Hamidian photographs: the plinth, chair, curtain tassels, and even rush matting, here unsullied by snow. Other parallels, meanwhile, are evident in matters of pose and composition, one of the few discernible differences being the doubling that has been imposed on the high school students. Once we make adjustments to the Hamidian photographs, thereby ‘returning’ them to their constituent parts, they can be more precisely mapped onto the photograph of the Armenian student and thus recognized as closely corresponding items (Figure 3.3). Our subjects each stand there, framed by the same décor as they are framed by the same lens. Some differences persist; for example, there is no sign in his work of the state of the Erzurum photographer’s usual habit (in apparent mimicry of Disdéri’s perennial penchant for the same) of posing subjects with a hand or elbow resting on the studio plinth.12 The Hamidian students instead stand to attention, ready to be inspected by the sultan. Nevertheless, the plinth remains, and remains, in part, as a place of display. The book(s) laid on a table or pedestal is one the format’s

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central tropes. In the military high school photograph, they accompany the figure on the left; the figure on the right would, of course, have been pictured with books as well, as suggested by the section of plinth still just about visible by his foot, only the widest portion of its base surviving the photographic stitching process. The fact that in the final photograph the students share the books suggests those props as the generic feature that they are. They share the books – and other props – with each other and indeed with myriad others photographed by the same photographer in the same studio space (the book that the Armenian student places his hand upon is likely one of the very same seen in the Hamidian photographs). Books, although presented as particularizing, characterizing features, are in fact particular to no one and serve in the end only to characterize the form of photography at work.13 Restored to individual status, the state photographs can be clearly identified as belonging to the carte de visite tradition, their modern vision thus having a clear, demonstrable basis in studio practice. Our comparison supports Sheehi’s assertion that the Hamidian project echoes the homogenizing gaze of the carte de visite, the ‘genetic patterns of military officials, cadets, schoolchildren, clerics, and government officials […] repetitiously produced’.14 What the albums utilized was not simply the photographic modes of the Western world but those of local and regional Ottoman studios, which had domesticated those modes and made them a part of their daily practices. Indeed, the visual vocabulary in use in the Abdülhamid albums might have been new to the state but it can be seen to have been in use, at least in this particular studio in Erzurum, for a number of years before the photographer applied it in his work for that official commission. And with regards that photographer, our comparison confirms how closely he adhered, even when working on a unique photographic project for the state, to his standardized, repetitious studio practice; indeed, that adherence to formula lies at the very heart of the carte de visite, its generalized modes finding perpetual employment regardless of the particulars of the task in hand and the specificities of the subjects standing before the lens. Writing of the Mediterranean context at this time, Michèle Hannoosh describes carte de visite photography as ‘a homogenising art, the studio a mixed space’ through which diverse sitters passed, all to be treated and pictured in the same manner; ‘props said little, or even nothing, about the identity of the sitter, but this weak meaning meant precisely that they became shared and exchangeable objects, ones which interacted with, and thus linked, the various people who were photographed with them, and who became “interchangeable” themselves’.15 However, in Erzurum this is only true to a limited degree. Military students are proposed as being interchangeable with each other within their state-sponsored milieu; this interchangeability does not extend to the other subjects depicted by the photographer within the same conventions. An equivalence with such people was neither intended nor desired by a project that professed a new rigidity and centrality of state identity. Similarly, there are limits to photography’s provision of ‘a common, shared experience to people of different backgrounds and milieux’.16 That the products of these experiences shared a visual language does not equate to the studio experience itself being common to all.

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Figure 3.2  Uncredited photographer. Student, Erzurum, 1880s. Collection of the author.

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Figure 3.3  Uncredited photographer. (Altered version of) Students, Imperial High School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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For all the talk of the flattening effect of the carte de visite, it is perhaps not his subjects but the photographer himself who stands most at risk of disappearing into anonymity. His presence can be felt in the carte of the Armenian student, for while André Disdéri’s carte de visite format promised regularity and inaugurated the era of industrialized photography, as practised here it still carries signs of the handmade, with small peculiarities and imperfections in evidence. The print has been cut by hand, its gently undulating edges lying in contrast to the ruled lines adorning the card’s margin; and straight though those ruled lines may be, they have clearly been applied by hand also, the ink running first thick and then thin, pooling in the corners where they meet and sometimes overrun one another. Beyond these small vestigial signs of his activity, however, there is little trace of the imagemaker, the mounts of his early portraits being devoid of any identifying stamps or markings. The backdrop similarly fails to provide clues or lend character, for in the early days of the studio’s existence a plain cloth is in use. It takes a number of years before we see the appearance of the painted features, and these seem to arrive incrementally – a portrait of a Laz man, for example, with familiar props and pose on display, shows the cloth now adorned but adorned with balustrade only, its other key distinguishing feature of the gnarled tree absent (Figure 3.4). In time, too, text emerges on the mounts, and turning over this print we find the discrete inked stamp with which the photographer announces himself simply with the words: PHOTOGRAPHER M. G. PAPAZIAN ERZEROUM. A profession, a name, a city; Papazian, on present evidence, certainly belongs among those photographers who have left scant trace. And yet even in the space of a few words we find certain intimations of a life, for it is striking to find in the typically multilingual territory of the photographer’s mount (as witnessed already in Cacoulis’s work, with its pronouncements in Greek and French) Papazian presenting himself in only one language, and for that one language to be not of the region but instead English. The image itself, a photographic ‘type’ of the sort popular among visitors, and the fact that this print is to be found in the archive of ABCFM missionary Royal M. Cole, contribute to a sense of a photographer who, at the very least, was comfortable operating among Erzurum’s foreign contingent. That said, it does seem to be something of a truism to say that photographers in the city worked amongst the foreign residents and visitors. Papazian was one of the earliest, but others followed, playing a similar role, such as the Voskertchian Frères who had a studio on Fenerji Street in the vicinity of Gumruk and near the French consulate and French lycée. They likewise are said to have had their clientele amongst the foreign traders, consular officials and missionaries, those people who brought with them a readymade cultural propensity to have photographs made and the capital to do so.17 But a domestic clientele was also important to the city’s photographers. The ‘well-known painter and photographer’ Haroutiun Der Raphaelian is said to have been a recipient of commissions from military and state officials.18 As a military centre, Erzurum was one of the few places in the Ottoman East where the extraction of taxes by central government was accompanied by local expenditure; the boost to the local economy provided by the presence of the Fourth Army was no doubt felt in part by the photographers of the city.19 And

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Figure 3.4  M.G. Papazian. Laz man, Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The Zoryan Institute, Toronto.

then there was the emerging middle class of professionals, artisans and merchants, many of whom, like the wealthier people of property in the city, were Armenian. This, however, risks a reductive approach to identity, one in which we ourselves compartmentalize people into distinct groups in the manner of photographic ‘types’. The very essence of these small Péras, and the small Péra of Erzurum was no different, was that they existed as more nuanced and fluid zones of identity. They were not simply where people from different backgrounds met and became involved in processes of exchange, but where identities themselves mingled, merged and took on new complexions. Royal M. Cole’s purchase – perhaps even commission – of the image of the Laz indicates an acceptance of the essential premise of this form of image-making, as does his own annotations in pencil on the reverse: ‘Dress of the Lazes found in the mts [mountains] near Trebizond. They are very good gardeners + sometimes robbers.’ Yet the clear delineations of identity it proposes run counter to aspects of his own life, with Owen Miller proposing missionaries as ‘American-Ottomans’ rather than colonial outsiders, with some being born in the empire, others acculturated over decades in residence.20 Cole was stationed in Erzurum for thirty years (between 1868 and 1898 and thereafter in Bitlis) and was delivering sermons in Armenian after only a few months there.21 And of course, his very business in this part of the world was

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to bring about changes in identity. Other portraits by Papazian in the Cole archive appear to show Armenian converts to Protestantism with some level of continuing involvement with the mission. Could something similar be said of Papazian? Can he, too, be placed among these transcultural figures? His English-language mount and the photographs of his that we can trace suggest at the very least a firm level of contact with English-speaking Erzurum, if not something more complicated. Indeed, in time, family connections to the American mission and Protestant church do emerge, but perhaps all we can do at present is to place Papazian – Movses Papazian as we learn his name to be – in close physical rather than cultural proximity, as attested to when he photographs the city from the roof of one of the taller buildings in this part of town, looking southwards towards the citadel and the mountains beyond (Figure 3.5). Out of sight below are the streets through which Papazian’s clients would have travelled, including Garnetsi Harry Hekimian, a local doctor with a medical practice in the Gol Bashi neighbourhood, adjacent to the Gümrüğün Yedeve district whose foreign consulates and schools kept him supplied with patients.22 His portrait, as he poses with two colleagues, an unidentified Greek doctor and a Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, forms a strong advertisement for the cosmopolitan nature of this section of Erzurum and the studio as a ‘mixed space’ (Figure 3.6). It is also a portrait that shows the transition of the carte de visite formula as the picture plane expands. The carte, tight in composition and simple in design, most often presenting a single individual, gives way to larger scenes that both replicate and complicate its language. Hekimian would surely have been weighed down as he ventured through those Erzurum streets, for the medical array on display is almost certainly his own. Unlike the generic books in other photographs by Papazian, props that perpetually resided in the studio and were called upon for visual effect alone, the skeletal exhibit here, on the very same plinth employed for the literary displays, carries far more specificity and speaks of origins beyond the studio. It endeavours thus to say something particular about its sitters. Yet photographs adhere to formats even as they stray from them. Poses are now duplicated inside the frame, the seated figures echoing one another, each man on the left with his right arm extended, seemingly caught in the act of writing on the board that he has propped on his right leg. In this and in the display, personalized although it is, we can readily associate the picture with the wider portraiture of the professional classes, divided into subsets and subgenres, including medical portraiture, with their own tropes. Indeed, for a related display we need look no further than the Hamidian albums. Hekimian’s array shares its essence with the display in the Abdullah Frères photograph of the Imperial Civil Medical School in Constantinople and works towards the same ends, advertising its sitters as men of learning, of modern scientific knowledge (Figure 3.7). Helpfully, the Constantinople class portrait announces itself as operating within a particular photographic mode and its own traditions and routines. The pictures on the wall behind are previous class portraits, brought outside for the occasion, which can be recognized as adhering to the same format of rows of students with a table display at the front. Thus the scene being pictured

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Figure 3.5  M.G. Papazian. View from the north-east of Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The Zoryan Institute, Toronto.

that day is not a unique occurrence staged specifically for the albums but rather a regular event, annual perhaps, with the resultant photograph being destined for a life inside the walls it pictures. Like the pre-existing views of Constantinople co-opted into the albums, school photographs too – at least those like this one, showing classes rather than pairs of students – were dragged from their typical habitats and inserted into the sultan’s catalogue of empire. The linking of these two photographs becomes more pertinent still when we learn that the School of Medicine is Hekimian’s alma mater.23 Considering the regularity of photography at the school, he would have almost certainly taken part in such a class picture. It raises the prospect that sitters, as well as photographers, replicate photographic conventions; those in Papazian’s photograph, or Hekimian at the very least, were very likely acting in accordance with their own experience, operating and cooperating within the realms of known and understood photographic tropes and formats. There is also, of course, the possibility that Hekimian had not simply posed for a picture like that which appears in the Hamidian albums but had been

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Figure 3.6  M.G. Papazian. Harry Hekimian with an unidentified Greek doctor and Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, Erzurum, 1890s. Garin Compatriotic Union Records (Collection 284). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

part of that very scene. For most of the school’s existence, the bulk of the student and faculty bodies had been made up of non-Muslims, and it remained a place of subjects from diverse imperial backgrounds.24 It might therefore still be possible to locate in some of the Hamidian photographs an older idea of empire, one that still existed even if, like the corpse laid out before the class at the School of Medicine, it was in the process of being dismembered.

Under Observation Thinking of these medical professionals and the resonances between their pictures, a striking irony presents itself: that the Abdülhamid albums, with their desire to put a modernizing face on the empire, to communicate ‘what progress has been made in literature and science’, should cut out a section of society that perhaps lay closest to modernizing processes. But therein lay the problem, for theirs was held to be a

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Figure 3.7  Abdullah Frères. A group photograph of the students and the teachers of the Mekteb-l Tıbbiye-yi Mülkiye (Civil Medical School), Constantinople, 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

form of modernity too closely imbricated with external forces, not an ‘Ottoman modernity’ at all (indeed, ‘Ottoman modernity’ in part responded to and targeted the social and economic advancement of non-Muslims). This association accounts, too, for the way foreign schools became a great focus and concern for the state. They represented the foothold that rival powers had established in the empire, a peculiar form of colonial intrusion that was perceived as having a deleterious effect on students from the Ottoman millets. On one level, the schools were seen as the sites of unfair advantage, but another means by which Ottoman Christians, with the aid of foreign backers, advanced ahead of their Muslim counterparts. On another, they were active sources of nationalist sentiment and sedition. Missionary schools, not simply in the Ottoman East but across the empire, were viewed ‘to be ubiquitous, well financed, intent on undermining the authority of the state and the allegiance of its subjects, and, worst of all, successful’.25 There is an element of truth to this, for the missionary presence, the American presence above all, was certainly responsible in part for the cultivation of national awareness among Armenians. It was one of the nodes by which Western ideas were entering the empire, giving rise to a sense of identity among Armenians that hinged not on religion but on an understanding of a wider shared culture and a revived interest

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in the Armenian past; equally, there was a sense of connection with people beyond their homelands and outside their diasporic networks, a growing feeling of affinity with the Western world. Yet the American missionaries, by and large, tried not to involve themselves in what they deemed to be Ottoman internal affairs, and as they steered clear of politics they encouraged their students to do the same. What might be said is that the very fact of them being the products of a democratic republican society made it inevitable that theirs would be a disruptive presence.26 Armenians came under scrutiny during this era, above all those involved in education and those in contact with foreigners, with there of course being frequent confluence between the two. One case involves the detention in April 1888 of Abraham Seklemian, the principal of Erzurum’s American Protestant High School for Boys, the Masyats Varzharan. Accused of being involved in a conspiracy against the sultan’s ‘fatherly’ government, Seklemian was arrested one morning while teaching his class at the school and taken to the central prison. His description of the cell in which he was held gives us a good impression of recent events around Erzurum and the mood in the city at the time. Looking at the Kurds with whom he shares the space, he wonders if they are the ones responsible for recent attacks on Armenians, notably the murder of thirteen boys two months previously. They are attacks that he believes will go unpunished, for whatever charges his fellow inmates have been detained on, he is certain that they do not relate to assaults on Armenians. Meanwhile, he dwells on a photograph of his fiancée Magdaline, living at that time in Adapazar, near to Constantinople in the Marmara region of the empire. It is a photograph that begins to suggest the material lives of studio photographs such as those made by Papazian, the way in which they could be brought to life through the daily actions of those who held them close. That the portrait should have been with him during a typical day’s teaching tells us something of its role in Seklemian’s life, regularly kept close to him in his pocket, carefully wrapped in paper to keep it safe. It is evidently a private devotional object, both a proxy for and an extension of his betrothed. The sense that the photograph is imbued with the very life of his fiancée seems to become only more intense in the difficult surroundings of the prison, with Seklemian recalling in his memoirs: ‘If Magdaline only knew into what a place I was carrying her, who knows how many tears she would shed!’27 When it is broken in half by warders, the damage is taken by Seklemian to be an ill omen, carrying a dark foreboding of his fate and a sign of what he pictures to be Magdaline’s deep sadness at his imprisonment. And yet his response is as splintered as the photograph itself. Even in its broken state, it remains an image of his beloved and carries a connection to her and to another life, allowing him to look towards a different future; just as he imagines her weeping, he also pictures her happy, ‘joyfully dreaming beautiful dreams’ and planning their future lives together. In its ‘liquid temporality’, the photograph binds the couple together in the present moment while looking ahead, expressing a sense of hope for the world to come. Portraits of betrotheds, and the wedding portraits that they propel themselves towards, are among the sites par excellence for such forwardlooking glances, as are another form of portrait, one with which Seklemian would have been familiar – the school photograph.

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The new military high school in Erzurum and its sister institutions established that same year, 1881, in other key cities of the region, including Erzinjan and Trebizond, and indeed across the empire, were designed to contend with the empire’s military woes. They formed part, furthermore, of an expanding educational network that sought to effect wider changes in the Ottoman populace in an era of internal political opposition and perceived subversion. The Hamidian school system, at military and civilian levels, was developed as a response to perceived Western encroachment enacted via schools like Seklemian’s, the new state schools intended as counterweights to and bulwarks against the foreign presence. The system’s ‘conflicted task’ was to reinvigorate state education through selectively appropriating Western systems and methods for its own ends, namely instilling the values of the central state.28 The parallels are clear; the political use of the camera was but part of a wider pattern, photography one more mode adopted and adapted for Ottoman purposes. The schools that came under scrutiny at this time included the state’s own, brought about by a magnification of Abdülhamid’s autocratic tendencies. The central object of loyalty in the patterns of allegiance inculcated by these schools morphed from the state to the sultan himself. At the same time, students became the focus of increased surveillance.29 In these circumstances, it is difficult not to imagine photography as part of the inspection process. Indeed, returning to the already mentioned ‘panoptic effect’, Wendy Shaw suggests that ‘those in the photographs and those in charge of the spaces and events they document knew that the eye of the sultan, as represented by the camera, was evaluating their work as well as their participation in the empire-wide project of modernization’. Viewed thus, photography becomes entwined with other surveillance systems; Shaw sees a direct link between it and the network of spies in operation throughout the empire, for like them ‘the camera served as the roving eye of the sultan’.30 This, then, is one means by which we start to understand differences in photographic experiences. It might seem on the surface, considering the close visual resonances between their portraits, that a student from the military high school might have had the same experience in the studio as a student from an Armenian school (see Figs 3.2 and 3.3). After all, they were similarly posed in the same studio space, the same props surrounding them; and yet one apparently saw Sultan Abdülhamid before them, the other Movses Papazian. At the same time, perhaps even the assumption that one saw Papazian is erroneous. After all, the Armenian student might have similarly imagined upon him the scrutinizing gaze of his photograph’s eventual intended viewer, thus conjuring his own spectre in the studio; his mother, perhaps, as it was for Yeghiazarian in Trebizond, and who is to say that that is a figure any less powerful than the sultan? Once again, the photographer seems to recede into anonymity, becoming a blank space in his own studio. Outside in the city, however, it might have been quite a different matter. A telling account of April 1893, residing in the Ottoman archives, suggests the way in which photographers came to stand out, especially in sites considered sensitive. Dating from approximately the same period during which Papazian would have been working on the Abdülhamid

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albums, it is an account that perhaps relates to another state commission and perhaps even involves Papazian himself, although the photographer in question is not identified. A letter of complaint forwarded by ‘the cannoneer in charge of inspection and repair of weaponry of Fourth Imperial Army’ recounts how a Christian photographer was observed taking photographs at the Chifte Minare, a Seljuk-era building in the citadel that housed a theological school and a military munitions store. Insisting that this was against the rules laid down by the governor of Erzurum, the complainant recounts having the local police intervene, so that only ‘the tower’s door, deemed to be a relic, was photographed, instead of the entire weaponry building’. It is evident that the problem pertained specifically to the photographer’s identity and the problematic associations that this had in the mind of the complainant. If military sites must be photographed, he writes, then the ‘photographers should be from among the loyal subjects’. Even then, he continues, a photographer should only be allowed to work under the supervision of a soldier, and once prints have been produced the glass plate negatives should be destroyed to ensure no further are made. The writer ends the missive on a note of regret and added suspicion, suggesting that rules are not being properly followed and that it is likely illicit photography is taking place at other military sites.31 It is strange to come across accounts like this, running as they do against the flow of the histories we read. The photographers regularly rendered invisible in histories of photography in the Ottoman Empire are in certain contemporary sources not simply visible but highly visible. Already the target of suspicion, their use of the camera makes them stand out all the more, for the apparatus forms in their hands a potentially dangerous tool of surveillance. We are given the suggestion of power having reason to fear the camera and left with the associated image of an Armenian photographer under the watchful gaze of the state.32 This, it would seem, was another ‘panoptic effect’ at work, one in truth more demonstrable than the presumed surveillance of state students by the camera on behalf of the sultan. It is not that the lens observes but rather that the lens finds itself observed. Did the high school students really feel themselves being watched by the sultan or were they in fact the watchers, their eyes always on the photographer?

At the Sanasarian Official concerns about photography did not solely relate to the activities of Ottoman Christians. Shortly after the unnamed photographer was given his police escort at the Chifte Minare, the British traveller H.F.B. Lynch, involved in the production of his huge Armenian survey project, encountered similar problems at the very same site (he had likewise met with resistance on his approach to Erzurum via the Tebriz road, taking interest in an abandoned fortress ‘which, nevertheless, I was forbidden to photograph’).33 Yet, once again, as it is in the studio, photographic experiences differ from person to person. It might be inferred that these incidents were unusual interruptions for the European photographer, his mention of

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them suggesting he was either typically able to go about his photographic work unfettered or else retained the expectation that this should be the case. Lynch subsequently spent the winter of 1893/94 in Erzurum, during which time he paid a visit to the Sanasarian Varzharan and photographed a class in its grounds (Figure 3.8). Armenian community schools had been growing in number and stature during the latter part of the century, particularly in the wake of the conflicts of the 1870s. Educational advances materialized in relation to both great need, with schools recognized as a vital means of ameliorating conditions in the eastern provinces, and, almost paradoxically, great optimism, with the reform promised in Berlin offering, despite the reality of present conditions, hope for the future. The Sanasarian Varzharan, the most famous of these new schools in the city, and among the most famous anywhere, was established in 1881 (the same year as the military high school, helping us to picture state and millet schools as counterparts to one another and Erzurum as a city that contained parallel worlds). It was founded in the city’s Armenian quarters, opposite the church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, but had essentially been forged in the Armenian networks of the Russian Empire.34 Its founder Mgrdich Sanasarian, whose portrait sits at the centre of Lynch’s

Figure 3.8  H.F.B. Lynch. Class at the Sanasarian Varzharan (caption: ‘Armenian Youths’), Erzurum, 1893/94. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901).

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photograph, was born in Tiflis to a Vanetsi family and spent most of his life in St Petersburg. He had benefitted from the great expansion in education that had taken place among Armenians after the Russian annexations of the 1820s had made them Tsarist subjects, studying at the renowned Nersesian College in Tiflis while Garabed Yeziantz, his friend and colleague in the Sanasarian enterprise, attended the Lazarian Academy in Moscow.35 Later, in the 1870s, as the two prepared for the opening of the school, it was the Nersessian, along with the Gevorkian Academy in Echmiadzin, that provided schooling for the Sanasarian College’s first teachers. Those teachers also travelled to Europe to receive further training, benefitting in particular from the Germanic connections of Russian Armenian education.36 For example, before he became one of the founding principals at the school, Kevork Apulian’s training had taken him through Tiflis, Zurich, Jena, Tubingen, Berlin and Cambridge.37 The Sanasarian thus proved another outlet for modern, foreign ideas in Erzurum, but there, crucially, it was Armenians themselves who were responsible for the importations. Mgrdich Sanasarian’s portrait could well act as a visual placeholder for the absent portrait of Surmelian’s grandfather, remembered by the writer in terms of ‘the kind expression of his eyes, the handsome countenance, and the wing collar and bow tie he wore’.38 It is clearly in part a subjective reading by a grandson, but it also serves to insert both portraits within a standardized form of bourgeois portraiture. Although what is presented to the lens has been referred to as a photograph, the portrait is most likely to have been the oil painting of Sanasarian that can be found listed among the school’s picture holdings.39 At the same time, it is a photograph of Sanasarian that appears to have been the original source of the painting, the later conversion of the photograph into a painting seemingly making plain photography’s borrowings from the aesthetic conventions of painted portraits.40 It stands as a curious example of the ongoing reproduction and recreation to which photographs are subject. Photography does not hinge on a single extraction, the ‘form from matter’ described by Oliver Wendell Holmes, but is rather an ongoing process, extracting ‘form from form’ according to Geoffrey Batchen, advancing the initial proposition to emphasize the myriad reproductions in a variety of media that follow the initial photographic exposure.41 Lynch’s photograph in one sense adds a further layer of removal to the process, taking the photograph further from its source, while from another perspective it is an act of restoration, returning it to its original photographic form. Indeed, it becomes subject to a process of continual reproduction, annual portraits of graduating classes being produced over the years by the professional domestic photographers of Erzurum, Sanasarian’s portrait always at their heart. (Lynch’s photograph forms part of this repetitious sequence; it cannot be stated with any certainty whether local photographers duplicated the conventions of Lynch’s photograph or whether Lynch’s photograph utilizes conventions already in place at the school.) Centred around the founder’s portrait, the Sanasarian pictures allow us to see the way in which photography’s standard template had grown to incorporate wider group scenes, which themselves became rapidly standardized and rendered through their own set of conventions. Lynch’s photograph shows how difficult it

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can be to manage and to marshal the new spaces of photography, with extended casts and symbolic arrays assembled in the open air. Even the most proficient studio photographers can struggle – witness in the Abdullah photograph of the Imperial Civil Medical School how the pictures sit lopsidedly on the wall, the sheet rebels against its task of covering a window frame, a tree branch intrudes into view, and, most inexplicably, a figure who appears not to belong to the scene at all lurks beside a skeleton at the right edge of the frame (see Fig. 3.7). Yet Lynch’s photograph appears particularly clumsy in its composition and staging.42 The table upon which Sanasarian’s portrait sits is covered with a cloth that only just meets one end, while at the other it sits in excess. The props, meanwhile, are scattered and strewn in an ad hoc manner, making identification difficult. The students around the table seem arranged in just as haphazard a way, piled on top of each other like the books on the table. Those on the right of this uneven arrangement look particularly uncomfortable, for the placing of the group and the table has left them wedged against the exterior wall of the school with seemingly little room to breathe. All of this is captured and framed by Lynch’s camera, positioned at an awkward angle and uneven slant. Despite such inelegance of execution, Lynch’s photograph noticeably adheres to the set formula of school photography, already well established by this stage. Placing his Sanasarian photograph alongside that from the Imperial Civil Medical School demonstrates as much: each shows a class of uniformed students against an exterior wall of their school, separated into seated and standing rows, addressing the camera, an array of attributes before them. In addition, there is what Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer identify as a key aspect of school photography, the authority figure ‘whose presence, like the photographer’s, serves as a disciplining force enjoining the children to assume postures and gazes that demonstrate their acquiescence to an imposed group identity’ (by identifying the photographer as a proxy and an agent in the regulatory process, they lend support to Shaw’s suggestion of the camera as ‘the roving eye of the sultan’).43 Our examples adhere to the convention in an unusual manner by referencing, and providing a proxy presence for, an absent authority figure. The portrait of Sanasarian has its counterpoint in the sultan’s tuğra, the marker of his authority which can be found framed, hanging on the Medical School wall, looming over the assembled group. There the similarities end, however, for Sanasarian was not the remote figure that Abdülhamid was; when Lynch’s photograph was made, he was recently deceased. As far as the school was concerned, authority, in fact, lay in the hands of a board of trustees in Constantinople and benefactors in St Petersburg. One can imagine the class portraits being sent to these groups to keep them apprised of progress in Erzurum and of the smooth running of the school. Lynch’s photograph is fairly typical in presenting a globe, books, violins, and a hammer and anvil, items that return over the years in a variety of Sanasarian displays. The objects on exhibition seem designed to act as much as attributes of the trustees and benefactors as the students, particularly the candlestick, which belongs above all to the symbolic, an apparent play on the enlightenment provided by education. Light was a particular theme of missionary work and missionary photography;44 perhaps it was similarly

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so for the new Armenian educational movement that sought to ‘illuminate’ the homelands in what can be considered a ‘civilizing mission’ on a par with that of the ABCFM.45 In the end, however, the image of the founder remains in the most prominent position and remains the most substantial prop, becoming a proxy for their remote authority and a symbol of students’ allegiance. Indeed, with ‘constant tension’ between the trustees and benefactors on one side and the institutional directors in Erzurum on the other, is it a portrait that serves to reassure, acting as a shorthand signifier of the students’ – and by extension the directors’ and wider institution’s – deference to Constantinople and St Petersburg?46 The concerns the trustees and benefactors had may well have coalesced with those of the state, the authorities coming to view the Sanasarian and other Armenian schools in Erzurum as the sources of sedition that needed to be kept under surveillance.47 A nationalist self-defence organization Bashdban Haireniats (The Defenders of the Fatherland) was established by Sanasarian students almost as soon as that school had opened, the group being discovered by the authorities soon after, in 1882.48 The organization and the school were once again the focus in 1890 during a series of weapons searches that led to armed clashes, an incident that attracted international attention, particularly in the British press, becoming a central focus of reports of state violence and the ‘Armenian question’.49 That was the Bezdig Tebk (Minor Incident); later came the Medz Tebk (Major Incident), in the aftermath of which a series of images was made but a stone’s throw from the Sanasarian, across the street in the city’s great Armenian cemetery.

In the Great Cemetery Lynch’s account of his first visit to Erzurum in the winter of 1893–94 describes a precarious situation in the surrounding countryside as Armenian peasants, and increasingly Muslim peasants too, were subject to regular assaults by Kurdish bands allowed to operate unconstrained, some even led by officers in the sultan’s Hamidiye regiments.50 The situation, already resulting in a new exodus of Armenians across the Russian border, only grew worse in the period that followed. Massacres perpetrated by Kurdish groups and Ottoman soldiers in 1894 in the Sasun mountains, due south of Erzurum, signalled a distinct escalation in violence and set off a chain of events that saw Armenian protests and pleas to the international community met with suppression and further violence.51 As presented in official Ottoman reports, Armenians were provocateurs, the victims thus themselves responsible for the series of massacres that swept through Armenian-populated sections of the empire late in 1895.52 One of the first was perpetrated in early October in Trebizond, and from there, as a commentator of the time wrote, the great swell of violence ‘spread southward, following the line of the road’, to Gumushane, then Baiburt, before arriving in Erzurum at the end of October.53 Violence became not only ‘banalized’ but standardized also. Events in Erzurum followed the pattern established elsewhere, and even involved some of the

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same perpetrators, with orchestrated murder and looting that specifically targeted Armenian shops, markets and homes taking place over a period of days.54 The scene along Gumruk, according to one report, ‘beggars description’, an assault on nearby housing having apparently been mounted from the nearby army barracks.55 The massacre at Erzurum did have at least one distinctive feature, for its aftermath was documented photographically, the focus in large part being on the mass burials at the great Armenian cemetery. They are photographs that owe their existence to Western mobility and technology, thanks to the presence in Erzurum ‘by force of circumstance’ of William Sachtleben, an American cyclist, writer and amateur photographer, who was investigating the disappearance of a fellow cyclist; and to the fact of Sachtleben carrying with him on his travels a Kodak camera, the light, handheld instrument that, still young, was in the process of bestowing upon photography a new ease.56 And yet, at the same time, another proposition is also true, specifically that local Armenians were themselves instrumental in the making of the images. Buried within Sachtleben’s reports lies important information about the making of the photographs, with him describing going to the cemetery ‘with one of the cavasses of the English Legation, a soldier, my interpreter, and a photographer (Armenian)’. Only one further detail concerning the second photographer is provided, the report mentioning that at the cemetery he ‘saw two children, relatives of his, among the dead’.57 Even with such minimal information, we can situate the photographer in relation to what is recorded, his proximity to the events and his place as a member of the effected community established. His relationship to the photographs themselves is less clear, but we might begin to understand him, at the very least, as an intermediary whose presence at the scene is important to the making of certain photographs, notably those in which subjects engage the lens directly, some displaying their injuries for the record, others displaying the dead. This second photographer also seems to make his presence felt in the staging and framing of scenes, the images possessing a formality and sense of compositional order unusual for an amateur (and indeed nowhere to be seen among the photographs Sachtleben made at other stages in his journey) but redolent of the studio. We might observe, for instance, the almost perfect spacing (for the most part) of a group of men that present a coffin and corpse to the lens (Figure 3.9). With its evident arrangement, the photograph bears distinct relation to some of those already examined and speaks of its own lineage. It also sounds an echo quite unintended, for with its central display it provides a cruel reflection of the medical portraiture already examined. We deal here with another form of portrait, one that speaks not of mastery of the modern world but of susceptibility to it, its subjects the victims of an ‘Ottoman modernity’ that sought to diminish Armenian communities and restore the traditional order.58 When studied closely, the photographs made in the aftermath of the Erzurum massacre suggest themselves to be collaborations, the products of one camera and two photographers, combining the mobility of the Kodak and the formality of the studio apparatus. They suggest, further, that this collaborative work extended beyond the two practitioners to include those that worked with them to show

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Figure 3.9  William Sachtleben. Armenian Gregorian Cemetery, Erzurum, 1 November 1895. Sachtleben Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

the destruction to the camera. After all, it is indeed a display at the centre of the photograph here under examination, the coffin raised onto a tombstone and tilted to guarantee the visibility of its contents. The photographed ask that the scene be recorded while the traces of the massacre are still evident, the coffin lid immediately on hand announcing that the moment of visibility is limited. In this way, they seem to speak to a presumed international community on the other side of the photograph. It is an understanding of photography along the lines laid out by Ariella Azoulay, as a civil practice in which all can actively take part, bypassing state structures. Indeed, it is the very inclusivity and availability of photography that marks it as a system to be engaged with, one that is open to Armenians where others are closed or set against them. Photographed subjects ‘participate actively in the photographic act and view both this act and the photographer facing them as a framework that offers an alternative […] to the institutional structures that have abandoned and injured them’.59 It is a new civic space that to a certain extent stands

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in for the existing civic spaces that have let them down. In the great cemetery in the northern part of the newly integrated Erzurum, Armenians demonstrate the way they have been excluded – in violent and dramatic fashion – from the protections of the city and the protections of the state. Does this explain, then, the propensity with which Armenians present at the scene acknowledge the camera, turning to it and wilfully displaying themselves for it as if engaged in open address? In one photograph, a ring of figures stand assembled around a central scene of mass burial, with some witnesses leaning into the frame (Figure 3.10). Do they do so out of curiosity, evidence of Sachtleben’s assertion that his activities attracted the eyes of the assembled crowd? Or is their aim not to see but rather to be seen, to ensure that they are visible to the lens and that they are recorded as part of the scene? Their actions are reminiscent of those in another massacre scene, discussed

Figure 3.10  William Sachtleben. Armenian Gregorian Cemetery, Erzurum, 1 November 1895. Sachtleben Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

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by Christopher Pinney, in which the ‘bodies that strain to be photographed inside the camera understand that this is the precondition for their visibility outside’.60 The Erzurum photographs in this way stand as expressions of a conscious desire on behalf of the photographed subjects that they be seen by the outside world and that this visibility might pave the way to a remedy. Sachtleben’s account also provides details, echoed elsewhere, concerning the mood among Garnetsis after the massacre, intimating that foreign powers, particularly the British and the Americans, were held in low regard, either for their failure to offer political protection, by not properly enforcing international treaties, or for their failure to offer protection on the ground.61 With this in mind, we might have to imagine that another impulse is at work in the cemetery. Could it be that those who fix the lens with their gaze do so as an act of condemnation? That they use the collective space of photography to signal that their own world has been intruded upon, looking to the West not as the possible source of aid and solidarity but as the demonstrable bringer of misfortune? Also important in this regard might be those who were present in the cemetery but who did not participate in the picture-making. The photographs might support Sachtleben’s statement that the eyes of those gathered in the cemetery were upon him as he worked, yet they also suggest a degree of obliviousness. Indeed, the scene of mass burial seems to tell different stories about the local response to and involvement in the taking of photographs in the aftermath of the massacre. Those on the edges of the frame may well have strained to be contained within it, yet many of those at the very heart of the image ignore the camera in favour of continuing with the business of burying the dead, a task over which they laboured for days.

The enclosure of a set of prints by Fernand Roqueferrier, the French consul in the city, as part of his mid-November communique to his ambassador in Constantinople, shows how, in addition to negotiating and orchestrating some of these photographs, the unnamed Armenian photographer undoubtedly developed the negatives and produced prints – multiple sets, clearly – that were rapidly set in motion.62 Roqueferrier anticipated just what sort of a future awaited the images, stating his presumption ‘that the photographs – addressed to newspapers in England and the United States – will be the occasion of indignant articles on the “Armenian atrocities”’.63 There is here the intimation of ‘form from form’, a moment of transition when photographs morph from individual handmade prints, passed from hand to hand, to truly industrial, mass-produced images that freely circulate in a variety of forms. One of the central vehicles for this circulation was the illustrated press, and on 7 December 1895, The Graphic in London announced: Hitherto […] the accounts of these heartrending scenes have been solely recorded by the pen, and consequently denounced as exaggerated and highly

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coloured […] At Erzeroum, however, one correspondent brought the camera to bear upon the results of the massacres, and by this witness, which cannot exaggerate, fully confirmed the truth of his terrible statements.64

It was as carriers of unassailable truth providing a new standard of evidence that photographs from Erzurum were widely presented in late 1895 and early 1896. See for yourselves, they seemed to say. Yet, what was seen were specifically not the direct products of the camera but rather mediated extractions from its products, photographs rendered for the mass market via processes of photomechanical reproduction. New processes had taken over from the wood engraving of the earlier century and photographs were now being reproduced at larger scale and smaller cost, allowing for a great expansion of the illustrated press. Images circulated as never before, and furthermore they circulated with narratives directly attached, imbued with particular meaning from the outset thanks to the new ease with which images and text could be integrated on the printed page (it was this development that had allowed Musa Bey’s portrait to be branded ‘The Condition of Armenia’ in 1889).65 With his reference to the ‘Armenian atrocities’, the French consul was clearly not casting doubt on the reality of the events. He was, after all, a witness to the devastation in Erzurum (and is said to have set up a field hospital to treat victims).66 Instead, his use of inverted commas signalled his understanding that violence was taking on a distinct life of its own as a series of stories and reports disseminated in Europe and the USA for a variety of purposes. At one extreme was the ‘atrocities pornography’ that sought to exploit the violence for commercial purposes, packaging it in lurid and titillating form;67 at the other end of the spectrum was the politically and humanitarian-minded coverage that sought intervention on behalf of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. Sachtleben became involved in the latter, presenting upon his return to the USA a series of illustrated lectures. As he showed the images from Erzurum, he took the opportunity to call upon Western governments to implement reforms in the region. According to press reports the pictures proved particularly effective, for the ‘vivid picturing of the recent atrocities almost transferred one to the scenes and the horrors’.68 Another use of the photographs was as part of a prominent campaigning magic lantern show of the day associated with Minas Tcheraz’s journal L’Arménie.69 The London-based Armenian writer and campaigner Tcheraz had served as secretary to the Armenian delegation to Berlin in 1878, a conference that he regularly recalled to his audience and readers, speaking of it in terms of unkept promises.70 Tcheraz saw himself as an agent of education and agitation, and he acted on the understanding that, in the absence of concrete knowledge of their lives, Western publics had failed to forge any imaginative connection with Armenians. Tcheraz declared through his journal that Armenia ‘still remains for most Europeans a terra incognita’, and he aimed in response ‘to bring to light, so to speak, the past and the present of the old people of Ararat’.71 The light was at times literal, touring a lecture – illustrated with projected ‘limelight views’ – to a variety of venues in Britain, France and the USA, a show

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into which he incorporated, after the massacres of 1895, images from Erzurum. The show was frequently presented at churches, with religious groups acting as the central driving force behind campaigns on behalf of Ottoman Armenians.72 Equally, Tcheraz met with and relied upon Armenians themselves, touring along the lines of diasporic networks, including the young and growing community of Worcester, Massachusetts. Echoing the language of The Graphic, Tcheraz spoke of the veracity and certainty offered by the camera. On the occasion of a speech in honour of E.J. Dillon, the noted journalist who had reported on the Sasun massacre for the British press, Tcheraz praised his employment of ‘the fidelity of photography’ to communicate the terms under which Armenians lived in the Ottoman East, announcing that he had ‘torn off for ever the mask of hypocrisy with which the barbarous Turk covered himself, and […] proved the facts of the Armenian atrocities so clearly that the most unbelieving have been obliged to give credence to them’.73 However, photography’s evidentiary power was more limited than Tcheraz would like to have believed, as demonstrated by at least one respondent to his lecture who passed judgement on his use of the images from Erzurum. Viscount Des Coursons attacked Tcheraz’s show, expressing his ‘surprise that there was found, at a given point, in the half-savage mountains of Kurdistan, a squad of photographers to collodion from life these death scenes’.74 The writer evidently had but a poor understanding of contemporary photographic practices, for even before the advent of the Kodak that Sachtleben carried with him on his travels, the collodion wet plate had largely disappeared, replaced by dry plate processes. However, there is a more important point that his words demonstrate, namely that the ‘proof ’ of photography was sorely limited. Viewing of photographs takes place from positions already established and informed by myriad factors and circumstances lying outside the photograph’s frame.75 Robert Melson’s call to situate historical actors in an experiential ‘field of action and perception’ is no less relevant here, applying equally to those viewing photographs. It tends to be these perceptions, and the wider pre-existing political positions that perceptions nestle within and feed off, that shape the reading of photographs and not vice versa. The photographs from Erzurum, therefore, were not likely to convince those inclined to believe in Armenians as agitators and disinclined to believe that such things as wholesale massacre could take place. For some commentators the failure of nineteenth-century campaigns was a result of the particular media employed. The processes that saw the extraction of form finally ended with the evaporation of matter, projected images appearing then disappearing before the eyes of audiences in attendance at magic lantern shows. Lacking in substance themselves, illustrated slides were ill-suited to provoking substantial responses and forging the imaginative connection for which Tcheraz, among others, hoped. The spectral, illusory apparitions through which they momentarily took form and communicated the real seemed to belong to the moment alone and possibly promoted a fleeting, insubstantial form of engagement, the detached reverie brought on by phantasmagoria, to use Benjamin’s term.76 Yet while the material nature of photographs plays a part in their reception, it is, ultimately, no guarantor of

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either attention or neglect. After all, the large, luxurious Abdülhamid albums were at this very moment sitting ignored in the libraries to which they had been sent, while numerous small, slight cartes de visite stood pride of place in family homes and in the hands of loved ones.77 To blame photographic materiality would be to ignore political reality. Public sentiment of the era, strongly on the side of the Armenians, was not as powerful as the realpolitik that prevailed in governmental policy.78 With time, the strength of opinion waned, and magic lantern shows perhaps simply provide us with a fitting analogy, for like images on a screen, the subject of the massacres flared up and flickered for a brief moment before disappearing from view.

Returning to the Sanasarian The recognition of the degree to which Garnetsis were involved in the production of images in the great cemetery might help us to reconsider the dynamic of photographs made by visitors to the city, including Lynch’s portrait of the Sanasarian class (see Fig. 3.8). To think only in terms of Lynch’s framing of that image is to neglect its subjects. The students might have been approached by Lynch in the same way he approached any subject, as raw information for his grand survey project (which can certainly be characterized as belonging to the ‘great period of taxonomies, inventories, and physiologies’), but they were by no means novices when it came to images. They existed in a highly visually literate world, the Sanasarian being a great regional repository, its library and museum giving students access to numerous and diverse holdings of illuminated manuscripts, marble busts, pottery, ivory, embalmed and taxidermied animals and birds.79 Of particular note must be the school’s collection of oil paintings which, in addition to portraits of Sanasarian, already seen in Lynch’s photograph, and Yeziantz, held works by, amongst others, Rubens, Poussin and several nineteenth-century Russian painters, including the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin and the celebrated Russian Armenian Romantic seascape artist Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky.80 And students were artists themselves, receiving an arts education at the school, with numerous professionals emerging from their ranks, notably the painters Sarkis Katchadourian and Vartan Makhokhian.81 Importantly, they were photographers too. The student body, Ghazar-Charek writes, became inspired by the great collections amassed at the school and developed a desire to learn photography and then later to develop their own processes for producing colour photographic paper.82 Students appear to have been just as concerned with capturing ‘the things of the world’ as Lynch was. Accordingly, we see this desire and its associated practice at work in the outside world, beyond the bounds of the school and of the city. Each year around the end of June, after final exams had taken place, the school would break for the summer and those students not returning home would set off on foot with the faculty, departing through the Olti Gate (led by a marching band) on a 25-mile trek. On their two-month excursion in the countryside to the north of the city, they studied Armenian churches and monasteries, and the geography,

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geology and botany of the region.83 We find scenes from these excursions amongst the photographic plates left by one of the Sanasarian’s resident amateurs, George Djerdjian. Djerdjian might be considered typical of the Sanasarian. A native of Arabgir, he was a student and then teacher at the school before spending the last years of the nineteenth century in Reichenberg in the Habsburg Empire (today Liberec, Czech Republic) and Zurich, studying for a doctorate in Natural Sciences.84 In 1900, he returned to Erzurum and the Sanasarian, bringing with him from Europe the latest scientific learning and a recently purchased field camera, which he put to use in the city and on excursions outside of it.85 In the latter he was not unique, judging by other photographs of Sanasarian excursions we find, and judging also by one plate in Djerdjian’s collection that shows him posing with his camera in the process of photographing the waterfall at Tortum, a photograph that attests to an overlapping photographic space, the simultaneous presence of two cameras and two photographers.86 Students are also seen involving themselves in picturemaking by other means. Posing in the landscape before Djerdjian’s lens, they turn ‘his’ photography into a collective enterprise, one which is most noticeable when they stand in pairs at the sites of churches or ruins (Figure 3.11). Such positioning of figures is a common pictorial device – serving to provide scale, frame views and focus the eye – with which the students were evidently familiar. Indeed, they may well have seen it in Poussin’s paintings at the school or else in prevalent Western photographic depictions of ‘the Orient’, where it formed a regular motif. Yet there is not in these photographs the cool remove that tends to accompany such formations in the work of other photographers, notably Francis Frith and Félix Bonfils; instead, photographer and photographed work in tandem, and in so doing indicate an attachment to each other and to a sense of a shared land and history, to the world they present together as part of a collaborative photographic effort.87 The same cannot be said for scenes of peasants and rural life, as when Djerdjian photographs farmers at work ploughing as the school contingent marches northwards (Figure 3.12). Local people are apparently as much objects of study and signifiers of Armenian character as churches and ruins, and here there is certainly a discernible detachment. Djerdjian’s photograph appears as a graphic illustration of people existing in different worlds, the (literally and figuratively) mobile metropolitan Armenians passing by those who dwell on the land, the two groups meeting only briefly, if indeed they met at all. It acts as a reminder of the diversity of Armenian lives, with many of those lives typically lying outside photography’s purview and going unrecorded by the lens. The countryside north of Erzurum may well have experienced a surfeit of cameras and become an overlapping photographic space during the summer months, but for the rest of the year it was very different in this regard, a place instead where photography was notable for its absence. The camera was predominantly a city-dweller. Certainly, rural villagers travelled to cities to be photographed and photographers in turn travelled to rural villages, but these movements only serve to emphasize the fact that photography’s anchor was in the city. The studio was chiefly a resource for urbanites and amateur cameras such as Djerdjian’s were found only in the hands of those with a degree of privilege.

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Figure 3.11  George Djerdjian. Countryside north of Erzurum, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.

Figure 3.12  George Djerdjian. Countryside north of Erzurum, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.

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By picturing the human, natural and built environment around Erzurum, Djerdjian and others from the Sanasarian circle were creating their own personal visual records, photographs that can be considered documents twice over. They record particular places and scenes while registering also the particular person behind the lens, testifying to their interest in the subject and their desire to communicate it to others. This is photography’s essential truth: to photograph something is always to proclaim its significance, assign it relevance and pay it tribute. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than a photograph made by Djerdjian back in the city, inside the Sanasarian, of a statue bust of the founder covered, almost entirely, in floral garlands (Figure 3.13). A few discernible words  –  ‘from your worthy wards’ – indicate that the flowers have been placed there by students, possibly that year’s graduates, with the names of some partially

Figure 3.13  George Djerdjian. Inside the Sanasarian Varzharan, c.1900. Dr George Djerdjian Collection, courtesy of George Jerjian and AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.

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visible on the right (‘Yagoopian’ and ‘Baghdasar’). Yet this act of homage, this salute to the school’s founder, belongs not only to those who have placed the garlands and placed their names. Through his picture-making, Djerdjian himself was performing an action in essence very similar, for with his camera he makes his own offering. Photographs, whether amateur or professional productions, declare the importance of what they contain, the photographic frame a garland that honours the fragment of the world it surrounds. The propensity with which flowers adorn photographic mounts reinforces this idea of image-making. Such flowers provide not simply a decorative motif but an implicit acknowledgement of the role that photographs play as tributes. Even in Erzurum’s great cemetery in 1895 the camera performs a variety of this function – it declares that the scene must be looked at, that its importance must be acknowledged. It does not do so in a mood of celebration, of course, for there its garland is a funerary wreath. In class photographs from the Sanasarian, a flower motif can also be discerned on the frame encircling the founder’s portrait. Indeed, looking again at Lynch’s photograph, we now find that the portrait on that occasion has been further festooned with real flowers, reinforcing the element of tribute (see Fig. 3.8). With this we might shift back to those operating in front of the camera rather than behind – to the student body who had photographers amongst them, who were inspired to learn photography, to experiment and to engage with the medium collaboratively – and see the extent to which they actively participate in the construction of the scene, thus in their own way using the camera as garland. We see, for example, how one student clasps the candlestick, while another gestures towards it from the row behind (those pressed against the wall, it seems, participate in the photograph most emphatically, using what little space they have to full effect). Their actions suggest a vision of education not belonging purely to the institution or to the photographer, but one in which they themselves profess a belief. Equally, they appear to express a genuine fondness for Mgrdich Sanasarian; just as the portrait of Sanasarian might help us to picture that of Surmelian’s grandfather, so too might Surmelian’s loving description – ‘the kind expression of his eyes, the handsome countenance’ – help us to imagine the formulation of a similar response to Sanasarian’s image. An affection for Sanasarian becomes more evident over the years in the studio portraits that follow Lynch’s, his portrait a mainstay that remains rooted to the centre of the frame. It is the one constant, it would seem, of a flexible format, for books, globes, and musical instruments come and go, appearing in different configurations before disappearing, but Sanasarian’s portrait remains, the enduring element that allows the photographs to be read as a series with a common source and a common ethos. Students lay their hands on the frame, as they might lay their hands on the shoulders of their own fathers in family photographs. Equally, they can be seen enacting a form of garland motif themselves as they encircle and embrace the framed portrait, adorning it with their own bodies. They do so in a class picture produced by the Voskertchian Frères some sixteen years after Lynch made his, and do so on their own terms (Figure  3.14). The photograph seems largely free of anything that might be described as institutional control; even the college uniforms of previous years have

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Figure 3.14  Voskertchian Frères. Class of the Sanasarian Varzharan, Erzurum, 1910. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.

disappeared, a variety of suits taking their place. Meanwhile, the orchestration of the scene by the Voskertchians is minimal; theirs is a composition stricter than Lynch’s, more carefully considered and logically arranged, but within it the student sitters seem free to perform as they please, their heads and bodies turning this way and that. Can we really say in such circumstances that the sentiments they act out towards Sanasarian’s portrait are not their own? Their homage is, unquestionably, not to Sanasarian alone, for they bring their own lives to bear on the picture, their lives at the school and their lives of the future. We should remember those words that adorn the floral tributes to Sanasarian in Djerdjian’s photograph: from your worthy wards. It is with a sense of their own value that they act. Sanasarian’s picture becomes, in a sense, a picture of them, the man they might be, the man they imagine themselves becoming; in it, they find their own worth, their own potential displayed. Student pictures are particular in this way, for there is no form of photograph that engages more completely with the medium’s ‘liquid temporality’; produced at a particular junction in life, young people gaze forwards in time to contemplate what lies ahead. It is possible thus that the Armenian student in Papazian’s studio (see Fig. 3.2) conjured the spectre before him not only of his family but of his imagined future self also. And for us to peer into the future now and find another version of him, perhaps we have to do no more than turn over the photograph, for there, glued onto the back of the mount, is

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a fragment of another portrait, one cut from elsewhere (Figure 3.15). Judging by appearances, it is the same man, adopting the same, conventional pose (his right arm, this time, resting on a studio prop), yet now several years older and now a person of stature, at least in the eyes of the person who placed the fragment there, having cut it into an oval, seemingly the appropriate shape, as seen with Sanasarian, with which to celebrate a life, the sentimentality of the carte de visite thus on full display in this personal act of photographic intervention. As students matured, some did become like Sanasarian, at least in the sense that they took up residence in the heart of the image, the space that photographers and photographic Figure 3.15  Uncredited photographer. Unknown man, no date (found on reverse of convention reserved for the ‘portrait of M.G. Papazian carte de visite). Collection of the gentleman’, becoming the location the author. of vernacular photography’s own megalography. It is perhaps in the exceptions that the format fully reveals itself, as when we see Sanasarian graduate Karekin Pasdermadjian ostensibly sharing the core of the family portrait, photographed by the Voskertchians (Figure 3.16). Yet the fact that the relationship between the two central figures is mother and son shows the disbalance. Karekin Pasdermadjian sits before us as the patriarch, promoted to the position of family head upon the death of his father; his mother, meanwhile takes her place beside him almost by invitation, in honorary fashion. Their poses mirror one another; in the tradition of the carte de visite, it tends to be the most prominent in the frame who rest their elbows on studio props, as Figure 3.16  Voskertchian Frères. The Pasdermadjian if to imbue them with extra Family, Erzurum, 1912. Garin Compatriotic Union stature and solidity. However, Records (Collection 284). Department of Special as the patriarch, Karekin Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

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Pasdermadjian is the beneficiary of another status-conferring gesture. His wife, to his side, rests a hand on his back to show closeness and deference, a signal commonly issued by wives and also sons (a form of which has been seen in the Sanasarian photographs). The organization of photographic space finds itself echoed and accentuated by acts of naming. The Pasdermadjian family is often found labelled ‘Armen Garo and his family’, a caption that reinforces the centrality of Karekin Pasdermadjian, who became a key revolutionary figure under the Garo assumed name.88 This is an imbalance reflective of Garo’s elevated place in Armenian history, one that ensures that his presence in the image – reinforced by the caption – demands the viewer’s gaze, drawing all attention away from others present. Were we to introduce more fully other figures into our consideration, we might be presented with a wider history – the man standing in the direct centre of the frame, for example. Like his brother, Khachig Pasdermadjian was Erzurum-born and Sanasarian-educated. After graduating from the college, he left the city and went to Beirut, where he pursued pharmaceutical studies and moved in scholarly circles. At the time of Khachig Pasdermadjian’s residence in the city, Beirut constituted only a small star in the constellation of Armenian communities, but one that was in the process of being augmented by the increasing number of Armenian students drawn to the French and American universities there. He later returned to Erzurum and took over its longest-standing pharmacy, a business that had been established by an Italian named Augusto Lavini. At the time of the photograph, he was operating ‘the most modern drugstore’ in the city.89 Here we must observe how he is not the only chemist present in the studio; he stands at the centre of a scene composed by people who were themselves chemists, who might be said to stand as his equals in regard to modern scientific knowledge and its application. In Khachig Pasdermadjian, thus, we find an avatar for the hidden photographers. Photography and pharmacy overlapped.90 A clear example of the dual figure of the photographer-pharmacist is Djerdjian, who trained as a chemist and applied that knowledge in his photography, developing his own photographic plates and producing prints and lantern slides from them.91 We might also think back to his classmates at the Sanasarian, involved as they were in their own chemical experiments in order to create colour printing processes. There are also superficial suggestions, examining Erzurum’s business landscape, that the studio photographers of the city might have had family connections in the pharmaceutical business, as if that were a world operating in parallel to and in tandem with the photographic sphere. We find reference to pharmacists by the family name of Voskertchian, others named Der Raphaelian.92 Clearly, a link between the trades cannot be shown through these names alone, and yet such concurrences are suggestive, to say the least. At the same time, the link does not need to be proved in this way. The photographer of this period was by very nature a chemist, and the evidence for that lies right before us. What we are looking at, in basic terms, is the trace of light, reflected by sitters’ bodies and captured by silver salts. It is this that creates the photograph, leading Barthes to picture the photographed being as ‘the necessarily real thing which

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has been placed before the lens’.93 The portrait stands as a material trace of the Pasdermadjian family, testifying to their presence in the studio. Following this, we might speak of another way in which the photograph provides proof and creates a certificate of presence, for it testifies to what stands behind the apparatus. It tells us of the presence in the process of people with the capacity for capturing the image. While we tend to speak of the eye behind the lens, the creation of the physical photograph was also reliant upon the presence of a brain that had mastered the necessary scientific knowledge and a hand to apply that knowledge in order to produce material results. Every step in the process required the handling, application and manipulation of chemicals. The photographer of this day had to prepare a photosensitive emulsion of metal particles – most likely potassium bromide and silver nitrate – and a binding agent; to adhere the solution to a glass plate support; to expose the prepared photosensitive plate to the correct degree of light; to reveal and fix the latent image by immersing the plate, at the correct temperature and for the correct duration, in a series of chemical solutions (a developer solution to convert the silver halide microcrystals into metallic silver and an acidic stop bath solution to halt the process, followed by a fixer of sodium hyposulphite to make the image stable, and finally a wash of clean water).94 All this was required for the creation of a photograph – and of course had a bearing on its quality. There is still the instinct to think of the photography of this era as a lengthy process, specifically in terms of an extended period of stillness required from the sitter so their likeness might be captured by the lens. In fact, exposure speeds were relatively fast and the actual sitting might be the quickest part of making a photograph (the last lingering trace of long exposures might be found in Armen Garo’s resting elbow, for such poses were a hangover from the days of enforced immobility, according to Gisèle Freund, a further indication of how convention survives and is passed from format to format).95 The longer processes occurred elsewhere, timed in seconds, the small measures that made all the difference in darkroom processes, and in years, the longer time that it took to master the required knowledge. The photograph is a product of this knowledge and a testament to it. The photograph speaks of the time spent by the photographer, and of the spaces inhabited by that figure, too, which might be thought of in similar terms of scale, from the small spaces of the studio and the darkroom from which the photograph emerged as a finished object to the wider spaces of the Ottoman Armenian world that produced the skills necessary for the enactment of the processes. Khachig Pasdermadjian’s technical knowledge was as much the product of Beirut as of Erzurum, thus a product of his ability to live, learn and work in that city and a testament to his mobility across an archipelago of Armenian communities and its networks of commerce and education. Something similar can be written of the Voskertchians, who appear to have studied at the Sanasarian also. According to family history, to study photographic techniques Yervand Voskertchian travelled to Germany – possibly following a Sanasarian connection – and to Tiflis.96 The latter stood in contrast to Beirut, having become in the course of the nineteenth century one of the most important Armenian economic and intellectual centres, a ‘Constantinople of the east for the Armenians’.97 The Armenian element of the city had been bolstered over the years by Russian expansion, with the exodus from

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Erzurum in 1878 part of a wider population movement that accompanied the shift in imperial borders in the region, Armenians emigrating from the Turkish and Iranian sides of the new borderlands and resettling in what were felt to be the safer and more prosperous lands of the Russian Empire. In many ways Tiflis and Erzurum were parallel cities, both commercial hubs on trade routes between Europe and Iran, frequented by travellers with their own populations of resident foreigners and burgeoning middle classes of traders and financiers.98 These elements were even more conducive to the rise of photography in the rapidly expanding environment of Tiflis, a growing site of transculturation where a ‘connectedness’ born of geography was accentuated and accelerated, as Houri Berberian describes, by developments in transportation and communication technologies.99 From the 1860s, it became home to myriad studios, notable among them the early Armenians pioneers Pertch Proshyan, Grigor Ter-Ghevondyants and Hamazasp Mamikonyants.100 Importantly for our study, Tiflis subsequently served as a vital feeder city serving the medium’s progression in the Ottoman East. Yervand Voskertchian was among those whose careers grew in part out of Tiflis, not only studying modern photographic techniques there but also importing photographic equipment from Germany by way of the city, returning to it regularly for the purpose.101 As we shift perspective, Khachig appears as one of the easier people to rescue from the Pasdermadjian portrait for we can rely upon the traces of him found in histories of Erzurum. More difficult are the women of the family, for they seem to exist only in the image; captions do not contend with their presence and histories do not seem to even record their names. These are the people who tend to fall from view, even as they occupy the photographic frame. Ali Behdad sees Armenian practice as the exception in a region where women tended to be hidden from the camera’s gaze, his studies showing the part played in Iranian photographic production by namus, the patriarchal code that hid women from view in order to ‘protect’ them. Yet we still might say that something of that spirit ruled, and that ‘men utilized the camera in its honorific function to produce idealized portraits of masculinity to reaffirm their social status and, in an exclusionary fashion, to consolidate their patriarchal power over women’.102 The difference was that Armenian women found themselves excluded in images rather than from them, subjected to a hierarchical system in which they frequently appeared as secondary figures, even as props, attributes of the central male.

Leaving Erzurum In this way, photography, even with its enlarged casts, returns persistently to its default position. Yet studio convention was being challenged, in large part owing to a great migratory movement that took many Armenian men away from their homelands in the Ottoman East. The new migrations reshaped Ottoman Armenian life and thus its photography too, becoming a particular theme of and impetus behind picture-making. Indeed, it reshaped photographs in a

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Figure 3.17  Alexandre Papazian. The Saroyan family of Bitlis (Aram, Lucine, Verkine, Takoohi, Cosette, Zabel, Henry), Erzurum, 1905. Courtesy of Charles Janigian/Forever Saroyan, LLC.

literal sense, altering their very structures. Knowing the established make-up of Armenian family photographs, the absence of a patriarch from a portrait of the Saroyan family made in Erzurum in 1905 seems glaring (Figure 3.17).103 The new arrangement, with women to the fore, might be taken as an indicator of how migration had begun to play with traditional family structures and the associated studio conventions. Such migrations were by now legal, at least potentially if not necessarily. They had not always been so, for between 1888 and 1896, Armenian migration to the USA had been officially banned. In an era of ‘suspect’ Armenians, Armenian mobility in general, and migration to the USA in particular, was thought to pose a unique threat to the state. In common with the idea it had of what was taking place inside missionary schools, the state saw the USA as a crucible of dangerous ideas that might subsequently be imported into the Ottoman Empire by returning Armenians. Armenian migration still took place during this period, some of it through limited legal allowances made for traders, the bulk of it through illegal movement via people-smuggling networks. The situation changed in October 1896, in the wake of the spate of massacres and, notably, the infamous armed takeover of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople by Armenian political activists (Armen Garo among their number). After that time, Armenians were allowed to migrate legally on the condition they agreed to forfeit their Ottoman subjecthood and never return to the empire.104

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Harput, as will be seen, lay at the centre of the migratory phenomenon, and yet Erzurum, like most places of Armenian habitation, was also implicated in these movements. The city supplied its own migrants, including Movses Papazian who we find a trace of in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1900.105 For a larger number of migrants, Erzurum was not a place of origin but a temporary host city. Acting as a stopping point on the road to the harbours of the Black Sea and the lands that lay beyond, the city saw migrants from other regions passing through its streets or staying for a time on their protracted journeys, divided into many stages. The Saroyan family’s experience gives us a sense of what these journeys entailed, the writer William Saroyan later providing a description of their trek from Bitlis, a city in the Taurus Mountains to the south-east of Erzurum: it wasn’t easy: the people who control the papers and the rubber stamps had to be bribed with gold one by one, and then transportation had to be paid for, first by donkey train over high mountains along narrow roads from Bitlis to Erzeroum, where my brother Henry was born in 1905, and from Erzeroum to Trabizon, where a ship carried them to Constantinople, and then to Marseilles, where they all had to work to raise money for the train ride across France to Le Havre, where again they had to work until there was enough money to put everybody on the ship that sailed to New York – a long crossing, far below in the ship, in steerage, where hundreds of families prepared their own meals and made sleeping places on the floor, followed at last by the terror of Ellis Island.106

The photograph they posed for in Erzurum, during a stay in the city of approximately three or four months, was made as a mid-journey communication, a message from the road addressed to Armenak, the husband and father who had not long before travelled ahead to the USA under the sponsorship of a Presbyterian minister and was awaiting the arrival of the family in New Jersey.107 The general purpose of the image was to indicate that the family was en route and in good health, while a more specific purpose was surely to present an image of the son who, having been born in Erzurum, had never been seen by his father. For that purpose, the Saroyans visited the Papazian studio, now in the hands of Movses’s younger brother. Alexandre Papazian appears to have taken over the running of the studio in the absence of Movses, working first under the new studio label of Papazian and then under his own name.108 William Saroyan’s account hints at the bureaucratic hurdles with which migrants had to contend, a bureaucracy in which Alexandre Papazian himself played a role. As his brother had done before him, Alexandre catered to disparate photographic demands and is found taking on, during the same period that he photographed the Saroyans, official state commissions to document migrants (Figure 3.18).109 Their abrogation of subjecthood and vow of non-return was legalized through the provision to the authorities of a signed pledge and two photographs of themselves. These photographic documents were the logical outcome of the state’s desire to make visible and regulate all forms of Armenian mobility, and with them it guarded against possible contraventions and efforts to return to the empire, the camera once again ‘the

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roving eye of the sultan’. They are, in Zeynep Gürsel’s apt phrase, ‘portraits of unbelonging’, official photographic documents in the manner of passports but acting to quite different ends. Instead of attachment to a state, they indicate detachment and the means by which that detachment should be made permanent.110 It is tempting to linger on the great differences between Alexandre Papazian’s photographs of migrants, the divergent and yet complimentary ends to which they work, with the Saroyan photograph saying we shall be seeing you soon while the state photograph declares we shan’t be seeing you again. However, it is the dialogue between Alexandre’s state commissions and those of his brother that seems most pertinent. Formally, Alexandre’s photographs represent an astonishing mirroring of Movses’s earlier work for the state, as finally Figure 3.18  Alexandre Papazian. Satenig and rendered in the Abdülhamid albums her sister Ardemis are emigrating to the US (see fig. 3.1). The poses are identical, from the Abdurrahman Aga neighbourhood the two emigrant women presenting of Erzurum by renouncing their Ottoman nationality, 14 August 1906. Ottoman State themselves for inspection as the Archives, DH.TMIK.M.243.49. military high school students once did. And there is clear correspondence in matters of décor; Alexandre declares his independence in a new studio name and a new backdrop, yet a reminder of the former business remains in the lingering presence, on the left of the frame, of the old wooden plinth that loyally served his brother for nearly twenty years. Bringing together these photographs by the Papazian brothers, it becomes clear that, even while studies are weighted in favour of state production, there remains a great deal of state photography to examine and make provision for in our histories. There was, it seems, a place for Armenians after all in the official record, their own particular place. Largely kept out of what was shared abroad as a positive image of empire, they instead reside in the disciplinary section of the archive. If the earlier Hamidian albums presented a ‘self-portrait’ that proclaimed what the empire thought itself to be, these later works illustrate what it thought it was not. Indeed, in these photographs of Armenians as personae non gratae we have a form of confirmation that they were the vernacular of the Ottoman world, the abject that must be expelled.

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Chapter 4 L E AV I N G H A R P U T

In keeping with convention, the patriarch sits at the centre of the family group, his wife deferring to him through a hand placed on his shoulder (Figure 4.1). Yet something else is afoot. The family is shown as a firm, impermeable structure, a close-knit group. In placing the family within a tight arrangement with maximum contact and minimum space between figures, the photograph emphasizes close bonds and enduring ties, thus forming the very picture of unity, stability, durability, the perseverance of the traditional order and the perpetual way of things. Its declaration of permanence, however, is made at a moment of impermanence and of change. More than a family photograph, it is a final family

Figure 4.1  A. & H. Soursourian. The Vaznaian family of Harput (parents Kevork and Aghavnee ‘Guzel’ Vaznaian, with children Hovaness, Maritza, Merhan, Victor, Avadis, and Mgerditch), c.1912. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Maritza Soorsoorian.

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photograph for which the Vaznaians pose, the last made before the departure for the USA of son Mgerditch. Indeed, with this knowledge Mgerditch now appears on the verge of a movement between worlds; he stands on the right edge of the frame, seemingly dressed for entry into New York.1 But standing on the edge too, having their own moment of waiting, are his family. They are on the brink of saying goodbye and of living with absence – on the brink, in other words, of staying behind. The family prepare for what lies ahead. A final picturing of the intact family unit becomes in Harput the standard means of marking departure and preparing for separation. The image almost becomes a performance of inseparability and intimacy, ostentatiously exhibiting a togetherness that is under threat. Perhaps the family lies to itself through its photograph, minimizing the extent of the danger, denying the gravity of what is taking place, preferring instead the imaginary cohesion that can so often be a part of the constructed vision of family photography.2 Or perhaps it acknowledges what is happening and makes a pledge through the image, announcing that, even apart, it will stay together, that in spite of the pressures exerted on it, the family and family life will be sustained, and that one day in the future there will be a reunion. The truth might be that it constitutes both, the photograph caught between states much as its subjects are. Indeed, the photograph makes dual states and double lives possible. It will allow Mgerditch to stay behind, for he will remain with his family in photographic form. Meanwhile, another print – for this photograph surely will lead a double life too – will enable the family to travel to the USA and to live with Mgerditch there. With family members heading in separate directions, they hold each other close at this moment in the studio, as they will hold close the photograph in the days and years to come.

Arriving in Harput A traveller heading southwards from Erzurum would have left the city by way of the same gate through which the Saroyans arrived, a gate that, like its companions around the city, announced in its name the place with which it was in communication: the Harput Gate. From there, the road followed a southwestwards trade route between Erzurum and Diyarbekir, weaving through the central mountainous region before alighting on the banks of an arm of the lower Euphrates (known in Armenian as the Aradzani, in Turkish as the Murat). That river would lead to the fertile plain of Harput province – the Vosgetashd or Golden Plain – and, sitting prominently 350 metres above the plain, the city of Harput, sometimes referred to by Armenians as simply Kaghak (the city) or as Veri Kaghak (the upper city).3 It was a manufacturing and mercantile city and a stop on, in addition to the Erzurum–Diyarbekir road, an east–west route between Iran and Anatolia. They were roles that it had come to share with the city below, Mezre (thus sometimes known as Vari Kaghak, Lower City, today called Elâzığ). Recollecting his childhood in Mezre, the writer Vahan Totovents recalled the street where he had lived as ‘a small section of that road of the Ancient East which began from

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Ancient Rome and ran all the way to the old Byzantine capital […]; from there, it went on to encircle the whole of Asia Minor and, passing in front of our house, continued on its way to the “end of the world” – Baghdad’.4 Despite being thick with historical connotations – thinking of his home in such terms meant that Totovents ‘seemed to sense the Persian, the Greek, the Roman soldiers march past our door’ – Mezre itself was a recent construction.5 It was a town that had emerged from the increased centralization of the reform period. The first regional governor Mehmet Reşit Paşa was appointed in 1834 and soon afterwards he requisitioned a mansion belonging to local Kurdish notables. A sizeable military installation was also constructed and added to over the decades that followed.6 The town was officially renamed Mamuret-ül Aziz in 1867 in honour of Sultan Abdülaziz, thus further cementing the state’s claim on the place. Yet rather than see Mezre as a state project and a colonial town, Ali Sipahi reads it more as a local creation, the product of collaboration between the Armenian trade bourgeoisie and a largely Muslim local bureaucracy. Importantly, he has shown how, despite the story of Harput and Mezre being often told in unidirectional terms, with the modern city growing as the old city shrank, in reality the two co-existed, leading a ‘dual life’ until the early twentieth century.7 Together they formed the active heart of the Golden Plain that stretched southwards towards Lake Dzovk (today known as Hazar Gölu), ‘thickly sown with thriving villages’, most of them Armenian.8 The largest of these, and the first that one would meet if arriving on the plain from Erzurum, was Hussenig, a substantial weaving town that can be seen in our photograph, lying immediately below Harput Kaghak and just to the east of Mezre (Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2  Uncredited photographer. View of the Golden Plain with Hussenig and Harput Kaghak, 1900s. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA.

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The twin cities of Harput and Mezre acted as the centre of the local textile industry; Zeynep Kezer uses the chief local product as a powerful motif, silk tying the region together and connecting it to the outside world.9 Historically, despite its position on trade routes, its weak regional infrastructure and relative isolation in the mountainous interior kept the Harput plain poor. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, new roads improved regional links to Harput-Mezre; so, too, did they link Harput-Mezre to the ports of Trebizond on the Black Sea and Mersin on the Mediterranean, the latter growing in stature and coming to dominate from the 1890s as a steamship link to Europe.10 In the era of heightened connectivity, a powerful foreign presence grew, particularly in the form of French, German and American missionaries, the latter being the presence most keenly felt. Alongside these arrivals, the Harput region also witnessed corresponding departures, an increasing number of its people travelling far afield for work. Kharpertsis still gazed imaginatively from their homes along that road of the Ancient East towards the ‘end of the world’, as Vahan Totovents puts it, but the bounds of the world had grown. This, it might be said, was the true duality of the province. Harput Kaghak and Mezre may well have been twinned with each other but, perhaps more pertinently, the two towns, together with the villages of the plain, were linked to an ‘elsewhere’, held in regular dialogue with foreign spaces to which Kharpertsis had migrated, the parallel diasporic Harputs that had been created in various quarters of the world, photography now acting as the pre-eminent connecting thread. In his history of the province, Vahe Haig describes how Harput’s first encounter with photography occurred in the 1860s with an unsuccessful visit from an itinerant photographer.11 This forerunner is but a shadow, an early figure that seems to have left little trace, not even a name on mount boards, and yet, despite a dearth of information, shrouded as he is in Benjamin’s fogs of beginnings, there are points of note. The photographer’s origins in the Caucasus provides further evidence of the role played by the Russian territories in the importation of photography into the Ottoman East. Above all, it is the reception given to his wares by the local populace that stands out. At that time, Haig writes, the making of photographic portraits held no appeal for the ‘common people’, and few photographs thus seem to have resulted from the visit.12 This lack of interest attests to a central truth about the way photography came to be established in various quarters, only taking root when accepted as having a role to play in local lives. In Harput, this role emerged later in the century, Haig carefully situating it amidst the rupture of the era of mass bantkhdoutioun. The departure from the province of vast numbers of migrants, he states, created a need for pictures, visual vestiges that allowed them to maintain a presence in the homes from which they were absent and in the lives of the families from which they were separated. Being found in almost every home, such photographs, Haig tells us, provided families with ‘certain comfort’.13 It is an account in which can be heard echoes of Pliny’s famous story of the birth of painting, in which a Corinthian maid traced the outline of the shadow, cast upon a wall, of her lover before his departure for war, thus proposing absence and the threat of absence as the driving forces behind the image-making desire.14 The echo between the two poses fascinating implications for where we should look for the story of photography, for it suggests that it is

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not in the ‘centre’, in the place of ‘action’, that photography takes place, but rather on the fringes of the central narrative in the space of absence and departure, the quieter, domestic places where things ostensibly ‘do not happen’. It suggests, in other words, a rhopographic history, and presents an important lesson as we endeavour to break Constantinople’s stranglehold on the history of photography in the region. It similarly breeches a class barricade, for it is not simply spaces that have been neglected but demographics also (the two cases of neglect no doubt being related). Haig notably describes the medium ‘becoming popular’ in response to migration, and by this he specifically indicates the medium gaining in popularity among the aforementioned ‘common people’.

That said, early photographs from Harput are cartes de visite in the established mould that hail from the ranks of the region’s trade bourgeoisie. A photograph made around the year 1880 depicts Avedis Jamgochian from Agn (today known as Kemaliye), a town to the north-west of Harput Kaghak; more softly rendered than Cacoulis’s portrait of Yeghiazarian, it can nevertheless be mapped closely onto that photograph as it presents this son of a prominent, well-to-do cotton merchant family in accordance with the dominant modes (Figure 4.3). The global nature of the carte de visite aesthetic and the spread of its norms across national and imperial borders is a tale also told on the reverse of the photograph. It is adorned with a

Figure 4.3  H. Soursouriants. Avedis Jamgochian from Agn, 1880 or 1881. The Jamgochian Family Collection.

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striking design featuring a winged man on the back of a bird, flying away from the background scene of a ship atop a mountain, making clear its allusion to the biblical story of Noah, who sent out a dove once the ark had landed on Mount Ararat. The photographer appears to be declaring himself as a man from Ararat – from Armenia, in other words, the mountain a metonym – and as the bearer of messages across distance. In Russian, Armenian and French (some of its Latin letters reversed), he declares himself to be H. SOURSOURIANTS. This form of name, with its -ts suffix, was typically found amongst Russian Armenian bourgeois families, a means of indicating social status and upward mobility. Its appearance here is another example of the way photographers utilized their mount cards as marketing tools, conjuring identities and histories for themselves and their studios, and furthermore tells us about the targets of that marketing and the class positioning of the studio’s products. Of course, the appearance of a Russian Armenian name in the Ottoman East is highly unusual, as is the presence of the Russian language (and similarly, the absence of Ottoman Turkish, although, as witnessed in the case of Movses Papazian, it is not unheard of). The details of name and language only begin to make sense when we understand that, while the photographic image was produced in Harput, the mount that supports it hails from elsewhere. Hovhannes and his brother Mardiros learned photography in Tiflis, and it was there that the first Soursouriants studio was based in the 1870s.15 Vestiges of that studio linger in Harput for a time; the brothers appear to have arrived with a supply of mounts from Tiflis, left over from the previous incarnation of their business and put to use in the new one. That this mount card was still being used at the time of the portrait of Avedis Jamgochian, around the year 1880, suggests they had only relatively recently arrived from the Caucasus and established the Harput studio.16 This makes for curious timing, of course, with the brothers seemingly leaving the Russian Empire for the Ottoman at a moment in time when many Armenians were making the reverse journey. Theirs appears to be a case of return, with a suggestion of the family having its origins in the village of Sursur on the Harput plain, wearing ever after a trace of the land in their name.17 We find the family based, however, not in Sursur but in Hussenig, giving them ready access to Harput Kaghak and Mezre. In Harput, the elaborate printed mount of Tiflis morphs into a small wet stamp (Figure 4.4). The multilingual text remains, but with the pigeon French dropped in favour of Ottoman Turkish; a concession to the new surrounds and its political environment, perhaps, and yet the Russian language remains and in a curious mixed message it is in Ottoman Turkish that the brothers declare themselves as being ‘of Tiflis’. The city seems to stand as a sign of prestige and a mark of accreditation, in the vein of the sultan’s seal and Cacoulis’s references to Figure 4.4  Soursouriants studio photography’s pioneers, yet it seems an odd stamp. The Dildilian Collection, choice considering the post-war atmosphere courtesy of Armen T. Marsoobian.

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in the eastern provinces. The Russian Armenian name Soursouriants remains too, although in time this makes way for a form more recognizable to Kharpertsis, Soursourian. The image of this stamp, meanwhile, is a greatly simplified rendering of the Tiflis mount’s central avian motif, still recognizably Noah’s dove (by virtue of the olive branch in its beak) and yet it might also, owing to the newly elongated neck, be taken for a crane. Thus the stamp speaks not only of the Armenian past but of the Armenian present day also, specifically the historic moment of bantkhdoutioun, through reference to the migratory crane and the most famous of bantoukhd songs, the lament Groung (Crane).18 The song is one of yearning, finding a migrant worker telling the bird of his longing: Crane, don’t you have any news from home? I have abandoned my fields and orchards, Every time I sigh my soul is seared, Crane, please stay for a while, I feel your voice deep in my soul, Crane, don’t you have any news from home?19

Leaving Harput At the time that he was photographed by Hovhannes Soursourian, Avedis Jamgochian was enrolled as a student at what was then known as Armenia College, a school that, dominating the upper part of the upper city, stood as the most visible sign of the American missionary presence in the region. The Harput Armenian Evangelical Union had been founded by the ABCFM in 1865 and was running several dozen small Protestant churches across the province at the time of the establishment of Armenia College in 1878.20 The college reflected a growing focus on higher education, with other colleges having already been established in recent years in Marsovan and Aintab. It stood on the mission grounds in the Kaghak alongside high schools for boys and girls, institutions fed by ABCFM primary schools in various locations across the province.21 The college became a great symbol of the substantial missionary presence in Harput, a presence that came to exert a powerful influence on the province. It gave the place a level of cosmopolitanism unusual for the locale, ensuring it ‘attracted attention as a small enclave of modernity in the east’.22 Importantly, this shift, more than drawing people to Harput, led them away. The foreign presence aroused among Kharpertsis an interest in the USA and opened up opportunities for them to travel and work there.23 At the same time that the ABCFM station in Harput was a hub from which satellite churches and schools radiated out across the province, it was itself a satellite, part of a great missionary network that had its ultimate centre in Massachusetts; that place, along with other industrial centres of North America, called to Kharpertsis with the lure of economic opportunities as the Kaghak had once called to villagers of the plain.

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What began in the late 1860s with a small number of individuals, often pursuing business interests, developed into a larger movement involving those from the less well-off artisan and peasant classes in the late 1870s, an exodus that continued to expand as the nineteenth century headed towards its close.24 The first arrivals travelled directly along the strands of the missionary network – the first Armenian in Worcester, Massachusetts, arrived in 1877 with missionary George Cushing Knapp.25 But he stayed for the employment, the town being an industrial as well as missionary centre (an indication of the extent to which these aspects of American life overlapped). He worked in the wire mill, and his letters home, detailing the wages on offer in American industry, gave rise to a stream of other Armenian migrants following in his wake. Wire became a new thread in Armenian lives for bantoukhds headed for Worcester and other industrial centres of the north-eastern United States, but the old threads remained, with migrants also finding employment in the textile mills of the region.26 It might have been the presence of American missionaries that first created a link between Kharpertsis and the USA, but once the link was forged, and once the tear was made in the fabric of the Kharpertsi world, it was largely self-sustaining. The solidification of Armenian communities in North America prompted but more migrants, as did the weakening of Armenian communities in Harput. In an incident of 1889, the home of ‘the photographer Ohannes’ – without doubt Hovhannes Soursourian – was raided by Ottoman authorities. Perhaps it had been the (hardly secret) Russian and Armenian references on those photographic mounts that had prompted the search, and it was precisely Russian and Armenian-related materials that were found and, being deemed suspicious, were seized. The official report makes reference to bound volumes of old Russian newspapers, and while the officer in charge states that these appear not to be politically sensitive, he also requests either that he be sent an interpreter (having no Russian-speaker locally) or that he be allowed to send the materials to the capital for examination. Of more concern to the raiding party, apparently a clearer indication that further investigation into this man Ohannes is required, is the discovery of pictures bearing the coat of arms of Ancient Armenia.27 We see present in Harput province the miasma of visceral suspicion that had rolled in from the borderlands since the Ottoman defeat of 1878, clouding the way in which Armenians were perceived. Armenian words and symbols – even, and perhaps especially, ancient ones that referred to historic periods of Armenian independence and power – came to carry connotations of sedition. Their presence in both public life and private spaces were targeted, most overtly in the prohibition of the term ‘Armenia’, with offending books and maps being censored or seized.28 The clearest manifestation of this policy as experienced by Kharpertsis on the local level was the local governor’s 1888 objection to the name Armenia College, leading to it being restyled as Euphrates College.29 This was, of course, the era of the Abdülhamid albums and those productions are given further context by these events. Just as the flattening of Ottoman identity and the omission (broadly speaking) of Armenians must be understood as in part the product of an era in which Armenians were being targeted in and removed from the eastern provinces of the empire, so too must the related flattening of Ottoman space be understood in relation to other geographical erasures, particularly that

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of ‘Armenia’. It is striking, then, to think that the Soursourians are surely the photographers responsible for the Abdülhamid images made in the area in the early 1890s. The studio certainly undertook at least one official commission at this time, with its stamp appearing on an 1889 photograph depicting the landscape around the city of Diyarbekir. Found in an album in the Yıldız archives, the photograph was evidently made for the sultan, most likely at the request of the local governor. It was now the Soursourians acting as the proxy eye of the state, mapping the landscape from a high vantage point above the city, producing what Berin Golonu describes as ‘an image from above, a symbolic manifestation of imperialist vision and state perspectives’.30 Their elevated position is mimicked below by two figures positioned on a rooftop, most likely Ottoman officials connected to the telegraphic network. We find nothing in the Abdülhamid albums that professes authorship in quite so clear a manner as that stamp in the Diyarbekir album. In rather spartan additions to the albums, the photographs from Mezre – or Mamuret-ül Aziz, to use, as the albums do, the official appellation – present us with neither studio props nor a backdrop of any distinctive design (in the way that Movses Papazian’s Erzurum pictures do). The backdrop that is on display, against which military high school students pose, is little but a plain dark fabric. Yet even in its seeming anonymity, it bears a certain character and a resemblance to that employed by the Soursourians at this time. Curiously, we once again find lines vertically dividing images, suggesting there to have been a Figure 4.5  Uncredited photographer (likely further instance of misunderstood H. & M. Soursourian). Students, Imperial instructions and portraits stitched High School, Mezre, early 1890s. Abdul together at a later date so that they Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, might stay true to the desired format Washington, DC. (Figure 4.5). Hovhannes Soursourian received contradictory treatments at the hands of the Ottoman authorities. He was hired to work on a prestigious project that would travel the world; his home in Hussenig was raided and his possessions rifled through with a suspicious eye. As a photographer, he possessed a skill rare in the region at this time; as an Armenian, he was an object of common mistrust. While the former is vital to understanding his own unique position, the latter is what helps us to understand his sitters and the realm in which his products circulated. He was hardly unusual in being targeted by the local authorities and indeed we find echoes of his story in the lives of those he photographed, with Avedis

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Jamgochian having very similar treatment meted out against him. Something of a local intellectual, Jamgochian was jailed after a search of the library in his Agn home, housing a variety of books and his own writings and translations, disclosed his apparent offence of writing a poem that contained the forbidden, incriminating word ‘liberty’. Even after his release (brought about through a bribe), he was still of interest to the local authorities, his home continuing to be targeted for raids. It was soon afterwards that he left Harput for Manchester, following the threads of the cotton trade and joining the established Armenian community of that English city.31 A suspicion of Armenian activity revealed itself in official surveillance, searches, seizures and arrests; it added to a precariousness in Armenian lives that also experienced, amid the deterioration of rural conditions during the latter years of the nineteenth century, poverty and famine. While Avedis Jamgochian moved through mercantile networks to England, many others travelled along newly forged paths to the USA, so-called ‘American fever’ taking hold of the province in the 1890s.32 Few Armenian communities remained untouched by the ‘fever’, but the province of Harput experienced a particularly sizeable exodus and stood at the heart of the phenomenon. The Soursourians’ town of Hussenig showed itself early on to be an especially strong provider of migratory labour; of its 3,500 residents in 1888, 200 were away in the USA.33 Come the first decade of the twentieth century, the American consulate in Mezre can be found estimating that approximately 80 per cent of the Armenians migrating to the USA had their origins in Harput.34 This mass migratory movement came, in no small way, to define the province and reshape the lives of its citizens, a mass disturbance that cut through the lives of all Kharpertsis. If Armenia/Euphrates College was the most visible sign of the missionary presence in Harput, migration was the invisible sign, one that manifested itself as emptiness and was experienced as absence.

The province fell under the influence of the missionary movement in other ways, too. The extension of education in the provinces encouraged the establishment of other schools, with French and German missions and missionary schools adding to the foreign presence.35 The military high school opened in Mezre in 1881, mirroring developments in Erzurum and elsewhere.36 Armenian community schools were established, the best known being the National Central School, also known as the Red College, founded by writer and educator Tlgadintsi in the Sourp Hagop quarter of Harput Kaghak in 1887.37 There, Tlgadintsi fostered a generation of Armenian intellectuals and a whole school of provincial literature based upon the guiding principles of his own work. An eye for the distinctive everyday life of the province was instilled in his students, notable amongst them Rupen Zartarian and Peniamin Noorigian, as well as the aforementioned Vahe Haig and Vahan Totovents. Our knowledge of Harput is indebted to their accounts.

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Tlgadintsi was the nom de plume taken by Hovhannes Haroutiunian to indicate his origins – being from the town of Tlgadin (also known as Khuylu) on the Harput plain – and his writerly concerns, his gaze permanently fixed upon the daily life of the provincial world. He showed himself acutely aware of a sense of absence and of the conditions that made it possible, the first work to be published under the Tlgadintsi name, the 1893 ‘Emily’, being a satirical portrait of the missionary presence.38 Thereafter, his ‘chronicles’ – short vignette sketches – often addressed the family unit, the great cornerstone of rural Armenian existence as he saw it and a subject that provided him with the opportunity to depict the character of the provinces and consider the strains under which it was placed. The culture of American migration and the ruptures it created formed the theme of, amongst other works, his story ‘I Did My Duty’ (1902) and his play ‘Going Abroad’ (1912).39 The title of the latter work – ‘Tebi Ardasahman’ – might be more literally translated as ‘Towards Abroad’, and one senses that from the pen of Tlgadintsi this word ‘towards’ is meant to evoke not simply physical movement but a wider directional pull, one that was also mental and emotional for the people of Harput, whether migrants on the move or families left behind. The concerns of Tlgadintsi’s writing were the concerns of the province, according to Totovents: It is not hard to understand why Tlgadintsi devoted so much time and attention to America. There was not a single family in Kharpert that had no one living in the United States. There was not a single girl who was not on fire with the idea of going to the United States as a young bride. America was the subject of conversation among the people of Kharpert, and their ideal.40

Tlgadintsi, Totovents concludes, levelled his ‘cannon and sword’ at these aspects of Harput life. His work also considered the provincial problems – poverty, hunger and local misgovernment – that influenced the new bantkhdoutioun. Equally, he did not shrink from assigning blame to Kharpertsis’ own role in the decline of the province. In the story ‘Goulig and the Schoolmaster’ (1913), for example, an illiterate woman employs a local teacher to write letters to her migrant husband.41 The story acts as a platform for Tlgadintsi to speak of the moral corruption that he saw stemming from bantkhdoutioun, with the schoolmaster a self-serving and opportunistic character who takes advantage of Goulig’s situation for his own gain.42 Her absent husband, meanwhile, is no more sympathetic a character, shown as having abandoned his family. A close examination of a photograph of a bakery shows us something of the way in which Harput was opened up to other worlds (Figure 4.6). The photograph is one of many made by ABCFM missionaries, yet rather than simply consider it a document of an outside observer studying the locals, we might also think of it as the reverse, a document of locals studying the outsider. It suggests the way in which many Kharpertsis were exposed to Americans in their daily lives – it was not the students of the college alone that came into contact with the missionaries but sections of the wider populace, and not in the form of passing encounter but as regular contact with those that had established a permanent, influential

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Figure 4.6  Uncredited photographer. Harput (handwritten album caption: ‘Bakery in Harpoot’), c.1903–11. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Kenar Aboyan and Tamar Der Vartanian Boghosian.

presence in the place. While the human presence of the missionaries had a huge bearing on developments in the province, the photograph also speaks of a visual presence and an imaginative presence. Indeed, as we study the detail of the wall in the background and see what is pinned there, seemingly pages from American illustrated magazines, it becomes an image about the circulation of images. Settling in new lands, migrants sent home postcards and newspaper pictures of their new lands, pictures which were studied at length by friends and family and which, fixed onto walls such as those of the bakery, became a physical part of the cityscapes of Harput and Mezre and of the homes in the villages of the plain. The bakery scene hints at a certain breakdown of local physical space experienced in Harput, with photographs creating breaches in space through which the other side of the world could be glimpsed and with which the faraway could maintain a daily Figure 4.6 (detail). 

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presence in the lives of Kharpertsis. It was a visual presence that played a part in the directional pull ‘towards abroad’ described by Tlgadintsi, with Kharpertsi eyes becoming fixed on a distant horizon, and a gleaming horizon at that. One section of the bakery wall in particular now stands out, for it carries an image of a skyscraper and the words ‘City of Glass and Steel’, a press clipping that calls to mind Isabel Kaprielian’s assertion that ‘[f]or a people on the perpetual verge of famine the fabled abundance of the United States was incredible’ and ‘the vision of automobiles, movie theaters, skyscrapers, and lighted streets was glorious’ (see detail).43 The impact of photographs like the one seen pinned up in the bakery must have been substantial, something perhaps akin to what was experienced by Hampartzoum Chitjian (from Perri, north-east of Harput-Mezre) in his account of a scene in Mezre, where a bulb put on display opposite the government building by some enterprising individual gave him his first glimpse of electricity: ‘I still remember standing there in awe. It seemed as if the light from the stars and moon had been encased in the bulb for all to admire.’44 It becomes difficult to think of photographs as elemental points of contact, carriers of light from far distant worlds, without thinking of Barthes’s declaration that ‘the photograph of the missing being […] will touch me like the delayed rays of a star’.45 It is, above all, ‘the photograph of the missing being’ that we are discussing here. For most Kharpertsis, the image desired from abroad was not of the fabled lands but of those that had travelled there, the loved ones from whom they were separated. The majority of the photographs arriving from the other side of the world thus took the form of studio portraits, ensuring that families did not have to rely solely on those last images made before departure. More than any other form of photograph, it was these studio portraits of migrants that formed the new image landscape of Harput. That said, these were not simply images and portraits offered more than a resemblance of the absentee, standing instead as physical traces, as directly suggested by Barthes’s evocation of light and indirectly by Pliny’s story, for it is the nature of the image retained by the Corinthian maid that makes the story of particular relevance to photography.46 The hand tracing the shadow and the camera registering reflected light are each dependent on the actual presence of their subjects and what results can thus be thought of as physical manifestations of those subjects, providing a lingering presence during times of absence. Yet this was only part of the process. A photograph became ‘real’, taking on presence, through not simply the bantoukhd body in the studio but moreover his family’s actions many miles away in Harput. It was their physicality, performed on a daily basis, that brought the photograph ‘to life’, their willingness to hold, kiss, cradle, converse with the photographic object, to show it around to others as Tlgadintsi imagines a proud mother doing in his short story ‘The Boy in the Picture’ (1905). In short, the photograph’s power lay in families’ acceptance of it as the proxy, in the fullest terms, of the absent. Absent migrants understood the role that photographs would play – as signs of love from afar, as their agents in the family home – and shaped them accordingly, working with studio photographers to project a certain image of their lives. The images that were fixed in the studios were intended as dynamic, constituting in

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effect items of news and progress reports from the ‘life being lived’. They confirmed the migrant’s safe arrival and, perhaps more importantly, proceeded from there to speak of his arrival, his attainment in social and economic terms. They were frequently images of achievement that plotted an ascent through the echelons of the host country. The photographic conventions on display in the portrait of Krikor Krikorian – a graduate of Armenia College who migrated from Hussenig to Worcester in 1882 – are familiar, and he is in many ways the counterpart of the Armenian student photographed by  Papazian in Erzurum, but here the accoutrements – gloves, cane, watchchain  – are altogether richer and seem  to form part of the man himself Figure 4.7  Uncredited (Figure 4.7).47 At the same time as much was put photographer. Krikor Krikorian on display, much was left ‘beyond the frame’, the of Hussenig, Worcester, MA, c.1890s. Marderos Deranian often difficult conditions under which migrants Collection, NAASR (National lived and worked (the clear erasures of Krikor Association for Armenian Studies Krikorian’s portrait, from which a figure has been and Research), Belmont, MA. removed at some stage, might stand as symbolic illustration of this tendency). ‘All that remained was a smoothed-out version of life projecting the self-image and the happiness that those back home wanted to see’, Houda Kassatly writes of the photographs produced by Lebanese migrants of the era.48 In place of struggle they spoke of success, displaying markers of newfound prosperity and evoking notions of the ‘better life’ to be had away from the Ottoman Empire. They might be read as varnished depictions of life abroad; their veneers were at times calculated, cynical constructions, yet deception was, for the most part, not their intention. Analysing the portraits of Dutch migrants in the USA, Rob Kroes describes how such photographs were not purely idealized pictures of the present day produced for the benefit of an audience back home, for they might also be seen as ‘visions of the future’, created by the migrant for their own reasons.49 The act of having one’s photograph taken spoke of personal dreams and ambitions; it was an almost alchemic act of beckoning success and prosperity from the migrant’s meagre lot. There were alchemic, too, in that they transformed the lives of others. Echoing those letters from Worcester’s first Armenian migrant, studio portraits essentially put tales of high wages into visual form, offering their own siren song to potential migrants back home. Like the ‘City of Glass and Steel’ newspaper image, their portraits spoke of magnificence and opulence. Indeed, migrants must have appeared in those photographs to be denizens of the ‘City of Glass and Steel’, even its human embodiments. They themselves became the economic lure, advertisements for the USA and the bantoukhd life that implicated photography in migratory movements, tempting others to join the westward movement of Kharpertsis.

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Group photographs were made too, as if to demonstrate the continuation of forms of Armenian community in faraway lands. Such communal photographs depicted the groups of friends that formed the bedrock of the largely male migrant communities of the time. Existing relationships were continued and renewed as friends travelled together or reconvened abroad, while new relationships emerged, often based upon shared places of origin in the homeland and shared places of work and habitation in the host country. Such communities replicated in part the world that they had left behind, becoming quasi-families, and replicated too their practices, with photographs their proxies, memory tokens and oaths proclaiming the strength and durability of bonds. Just as they might have done upon setting out for abroad, we find migrants returning to Harput posing for photographs with those that they were leaving behind in the USA. Varteres Garougian, a Kharpertsi bantoukhd in Wisconsin, recalls a friend preparing for just such a return journey and making arrangements for a group photograph, declaring: ‘Who knows if we’ll see each other again!’50 Returnees thus departed with images of togetherness in tow, photographs that played the very same role as the family photographs made in Harput, spells cast in the face of separation.

We are given a glimpse of a photograph like that made by Garougian and his friends in the British biblical scholar J. Rendell Harris’s account of journeying through the Ottoman East in the aftermath of the massacres. Arriving in Tlgadin/ Khuylu, Harris ‘found that it consisted of about three hundred houses, and that not more than six were standing’. Continuing his description, he writes: One single thing I found which had escaped destruction. High on the wall of a ruined house, in the second storey, a photograph was nailed […] It was a group of Armenian workmen from a factory at Worcester, Mass., and had doubtless been sent home by some happy emigrant to his relations.51

The scene hints at the place of the photograph within the home, the destruction allowing the outside visitor visual access to a private interior that would otherwise have remained hidden and emotional access to a private relationship once mediated through that photograph. Yet seen now, amidst the destruction, the photograph also tells another story. What Harris records in Tlgadin/Khuylu constitutes a dark reflection of the ordered vision presented in the Abdülhamid albums and other state productions. With the photographic viewing made possible by the state – by the violence of the state – the scene becomes itself an Ottoman album, a part of the corpus of state productions. It tells us what is typically missing from the state’s own photographic record, and equally what is missing from many Armenianmade photographs which occlude in their own way. Destruction has revealed the photograph and revealed itself as part of the photograph. It is the invisible history that usually lies ‘beyond the frame’ but which now registers in the field of vision. In a related manner, we can now read the traces of violence in our own

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photographs, those children in the foreground of the view of the plain being from the ‘orphanages where a thousand children left fatherless by the massacres of 1895 were fed and clothed’ by the ABCFM (see Fig. 4.2).52 Although the migrant’s departure and photograph both, of course, pre-date the massacres, Harris records, in essence, their origins, the conditions that made them possible. We can now read in such ‘happy’ photographs the violence from which migrants were fleeing and the violence they were fortunate enough to avoid through their absence. At the same time, of course, that ‘happy’ aspect remains. For Harris, the photograph’s joyous overtones were accentuated by – or perhaps were even entirely the product of – the manner in which he encountered it, and the knowledge and experience of violence must have continued to inform readings of such pictures. Migrants appeared all the happier in their pictures, miles away from the slaughter that they were. With the already poor local conditions deteriorating further, relatively small-scale violence morphing into wholesale massacre, the capacity of photographs to speak of a ‘better life’ can only have increased, the lure that they posed becoming all the greater. The exodus grew in the aftermath of the massacres, and provisional stays abroad took on aspects of the permanent. The bantoukhd continued to come and go, but increasingly he stayed, setting up home in the New World. It becomes difficult to categorize distinctly Armenian movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quest for opportunity, never a pure one to begin with, increasingly merging with the bid for survival.53 Migrations and family separations were part of the daily business of photographers in Harput; they were observers and recorders of the process, and furthermore actors too. ‘Photographer families’ were not immune to the forces that shaped other Armenian lives, being just as susceptible to the lure from abroad, just as vulnerable to violence at home. Harput province saw the departure of a number of the Gabrielians from the family photographic studio of A.E. Gabrielian in Agn shortly after a massacre there. As it was with other migrants, their departure was marked with the making of a picture, with Nicolas and Makrouhy Gabrielian posing with their children for one last portrait in the family studio.54 Into the twentieth century, we find sons of Mardiros Soursourian migrating to the USA. Listing themselves as photographers in immigration documents, they had surely played a role in their father’s business in Harput. Their stories demonstrate once again the complex position of photographers in relation to the state, serving as the instruments of state power on certain occasions while finding themselves the objects of that power on others. An official document of September 1904 compiled by the Minister of Internal Affairs records the name of Aram Soursourian of Hussenig on a list of Armenians from the province desirous of migrating to the USA who, ‘in accordance with regulations’, had been photographed.55 Thus Aram Soursourian’s final experience of photography in Harput would have been as the object of the institutional gaze of the state. To complicate this, the photographic apparatus might have been directed not by an Ottoman official but by a member of Aram’s own family, Hazal Özdemir suggesting that it was the Soursourian family responsible for the production of such pictures in Harput.56

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If Aram did indeed leave in 1904, that is. Reading this migration from documents on the other side of the journey, it is another son of Mardiros, Haigaz, who arrived in the USA.57 While it is difficult to know exactly what happened, it seems far more likely that Haigaz was the emigrant on this occasion, given that he was three years older than Aram, and given that when Aram’s name does appear on US immigration documents some years later, Haigaz is listed as the family member he is joining.58 Thus while the state endeavoured to restrict movement, it appears that it was, at least in this instance, its own understanding of that movement that was restricted. The Soursourian case suggests the limits of state power and state photography, and even the limits of what was being attempted by its photography. In photographs of departing migrants, it is perhaps the desire for control that might be discerned rather than control itself; they might be understood as ‘points of reassurance in a fragile world’.59 This poses wider implications for our understanding of other photographs produced by the state, suggesting the concepts of imperial gaze and ‘panoptic effect’ to be not entirely helpful when addressing systems of photography intermittent and inadequate in application.

Looking towards Home Just as the state generally dominates the history of Ottoman photography, so does the figure of the migrant tend to dominate accounts of photography’s role in migratory processes.60 The host country becomes the arena of action, the place of origin going largely ignored. The journey of the migrant is perceived as a movement towards the modern, a physical and temporal crossing; living in the technological ‘future’ of the New World, he exists amidst pictures in a visual sphere in a way the community he has left in the ‘old country’, the place of the ‘past’, supposedly do not. Yet this is to ignore the picture-making that occurs in his absence; it is to ignore the lesson of the Corinthian Maid and of Tlgadintsi’s own stories that centre on the vacated spaces of the homeland. The making of photographic portraits allowed not only an absent migrant to appear to his family in the homelands but also the inverse, for that family to appear to the migrant in foreign lands. Photography as it pertained to migration can thus be taken as multilateral, concerning both those who travelled and those that remained behind; each image of the former tended to have its counterpoint in one of the latter, and together they took part in photographic conversations that spanned the globe, with processes of exchange at work within private networks made up of family and friends. Photography thus continued in Harput amidst the absence. Not only was there no shortage of new migrants to photograph before their departures, but there were also pictures to be made of the Kharpertsi families left behind, new studio portraits constructed as replies to those that arrived from abroad. As departures from Harput greatly increased in the first decade of the twentieth century, so too do we find numerous new studios opening.61 The names M. Arabian, Baghdassar Terzian and Soghomon Yaghdjian appeared in Mezre.62 In Harput Kaghak, Mihran Toutounjian set up a studio with his brothers.63

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Toutounjian had trained in Jerusalem and his movement between there and Harput is another demonstration of the way in which Armenians could step with relative ease between different geographic locales and places of Armenian existence, as first seen demonstrated through the figure of Yessayi Garabedian.64 Indeed, the photographic milieu of Jerusalem in which Toutounjian studied was directly indebted to Garabedian and his travels. In marked contrast to Tiflis, the Caucasian metropolis important to other Kharpertsi photographers, Jerusalem was still at the time a relatively small provincial town, important in religious rather than economic terms. Its photographic scene was, for most of the nineteenth century, dominated by Europeans producing tourist views and biblical scenes. It took until the end of the century for what Issam Nassar describes as a ‘distinctly local’ practice to appear, emerging from Garabedian’s school.65 The most notable of Garabedian’s students was Garabed Krikorian, who later went into business with his own former pupil Khalil Raad; after years of being rivals, the marriage of the former’s son to the latter’s niece brought the families together and allied the businesses, Krikorian from that point producing portraiture, Raad city scenes.66 This gives us a flavour of the photographic milieu in which Mihran Toutounjian studied and also, in this noteworthy instance of business expansion, akin to ‘bees building a beehive’ if we remember Badr El-Hage’s analogy, provides a parallel to a development taking place in Harput, a studio venture operated by Askanaz and Haroutiun Soursourian. We know from the family history that the two were cousins, the sons of Hovhannes and Mardiros respectively, but we sometimes find them being referred to as brothers in other accounts.67 While their studio mounts proclaim a togetherness, giving the unified credit of ‘A. & H. Soursourian, Harpouth’, the men appear to have worked separately; it would seem that the ‘Harpouth’ of their stamp refers to Harput province rather than Kaghak, for the Annuaire Oriental business directory places Askanaz in a studio in Harput and Haroutiun down in Mezre.68 The suggestion is of two photographers working in tandem and one business straddling two cities, the sort of arrangement that was perhaps only possible in the twin city setting of Harput-Mezre. No strict demarcation of subject matter of the sort implemented at the Krikorian and Raad studios was in operation for A. & H. Soursourian. That said, somewhat unusually for the Ottoman East, the pair did produce numerous landscape views depicting the plain, its cities and villages, destined, it would seem, for bantoukhds abroad, who in their own way become tourists, domestic consumers of distant views in the manner of Oliver Wendell Holmes. But, by and large, portraiture was their central concern, and between their two sites the A. & H. Soursourian business served the populaces of Harput-Mezre as well as those who journeyed from the surrounding villages. And, as it was for the elder Soursourians, migration played a heavy hand in the business. On the back of one family portrait by A. & H. Soursourian, the patriarch Gabriel Vartabedian has placed a dedication to members of his wife’s family, Mr and Mrs Khachadour Bozian in the USA: ‘Wherever you may be / Keep this with you / As a keepsake of those you love/And those who love you.’69 These few lines express an outlook that assumes little fixity, suggesting that, for all the uncertainty and precariousness of life in Harput, the migrant life did not offer anything more

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certain. Instead, the certainty in all this, the solidity, lies in enduring family affection and the photograph that expresses and sustains it. The photograph is the link binding two uncertain worlds, acting equally on each side of the equation. For sender and for recipient alike, it serves as a manifestation of their attachment to the other, the words ‘those you love / And those who love you’ the perfect expression of the photograph as bilateral object and gesture, the kiss that gives as it takes.70 The existence of processes of exchange is best demonstrated by visual conversations, back and forths in which one photograph prompts another in return. We see one such conversation unfolding in a portrait of the Koobatian family of Hussenig, most likely made by the elder Soursourians (Figure 4.8). The photograph shares much of its composition with the Vaznaian portrait (see Fig. 4.1), especially with the presence of the eldest son at the edge of the frame, his arm reaching inwards to his family. Except that the boy in this case, Sahag, is not quite the eldest, only the eldest physically present. Visible in Sahag’s hand is a photograph sent by the eldest son and brother, Markar, who had since 1901 been in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was working as a barber. With this complex arrangement of a photograph within a photograph, the scene seems itself to participate in a migratory ‘to and fro’, pointing in different directions as it indicates the convoluted and sometimes conflicted work of photographs, the variety of roles they play and of emotional responses they might engender.

Figure 4.8  Uncredited photographer (likely H. & M. Soursourian). Koobatian Family of Hussenig (Kirkor, Araxie, Mary, Myran, John, Agavny, Markar [in the photo], Sahag), 1907. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Agavny Koubatian Bagdigian

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This is how migrant photographs often come to us, not as their own independent objects but as details in family pictures, embraced by their loved ones and interlaced into their own portraits. For the migrant it must have brought the comfort of which Haig writes. The Koobatians hold Markar’s photograph, and through this they signal to Markar that they hold on to him, that despite his absence he remains present in their lives. In complimentary fashion, they ask Markar to hold on to them in return. Yet the display cannot but speak of incompleteness; it ‘defines an absence’, in John Berger’s words, being a physical token of exactly what is missing from the scene, exactly what the family lacks.71 It makes clear the absence in the family and stands as a sign of loss; there’s a clear sadness and longing to such displays, a mood of yearning that stands as a domestic echo of the migrant’s sentiments in the Groung lament. And as a manifestation of their longing for the missing son and brother, might not comfort turn to discomfort? The bantoukhd in such a situation saw themselves in the form of a photograph, specifically in the form of a photograph that had been sent to the other side of the world as a sign of love and success, only to return in reconstituted form, made to define so clearly his absence from the family home. Perhaps discomfort was a necessary aspect. Photographs from Harput acted as insistent reminders of home, the means of claiming the attention of those who roamed abroad and whose eyes and minds might similarly wander away from the homeland. Thought of in this way, the pull of photographs was not simply ‘towards abroad’, away from the Armenian provinces; there was also a complementary force at work, one that urged migrants to look back towards home. The photograph ‘holds open, preserves the empty space which the sitter’s presence will, hopefully, one day fill again’.72 Before photographs are used as placeholders for missing histories, they are placeholders for missing people. They fill gaps not in the past but in the present, seemingly hoping that the gap does not continue into the future. With Markar’s photograph, the Koobatians bide their time. Like the complete, unfractured group portrait made before departure, a new portrait with the absent migrant’s photograph included in the family space does not simply present an idea of togetherness that the group can believe in and take consolation from, but rather looks forward in time to the moment of reunion. As they look to the future, might they not also be taking part in the migrant’s own vision? To see the display purely in terms of yearning is surely to limit the photograph and what is expressed and performed though its exhibition. We might think back to the Tlgadintsi story ‘The Boy in the Picture’ and remember the pride with which the mother shows her son’s photograph – indeed, shows off her son’s photograph. It is a physical action accompanied by and overlaid with a boastful oral narrative, with the mother spinning yarns of the boy’s great success in America. The boy is young, prosperous and full of vigour, she tells her listeners, ‘over there he is a lord’.73 The mother wields the son’s photograph as a status symbol, a sign of the family’s advancement. She takes part in acts of public exhibition that Disdéri had made a part of photography, portraits ‘not only dutifully kept, but […] also shown to guests as evidence of the prestige of the family’.74 The showing of the picture, in a sense, acts as an extension of the bantoukhd’s own narrative, a reiteration of the scene of success staged in the studio. Indeed, it would literally have been shared, for the migrant’s success would have been his family’s also, the fruits of his labour

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destined for the homelands in the form of financial remittances. We might even be looking at evidence of this in the form of the Koobatian photograph, one which could well have been paid for using money sent by Markar. In this sense, just as they hold up his photograph as a sign of success, so too do they hold up their own. The family might thus have their own future vision of prosperity and security, sharing in precisely those dreams that the migrant projected in his studio portrait. If we are to accept the mood of Tlgadintsi’s story, the stories a bantoukhd told about themselves were happily embraced by his family and possibly even embellished further. Thus clothed in narrative, photographs in Harput became not simply part of the landscape but also part of its soundscape. Photographs brought people together: across the world, as has been seen, but also in the sense that they brought people together around them as objects.75 People gathered around photographs, to look, to tell stories. Unlike other forms of portrait, such as a betrothed (we might think back to Abraham Seklemian and the photograph of his fiancée Magdaline), a migrant’s photograph was aimed at a wide audience made up of extended family. Viewing was often a communal rather than individual experience, much like the reading of a letter, and indeed the two probably went in tandem: Markar’s sits in what appears an envelope of similar size, what we might surmise to be the means by which the photograph arrived and the receptacle also for a letter. Photographs encouraged migration, and so too did they try to bring peregrinations to an end. Acting as insistent reminders of home, they called bantoukhds back. The medium can often be found working in this fashion, trying to undo itself and counterbalance its own excesses, and yet it did not throw its weight quite so forcefully behind the project of repatriation. Returnees, such as the man who carried with him the portrait of Varteres Garougian and other friends, were always outnumbered by those heading westwards. Young men would follow their migrant brothers – indeed, we discover that the Vaznaian family was not quite as intact as it appeared in the studio, for Mgerditch was joining his brother Aharon, already in the USA. Meanwhile, young women voyaged for marriages arranged through the sending of portraits, thus becoming ‘picture brides’.76 We might remember Totovents writing that ‘[t]here was not a single girl who was not on fire with the idea of going to the United States as a young bride’, and understand how photographs, as well as sustaining existing relationships, became involved in the construction of new ones. Such arrangements were common for the time. Marderos Deranian, the chronicler of the town of Hussenig, offers as a typical occurrence of local life a scene in which a young woman announces to fellow townswomen: ‘“My brother sent money for me to go to America and marry one of his friends with whom he works in the wire mill. His friend has seen my picture and wants to marry me.”’77 Tlgadintsi’s story deals with a similar situation, although there it is the man who is put on display; he is ‘The Boy in the Picture’ that the mother shows off to an audience made up of a potential bride’s family. The suitor’s picture did not always play such a central part, or indeed any part at all. Instead, the focus was on the portrait of the woman – the term ‘picture bride’ itself suggests such an imbalance and the workings of an asymmetrical power relationship. The circulation of a young woman’s photograph, often without the reciprocal circulation of the man’s photographs, indicated the limits of her own agency. In

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the regional practice described by Sarah Graham-Brown, the portrait of a woman meant that ‘she was scrutinized without having the opportunity to scrutinize in return’.78 We find numerous examples of this type of image, variations on the migrant image from the USA, in which solitary women present themselves, almost offer themselves, to the lens, submitting to an inspection process not far removed from the anthropological types of Orientalist photography. What Graham-Brown’s description evokes, after all, is the imbalance of an imperial ‘oneway vision’.79 Just as women’s relegation to the wings of family pictures indicates a second-class photographic status, so too, paradoxically, can their assumption of the Figure 4.9  A. & H. Soursourian. Unknown woman, centre stage. Keeping with the no date. K. S. Melikian Collection, Library of paradox, the female subjects Congress, Washington, DC. of some photographs seem simultaneously brought to the fore while kept at the margin. A cabinet portrait by A. & H. Soursourian employs a key carte de visite convention by posing its subject besides an empty chair, and yet here it has every appearance of performing a very different function (Figure 4.9). Even without knowing the exact history behind the photograph, it seems clear that an occupant is being sought for the chair, with the woman presented as having the makings of a dutiful wife, ready to take up position by a husband’s side. It would be remiss of us, however, to neglect Deranian’s suggestion of female agency in the process, at least as it plays out in his scene at Hussenig. ‘“When I go to America, if I do not like this man, I will not marry him”’, the speaker continues.80 The bride-to-be in Tlgadintsi’s narrative, by contrast, seems trapped by the arrangement, indeed ensnared, for she has been duped. Once the marriage is arranged, she travels to the USA, experiencing a culture shock when she ‘sets foot upon a new shore’. Nothing, however, is more surprising than the sight of the man who has come to meet her: ‘there on the seashore she sees someone holding out his hand. An awkward face looking around forty years old with sunken eyes, a young man with a camel’s hump, a worker worn out and aged by ten years, and

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nothing more.’81 Her betrothed is not all that she has been led to expect and she is left still searching hopefully for a trace of the world that had been presented to her in the photograph. While his photograph presented promises of wealth and happiness, the suitor in the flesh is an image of degradation, a body wrecked by American industry. He represents what is not said in studio portraits, what lies ‘beyond the frame’, being in Tlgadintsi’s eyes not simply physical damage but moral corruption also, for a young woman has been tricked into going abroad and Armenian existence in Harput has been diminished because of it. Rather than simply a fiction created by Tlgadintsi to pass comment on bantkhdoutioun, such Figure 4.10  J.A. Dansereau. Annakh sharp practices involving photographs Azerumian of Harput, Arzuman Srabian of really were sometimes employed during Woonsocket, Rhode Island, c.1906. Project the arrangement of marriages.82 SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Elsewhere, relationships, whether Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy born through photographs or sustained of Virginia Bethany. by them, were conducted honestly and on terms of parity. A composite photograph seems to tell a whole story about its protagonists, an exchange of portraits between Annakh Azerumian in Harput and Arzuman Srabian in the USA and finally their commingling (Figure 4.10). It tells a story of photography also, for the repetition of poses, the very fact that portraits made thousands of miles apart should mirror each other so precisely, is an indication of the global standardized compositional formula at work. The most discernible differences between the two wings of the images are to be found not in the figures but in the studio backgrounds, the details of Annakh’s suggesting it to have been the product of the A. & H. Soursourian studio. The photographer in Rhode Island, meanwhile, has made a virtue of the similarities in the process of bringing the two portraits together, above all using the traditional raised, leaning arm as a unifying hinge. Both formal device and symbol, the arms hermetically seal the image, locking the two photographs and two people together. In this, photography demonstrates the work that it does in support of this long-distance relationship. More than that, however, the quasi-matrimonial stance creates a vision that foretells and instrumentally plays a role in bringing about a future joining, for in delving into their later history we find the couple getting married in Massachusetts in 1908, Annakh having arrived from Harput the previous year.83

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Photographs forged relationships and forged physical passages across the world; women followed their portraits, and followed the lines of relationships fostered and sustained through those portraits. As did others. We also find arriving in late summer 1907 the Koobatian family of Hussenig. Their transit had been arranged by Markar, and they seem to have arrived not too far behind their photograph. With this knowledge that photograph seems to carry another message, at the very least announcing, as the Saroyans do from Alexandre Papazian’s studio in Erzurum, that the family are on their way. The photograph thus no longer trades in mere hope for reunion. It moves from the abstract to the concrete, from sentiment to solid intent. It seems to add, also, to the meaning behind the display of Markar’s photograph. Indeed, looking once again, a noted aspect of the family portrait is less the display of Markar’s picture and more the partial concealment of it. The migrant photograph is not brandished openly, as in so many similar photographs, and as it peeps out of the envelope so too does it seem to point inside, towards what is contained within, known to the sitters and to the intended viewer but perhaps no one else, as if the family conceal a truth not from themselves but from anyone else who might happen to see the photograph.84 Photographs kept families together, maintaining contact between them and reuniting them in pictures and in the imagination – and sometimes reuniting them in the flesh as well, making good on their promises to bring the fractured world back together. Yet fractures healed were also fractures maintained. The journeys of Annakh Azerumian and the Koobatians stand as indicators of the solidification of Armenian life abroad, bantoukhds’ temporary abandonment of their native soil taking on permanency.

At School in Harput Around the time of the arrival in the USA of those Kharpertsis, a scene in Hussenig was photographed by one of the Soursourian family – Askanaz or Haroutiun, or possibly both (Figure 4.11).85 The photographer(s) stood on the roof of the Apostolic girls’ school and looked over towards Sourp Varvar, one of the largest and most famous churches in the province, built in 1848, its dome decorated with paintings of the heavens.86 A holy spring ran under the church and it served as a place of pilgrimage for those seeking cures, particularly cures for eye problems;87 indeed, it might be wondered if this was a particular pilgrimage spot for hopeful migrants, with trachoma being a prevalent issue among Armenians hoping to enter the USA and the reason for the disbarment of many.88 The act of photographing the church no doubt extended pilgrimage opportunities to those who migrated successfully; it could be the means by which Armenians abroad visited the holy site, journeying via the photographic portal that Oliver Wendell Holmes describes, imaginatively occupying its spaces and participating in the life of the village. This role is perhaps best understood through funeral tableaus – post-mortem photographs that might appear to hinge on the absence of the deceased but were probably designed with absent viewers in mind, their aim to allow bantoukhds a semblance of involvement in traditional rites at the time of death and to provide an ongoing site of mourning for those not able to visit the final resting place.89

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Figure 4.11  A. & H. Soursourian. Sourp Varvar and Boys’ School, Hussenig, 1907. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA.

Although it occupies a smaller portion of the frame, the boys’ school next door to the church seems just as much the subject of the photograph, as suggested by the way in which its students put themselves on display. A child on the left edge of the roof raises a hand in greeting, seeming to understand that the camera represents a means of contact with distant lands. Other children lean out of the windows below, jockeying for position. Like the figures in the great cemetery of Erzurum (see Fig. 3.10), they strain to be seen by the lens, strain to be rendered visible in another part of the world. Yet unlike those in Erzurum, their audience is not unknown to them, for they specifically communicate with other places of Armenian habitation. Through the photograph they make contact with Kharpertsis thousands of miles away, their gestures of greetings traversing the gulf between. They participate in a new form of community; Hussenig is no longer contained by the space of the physical town itself but is spread across the world and held together by communications such as these. What photography did for the family, it did for the wider community. Its other roles similarly replicated themselves, and in addition to serving as a binding agent there can be little doubt that photographs such as this were also charged with more specific instrumental purposes. Hussenig still existed as a physical place, a town in need of assistance, and photographs thus solicited support from abroad and then served as evidence of the changes rendered through that support. One example relating to the scene at Sourp Varvar is the donation in 1888 of a new church bell, paid for by Hussenig Armenians in the USA, and forged in those lands also; but more the focus of the Soursourian view of 1907 is the church school. The school formed a particular site of photography’s involvement with community building, Haig declaring education to be the other great impetus behind studio production.90 The medium attended Harput’s educational

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developments as it did its migratory flows, and the two ‘forms’ were entwined with one another. Educational societies were established in the USA, each one drawing together migrants from particular towns and villages and organizing them in support of educational endeavours in those places.91 The activities and fundraising of these societies – dedicated to constructing schools, employing teachers and buying books – played a significant role in building up the places that migrants had left behind while also building those migrants into a diaspora, linking them through collective endeavour in support of their shared places of origin. This, then, appears to be the specific meaning behind the gestures of some schoolchildren in our photograph as they hold books out in front of them. This display takes on further significance when we learn that Askanaz and Haroutiun Soursourian served on the Library Committee of Hussenig, responsible for purchasing books on Armenian history from Constantinople, subsequently utilized by not only local school pupils but also others in the community.92 The photograph promotes their own cause, and further carries an autobiographical element, telling something of the story of their lives. They photograph their church and the school that they served. And of course, we know this place to be their hometown. Indeed, were we able to remove the church from our field of vision, we would be looking at the part of the town where their homes were to be found. The western part of Hussenig, where the Soursourian homes sat side by side, was also the nexus point of the town, a junction from which a number of roads led.93 On a regular basis, Askanaz would have ascended to the Kaghak on the Harput Road while Haroutiun would have followed the Mezre Road to his own studio.

Figures on rooftops appear to be a common feature of Soursourian photography – in the family’s work we can trace the trope at least as far back as 1889 and Hovhannes and Mardiros’s contribution to the Diyarbekir album.94 The act is no less significant when we see it staged in school photographs. In one photograph, what appears to belong to a number of images they produced for the ABCFM mission, they provide a view of the upper city, using its shape and stepped nature in the construction of their scene (Figure 4.12). As if adopting the logic established by the ABCFM schools, sat as they were high above both the plain of Harput and the rest of the Kaghak, a class from the girls’ school is pictured above the city, a sign of their ascent. Higher still, on the roof above the group, stands a lone figure, the class’s star pupil as an inscription on the reverse informs us. In her accentuated position, she is literally top of the class. The entire structure of the photograph, its highlighting of one school group, and highlighting one pupil from that group, speaks of elevation and progress. Indeed, it nods towards, and takes an unusual perspective on, the civilizational discourse of missionary work that made its influence felt on missionary photography, both globally and in a regional practice seen in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Taking a cue from anthropology, the camera was used to track ascents through the civilizational ranks, not least through its frequent use of the before-and-after format.95 Without

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being plotted so explicitly, progress and advancement remain the message of this Harput photograph, and indeed of all school photography. The typical presence of an authority figure (in one form or another) – whether Sultan Abdülhamid, Mgrdich Sanasarian or any number of others – might place pupils in a subservient position in a hierarchical system, but it simultaneously marks their privilege and places them above those outside the system, the ‘rank and file’. Such elevation is the implicit message of school photographs, and is here given expression through the utilization of the city itself. The Soursourians’ photograph consciously makes use of the physical shape of the Kaghak to this end, while also, we might observe, inadvertently replicating some of the city’s social structure. At the lower edge, amidst a blur of passing figures around an arched doorway, two young boys stay stock still, gazing up at the photographer, consciously impressing themselves upon the image (see detail). Their inclusion is not part of the photograph’s design, and yet it works to accentuate its message; in what is highly unusual for a school scene, we see pictured within the frame the outside element, usually only implied, that education seeks to lift its pupils above. Meanwhile, another presence, just as unintended, makes something of a mockery of that message of separation, as a boy intrudes upon the scene above, insinuating himself into the image by taking up position on a roof between the class and their star pupil (see detail).

Figure 4.12  Uncredited photographer (likely H. & M. Soursourian). Parsonage and Girls’ School class, East Harput Kaghak, no date. Harvard University, Houghton Library, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions archives, ABC 1–91, Box 17.

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These are presences that by turns reinforce and subvert photographic intentions while suggesting an essential truth about education, that it remained, despite great expansion, a domain of relative privilege. A Euphrates College yearbook shows its tuition fees to be two lira per year for the boys’ school and one lira for the girls’, with an attached comment declaring that, while those fees might seem low, they are ‘considerable’ by local standards. ‘For many pupils in a country of such poverty,’ it continues, ‘even these moderate charges are quite prohibitive.’96 The same applies to migration, even though as a phenomenon it drew from a cross-section of society by its very nature. Migrants required a certain level of funding in order to make their journeys, especially migrants to the USA.97 Figure 4.12 (detail). And the same, of course, is true of photography. Intimately connected with education and migration as it was, it tended to draw its subjects from the ranks of the better off and more fortunate. This means that there are always those that sit outside the frame and outside our line of sight. Sometimes they might sit at the edges of the photograph, looking inwards and indeed looking upwards, and on occasion they clamber uninvited right into the heart of the image and refuse to leave, enjoying their rare moment of being photographed and the sense of elevation that accompanies it.

In ‘Summer’s New Gift’ (1914), Tlgadintsi declares that it is in knowledge and education, in the instruction of a new generation, that the salvation of Harput lies, a salvation that can only be achieved through raising funds for the opening of new

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provincial schools.98 The contributions of American-based Kharpertsis had proved vital to the Central School, especially when Tlgadintsi was faced with rebuilding it after its destruction in the 1895 massacres.99 He thus came to use photography as countless other educators and educational establishments did, for celebratory and promotional purposes, as a way of speaking of achievements and soliciting funds. In a photograph of a Central School graduating class from 1910, Tlgadintsi sits, as might be expected, at the centre of the frame and the centre of the group, occupying the place of honour (Figure 4.13). He plays the father figure to his students, embracing his role as the founder and director of the school, teacher of its students and head of a literary movement. His pupils seem happy to aid the construction of this quasi-familial scene; indeed, some would write about him in fatherly terms, their tones chiming with those of the Sanasarian students who left offerings to the founder in the name of his ‘worthy wards’ (see Fig. 3.13).100 However, considering Tlgadintsi’s work as a writer and a teacher, considering his ideas of education as the salvation of the province, the photograph also seems to cast its net wider. The students gathered before the lens are preparing to leave school and enter the wider community, and both they and their diplomas sit as promises of future achievement and social contribution. Such photographs were thus the counterparts of and the antidotes to those photographs of departing migrants. It was the emptying and decline of provincial Harput that made the National Central School such an important enterprise for Tlgadintsi, and with this

Figure 4.13  A. & H. Soursourian. Tlgadintsi and graduates of the National Central School, 1910. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.

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being the case, the creation of class photographs stood for a belief in the future and the continuation of an Armenian existence in those lands. In other words, with such photographs Tlgadintsi constructs his own future visions, thinking ahead to a time in which Harput is no longer threatened and drained but instead thrives and prospers. With this outlook in mind, it might be wondered whether, despite appearing to follow the hierarchical structure of school photography, the photograph of Tlgadintsi’s class actually suggests something quite different. It seems as though the conventional dynamic becomes reversed, for it is the teacher that now looks to the class. The garlands – in the form of the diplomas, in the form of the photograph – are his offerings to them. This might in turn indicate a wider reversal in the photographs produced in Harput province. The bantoukhd in the family portrait constitutes a small detail, but it is one that disturbs the traditional order. With his inclusion, the structure and logic of the family photograph shifts inexorably, upending its established dynamic. The patriarch still clings to the apex of the picture, but that apex is no longer what it was. It is now not the father but the son, standing at the edge of the frame or appearing in miniature by way of the proffered photograph, who is the heart of the picture. It is to him that the family look, it is to him that the family defers. The dominant gesture of the Armenian family photograph is no longer the hand on the patriarch’s shoulder but the hand on the son’s photograph. By holding him up, they acknowledge that he holds them up, by sending home remittances, by paving the way for their exit from Ottoman lands. It is a gesture evident in the majority of photographs connected with the migratory phenomenon; it is there even when no photograph is held within the frame, for a family photograph being sent abroad in itself constitutes this gesture, a reaching out for the bantoukhd across space. John Berger tells us that migration ‘does not only involve leaving behind, crossing the water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world’; it is ‘to dismantle the center of the world, and so move into a lost, disorientated one of fragments’.101 The reorganization of the picture plane seems minor by comparison, but it is a reorganization that refers to and stems from this dismantling. Photographs from Harput might not speak as ostentatiously as those that arrived in Harput from abroad, and yet they speak just as much, in their own way, of existing in the modern world. They speak of the world of fragments, of the unsettling of the province, the upending of norms, the dispersal of people, the emptying of the land.

Chapter 5 RETURNING TO VAN

Another family of a departed migrant sit for their portrait (Figure 5.1). It might almost have been made as a trial run for the Adoians’ portrait, or as a repeat of the process (see Fig. 2.2). The exact relationship in time between the portrait of Khisarji Kevork’s family and its better-known counterpart – which came before, which after – cannot be known, and we might only speak of them as the products of the same era, and products of the same process, the same eye. The heads of the families sit, their hands resting on their legs directly ahead. The children stand, their hands bent towards their chests at right angles, cradling flowers that lean towards the lens in offering. Beneath their feet woven rush matting, seemingly Figure 5.1  Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Khisarji as textured and tactile as the Kevork’s family, Van, 1910s. Armen Shahinian painted scene behind them is flat. collection, courtesy of Houshamadyan. As for that backdrop, the portrait of Khisarji Kevork’s family is far more informative, filling in the gaps, fleshing out what is only hinted at and gestured to in the murky forms of the Adoian portrait. The design becomes clearer the more we witness of it in this and other photographs, revealing itself as something akin to a cloister scene: a series of compound columns, each one composed of two separate columns with a slender gap between; above, the columns support a series of arches while, midway down, they are supported in turn by small arched buttresses that connect each column to the next. Noticeably absent from the Adoian portrait, not even hinted at, is the backdrop’s most distinctive feature.

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Figure 5.1 (detail).

While three small archways frame shallow dark voids, a fourth, larger archway on the right-hand side of the scene gives onto a view of a mountainous landscape of two peaks and a winding path. For all its flatness and artifice, the painted backdrop begins to take on a concrete presence as we see it repeated across a number of portraits. Taking on some sort of presence, too, is the photographer whose name we sometimes find printed on the mounts – H. AVEDAGHAYAN – and indeed the world of which he was part, for the painted scene now seems to evoke Van and the physical environment in which the photographer worked. The backdrop, with its beckoning path, might act as a route into this world.

Above Van In the foothills of the twin-peaked Mount Varak (Mount Erek in Turkish), above the city of Van, lay the monastery complex that bore its name, Varakavank. One of the few to photograph the place in the nineteenth century was H.F.B. Lynch, doing so one November morning in 1893 after ‘the first snowstorm of the coming winter’, the snow ‘lying in spite of a brilliant sun’.1 He addresses the vank from the interior of its courtyard, gazing towards its portico and small bell tower, the narthex of Sourp Kevork beyond that and the church of the Holy Virgin at the rear (Figure 5.2). Established in the eleventh century, its fortunes had fluctuated over the years. When Mgrdich Khrimian, a native Vanetsi priest, returned from a stint in Constantinople to take up the role of Vartabed (abbot) of Varakavank, the place was lying in ruins.2 By the time that our photographer, Hovhannes Avedaghayan, was born, around 1863 in the city below, it was undergoing a revival and gaining in importance as ‘the cradle of the national movement and one of the symbols of the Armenian cultural rebirth’.3 The monastery was brought back

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Figure 5.2  H.F.B. Lynch. Varakavank (caption: ‘Monastery of Yedi Kilisa’), Van, 1893. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901).

to life during Khrimian’s tenure, with notable developments being the founding of the Zharankavorats seminary school for boys and a printing house where textbooks for the region’s schools were produced along with, importantly, the first periodical for miles around, Ardzvi Vasbouragan (The Eagle of Vasbouragan). It was a journal Khrimian had first published during his time in Constantinople, establishing there its central theme of the Armenian homeland: its history read through the religious buildings that peppered the land, often in states of ruin; the dire conditions experienced by its people; the plight of those forced to migrate as bantoukhds, seeking a living in Constantinople and elsewhere.4 Themes of decline, displacement and abandonment were present from the outset, Khrimian having pictured himself and the periodical as bantoukhds that had found themselves far from home, a home that was not only personal but ‘national’, rooted in the long collective history of a people. All of this was neatly expressed in Ardzvi Vasbouragan’s subtitle: ‘Flown with patriotic wings from the Artsruni Throne of Van-Dosb’, employing the medieval Armenian name for the region of Van and making reference to one of its great noble dynasties.5 Relocated to Van, publication of Ardzvi Vasbouragan became the means by which Armenians, particularly those of Constantinople, were kept appraised of what was happening in the Armenian-inhabited provinces, before that time a neglected and even despised place, looked down upon by the metropolitan intelligentsia who preferred to see themselves as the heart of the Armenian

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‘nation’. Indeed, Ardzvi Vasbouragan played a vital part in the emergence of a new Armenian ‘imagined community’ and the transformation of the Armenian sense of belonging from being primarily concerned with religion and language to having an anchor in a distinctly Armenian geography. Khrimian directed the gaze of Armenians ‘tebi yergir’ (‘to the homeland’) in a new impetus that mirrored the ‘back to the land’ movements of the Russian Empire.6 The yergir was the place held to be the national homeland in the Ottoman East, the lands where Armenians had historically lived and which had been the site of the ancient Armenian kingdoms. In short, Khrimian ‘aimed to make “Armenia” a core notion among Armenians’.7 During Khrimian’s time at Varak, the production of Ardzvi Vasbouragan was aided by the students and staff at the Zharankavorats school, thus involving some of the most important figures in late nineteenth-century Armenian literature and historical studies, their work credited with ushering in the new age of provincial writing and shaping the Armenian thought of the era.8 They included Karekin Srvantsdiants, most noted for his fieldwork, later travelling through the Ottoman East in the wake of the Russo–Turkish War to compile statistical data on Armenian communities for Patriarch Nerses Varzhapetian; he also pursued his own interests in recording folk tales, notably the oral epic Sasna Dzrer (The Daredevils of Sasun), commonly known as Sasuntsi Tavit (David of Sasun), told to Srvantsdiants by a villager from Mush, west of Lake Van, over a three-day period.9 Seen as a tale of the Arab-Armenian wars of the Middle Ages, Sasna Dzrer became a national epic, Armenians finding in it, as Leon Surmelian later wrote, the tale of ‘wild rebel[s] with a dream’ and ‘eccentrics who broke the rules and did the impossible’.10 Khrimian’s name became synonymous with Varak, and yet his stay on the mountain was relatively brief. Khrimian served as Primate of Daron (Mush) from 1862 and then as Patriarch of Constantinople from 1869, in which positions he continued to draw attention to the situation in the eastern provinces. The reports on conditions there that he commissioned as Patriarch of Constantinople made clear the precariousness of Armenian lives, subject to official corruption and Kurdish banditry, and highlighted the need for reform; they were submitted to the Sublime Porte but precipitated little action. Varakavank, meanwhile, still thrived under his lasting influence. Khoren Khrimian, his nephew, returned to Varak in the 1870s, after further education in Germany, and took over the directorship of the seminary school.11 The school continued in the established vein, with an emphasis on the study of the Armenian language, natural history and archaeology. Each spring Khoren Khrimian led the students on survey expeditions taking in the Armenian villages, monasteries and mountains of the region. The information gathered was later published in three volumes, edited by Khoren, under the title of Hayrenakidutiun (‘Knowledge of the Homeland’).12 At the same time, below in the city of Van, situated on the plain between Mount Varak and Lake Van to the west, worked an early proponent of the ‘tebi yergir’ movement, Khrimian’s close ally Mgrdich Portukalian, a prominent member of the Constantinoplebased Araratian society, devoted to the expansion of education.13 Along with this dedication to education, Portukalian shared with Khrimian a concerted focus

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on the homelands and almost a distain for those who looked in the opposite direction, equating bantkhdoutioun with ‘the tragic abandonment of Armenia’.14 He established the Central School of Van, pictured by Vahan Papazian, the Armenian political activist known as Goms, as a bourgeois counterpart to the ‘rusticism’ of the Zharankavorats (Khoren Khrimian was the only university graduate teaching at Varak).15 The schools, however, were united in a shared sense of education as a vital means of ameliorating conditions in the yergir, and carried ‘the missionary message of the greatness of the Armenian past’.16 Papazian writes of the importance of the schools in the emergence of Armenian political parties.17 The touchpaper for the movement is generally seen as having been lit in 1878 with the post-war peace treaties and an act that, in a career hardly lacking in influence, might have been Khrimian’s most significant. That year, the now former patriarch led a delegation, Minas Tcheraz included, to the Congress of Berlin to argue for the implementation of reform measures in the Ottoman East. These efforts resulted in Article 61 of the final Treaty of Berlin, a clause that would become infamous, its reform measures laid out only in the most general terms while others in the treaty made specific implementations for the Balkans.18 Khrimian subsequently returned to the Ottoman Empire with a descriptive metaphor. The European Powers, he announced, had offered a ‘Dish of Liberty’ to conference attendees; the Bulgarians, Serbs and Montenegrins had supped from the dish with iron spoons while the paper spoons of the Armenians had crumbled in the heat, leaving them to go hungry.19 With this, Khrimian adroitly diagnosed the prevailing European notion that nationhood was expressed through violent struggle; the iron of weaponry was all that mattered, he seemed to say, petitions on paper counted for little. Many construed this as a call to arms, a declaration that Armenians needed to employ Balkan tactics in order to secure the much-needed reforms. Local Armenian self-defence societies arose in the years that followed, such as Bashdban Haireniats in Erzurum. The first political party proper, the Armenagans, emerged in 1885 from among Portukalian’s students in Van, and in its wake came the other major groups of the era: the Hntchaks, set up in Geneva in 1887, with its first branch, it is interesting to note, established among students at the Imperial Medical School in Constantinople at the time of the Musa Bey affair;20 and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, most often referred to as the Dashnaktsuthiun (Federation) or simply Dashnaks, in Tiflis in 1890.21 In contrast to the Armenagans, these latter groups, it is important to stress, were Russian Armenian-led organizations, and while their eyes were fixed upon the yergir from the outset, it was a number of years before they achieved active presences in the Ottoman East.

During the 1880s and 1890s, when studios were opening and beginning to thrive in Erzurum and Harput, there were no such establishments in Van and instead images of the city and region come from travellers, including H.F.B Lynch and Maximilien-Étienne-Émile Barry (who served as photographer to anthropologist

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Ernest Chantre’s 1881 expedition).22 We do get an intimation, however, of the existence of some form of local photography. The French writer Paul Müller-Simonis, in Van in 1888, makes mention of an Armenian photographer working for the American mission. In an echo of incidents elsewhere, Patedjan, as Müller-Simonis names the photographer, is described as having fallen foul of the authorities and had his house searched owing to his taking photographs of the city and the fortress.23 (Müller-Simonis recounts also the confiscation of photographic equipment suffered by his own group on their approach to Van and his long efforts to be allowed to photograph cuneiform inscriptions around the city.24) With the absence of a local practice, there is no obvious place to which we might look in order to identify the maker of the photographs that appeared in the Abdülhamid albums in the early 1890s. The photographs themselves offer few clues and Patedjan seems our only suspect at present; quite possibly they are the product of a photographer not native to Van, an itinerant practitioner visiting from another part of the empire. At the time the album photographs were made, Hovhannes Avedaghayan, the man who appears to have been Van’s first studio photographer, was himself itinerant. He had travelled as a young man to the Caucasus, possibly as a migrant worker. Where exactly is not known, but one of the hubs of Tiflis or Baku might seem a reasonable proposition. As we have noted the rise of the bourgeoisie in Tiflis, so must we note how the vast expansion of both these cities in the second half of the nineteenth century was built on cheap itinerant labour, and how their populations each grew tenfold during that era, being predominantly composed of migrants by the 1880s.25 The presence of migrants thus played a substantial role in transculturation, the cities becoming sites where different classes, national groups and power contingents met, cooperated and clashed. One major result of these dense interconnections, as Houri Berberian tells us, was that the Caucasus became an incubator for radical politics, activists subsequently crossing over and spilling over into neighbouring regions along paths that closely resemble those followed by photographers.26 Sometimes politics and photography were travelling companions, as when we find Avedaghayan joining the ranks of the Dashnaktsuthiun at some point in the 1890s. The nature of his contribution to the party isn’t known; he could well have been one of Berberian’s ‘roving revolutionaries’.27 The only movements known to us at this time are of the forced variety, Avedaghayan being arrested by the Russian authorities and exiled to Siberia.28 Deportations most often took the form of sea voyages where prisoners, 600 at a time, would be packed in the hold of a steamship in the harbour at Odessa. Leaving the Black Sea by way of the Bosporus, the ship would have spent some time moored in Constantinople.29 As well as those voluntary migrants who passed through the ports of Constantinople, there were also those such as Avedaghayan, imperial subjects forcibly moved around imperial space.30 Indeed, the rest of the itinerary – with the ship continuing on the Mediterranean, passing through the Suez Canal, on to Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Nagasaki, before arriving in Vladivostok and the surrounding Siberian wilds – reads like a more arduous rendition of the migrant’s westward journey described by Saroyan.31 This was

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another ‘long crossing, far below in the ship’, one that was followed by another ‘island terror’, but one which makes the experience of Ellis Island seem supremely pale by comparison. The final destination of Sakhalin Island was set in the remote and unforgiving environment of the Sea of Okhotsk, off the Siberian coast.32 The penal colony established there in 1881 became ‘one of the most dreaded of exile destinations’, and by the time Avedaghayan arrived on the island, at some point in the 1890s, he would have been joining approximately 5,000 hard-labour convicts, part of a sizeable captive population on the island formed of ‘ordinary’ prisoners with sufficient sentence (two years and eight months) and, importantly, any sort of political prisoner.33 It is not clear how many other Armenian revolutionaries ended up on Sakhalin, but we do know that one of the most famous was confined there, an early, pioneering revolutionary whom Avedaghayan came to know during his time on the island.34 Sarkis Gougounian had been a student in St Petersburg before he travelled to the Caucasus with the intention of mounting a border raid to draw attention to the Armenian cause. In 1890, he set off with around 125 men, riding and marching under a banner emblazoned with five stars surrounding the number 61, referring to the five Armenian-inhabited provinces of the Ottoman East and Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin. It was an expedition that ended in abject failure, with the band pursued and captured by Russian Cossack forces and put on trial in Kars, the Russian fortress city that lay closest to the Ottoman border.35 Gougounian was sentenced to twenty years hard labour and, as would later happen to Avedaghayan, exiled first to Siberia and then to Sakhalin.36 Despite this, the expedition, clearly aimed at the Great Powers as a reminder of the responsibilities undertaken in Berlin in 1878, went a long way to establishing an important revolutionary paradigm whereby actions on the ground became inextricable from a presumed audience of international observers. Gougounian set the tone for the politics to come; the brashness and love of spectacle that he put on show in 1890 become particular aspects of the movement, especially its photography. It was not yet, however, a photographic movement; indeed, the revolutionaries of this early era, if anything, were targeted by the lens. There is a strong chance that Gougounian and Avedaghayan would have been photographed on Sakhalin, with there being an official photographic system that pictured prisoners for identity cards and other documents, as well as a doctor who had built himself a studio in order to compile anthropological images of criminal ‘types’ and even a studio photographer who produced souvenirs for the travellers on passing ships.37 With the camera on Sakhalin an instrument of repression, pseudo-science and tourism, the island seems to have represented something of a microcosm of nineteenth-century photographic practices.

Returning to Van Avedaghayan’s spell of imprisonment on Sakhalin came to an end when he mounted a successful escape bid.38 If this event were read through the lens of

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Anton Chekhov and his 1890 journalistic study of the penal colony, then it might be said that it was the distant city of Van that provided Avedaghayan with his inspiration. ‘First foremost,’ Chekhov states, ‘an exile is spurred to leave Sakhalin by his passionate love of his home district. If you listen to the convicts – what happiness it is, what joy, to live in one’s own place in one’s own country!’39 He declares the greatest lures to be the homes whose virtues stood in marked contrast to the inhospitality of Sakhalin, for ‘most frequently of all, those exiles flee for whom the difference between the climates of Sakhalin and their home region is most perceptible’.40 Certainly, to read descriptions of Van and Sakhalin is to believe that this theory could well have been true for Avedaghayan, the Eden consistently evoked with regard to the former (the popular refrain ‘Van in this world, and Paradise in the next’) lying in absolute contrast to the Hades we find in accounts of Sakhalin (‘I was in hell’, wrote Chekhov, in but one of many similar analogies by him and other writers).41 A route through Japan, China, India and Iran placed Avedaghayan finally back in Van in 1903 (he had possibly been away for the past twenty years). Upon his return, we find him getting married and embarking upon a career in photography (we might conjecture that, like numerous other practitioners, he had acquired the necessary skills in the Caucasus).42 Van had changed in his absence, continuing its expansion beyond its old walled city, the densely populated commercial hub that housed khans, markets and workshops with their famous silversmiths, tailors and other craftsmen and traders. The process had been in progress since the mid-nineteenth century but had picked up its pace with each new shock suffered by the city. Certain events, including the great fire of 1876 and the famine of 1880–81, had prompted locals, Christian and Muslim alike, to move eastwards in pursuit of a safer and healthier life to be had outside the city walls in Aikesdan, which can be translated as garden or orchard district. ‘Gardens, gardens, gardens’, Gurgen Mahari writes in the novel Burning Orchards, his loving recreation of the city, ‘Green – amazingly green – plush gardens with tall poplars and abundant orchards.’43 In contrast to the walled city, Aikesdan was largely composed of low-built dwellings, each surrounded by courtyards, orchards and gardens. These were fed by water brought down from Varak via the irrigation channels that lined the streets of the garden city, running between willows and poplars. The gardens and orchards themselves, meanwhile, saw a variety of trees – apricot, apple, pomegranate, cherry, orange and lemon, while roses and lilies were grown abundantly in the gardens. The movement away from the old city was mimicked by foreigners – the consulates and the missions – and the state, its buildings including the konak (governor’s mansion) and the new military school.44 Massacre spurred further decampment. Vanetsis largely avoided the violence of 1895 but met with massacre instead in June 1896. Despite mounting a successful defence, several Armenian sections of both the walled city and Aikesdan were looted and burnt down once the defenders had left for the Iranian border as part of a negotiated withdrawal (many of those people themselves being murdered en route).45 This was mirrored up on Varak when the monastery was plundered and partially destroyed through fire, subsequently lying abandoned for a time.

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The old city remained the central commercial site of Van. However, Aikesdan appears to have developed its own share of business activity, as we sense as Mahari plots the journey of three of his characters across Van. From the old covered market in the walled city, they travel eastwards and, with Varak before them in the distance, make their way along Khatch Poghots, the long poplar-lined central avenue running east–west through Aikesdan. As they came closer to Aikesdan, the street became noisier. Here were the Turkish baths where the soldiers crowded round, waiting for their turn. On the opposite side there was the shop of Arshak Dzetotian, the photographer, with a sign that read ‘Arshak Dzituni’ […] The bakery of Minas Palabeghian was still far away, but one could already smell the wonderful aroma of fresh bread.46

Mahari places the studio of Dzetotian, Van’s sole photographer in his rendering of the city, somewhere along the western stretch of Khatch Poghots, not far from the central crossroads of Khatch Square. Interestingly, it is just at this point that we find, on the map produced by Müller-Simonis, the city’s baths marked, reinforcing the suggestion of verisimilitude in Mahari’s city and suggesting that we might take the spot as, if not a clear statement of Avedaghayan’s place in the city, then at least an aid to imagining it.47 It certainly appears the best indication we have of the site of a studio that was listed from 1906 in the Ottoman Annuaire Oriental, making it the first Van studio to appear in the pages of that business directory and the only one to be listed for a number of years.48 If Avedaghayan did indeed have his business in this part of town, it would be in keeping with the way in which photographic businesses had situated themselves in other cities, near to customers both domestic and foreign. A photograph taken nearby gives us a sense of the place (Figure 5.3). From a spot close to Khatch Square, it looks eastwards along the main thoroughfare of Khatch Poghots; behind lies the largely Turkish district Javshin, the baths and the studio of which Mahari writes. Ahead is the more Armenian part of Aikesdan. The photograph in itself testifies to a dual presence in Van, one that by now we might understand as being conducive to the medium: the substantial educational infrastructure, represented by the large white building of the Yeramian school that looms at the centre of the frame, and the American missionary presence, with an ABCFM representative being responsible for the photograph (and its handwritten caption, declaring Khatch Poghots ‘a most beautiful street’). And in the wider vicinity of this part of Aikesdan, between the Yeramian and the large missionary compound in the south-east, especially along the broad avenue running from the right of the picture down to the Armenian district of Arark, were those elements that had proved so beneficial to photographers’ livelihoods in other cities: the British consulate situated just around the corner, with the Russians, French, Iranians and Italians not too far distant; French and German missions (with a footprint somewhat lighter than that of the substantial American compound); a hotel; and the homes of the wealthy Armenian merchants, being among the few larger structures in the generally low-lying garden city.

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Figure 5.3  Uncredited photographer. Khatch Poghots, Aikesdan, c.1900. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Vart Shirvanian Hachigian.

Equally, we find signs, albeit less obvious, of other constituents here in Aikesdan, a presence that creates a veritable photographic industry. The garden city was an environment ideal for the furtive activities of revolutionaries, its very structure providing them with surreptitious back channels away from the public streets. Vanetsi Oksen Teghtsoonian recalls ‘phantom-like shadowy figures, in semi-military costumes, rifles in their hands, cartridge belts across their chests and shoulders,’ passing unseen between gardens, courtyards and houses.49 Van was now the base of operations for multiple Armenian political activists, the Hntchaks and the Dashnaks having finally made inroads into the Ottoman East from their Caucasian crucible and joined the locally produced Armenagans in the streets of Van. At the moment when Avedaghayan returned home, it was the Armenagans and the Dashnaks that dominated, with 1904–08 being a particular period of local growth for the latter.50 Despite this image of the revolutionaries as a furtive force, they did have their highly visible aspect as well, particularly in Van, with the region becoming something of a centre of revolutionary photography (Elke Hartmann observes how the ‘leadership ranks of the Armenian revolutionaries in Van appear to have spent an especially large amount of time in the photo studio’).51 High levels of production were no doubt a logical consequence of the strong Dashnak presence and the party’s particular concern for matters of narrative and image projection; at the same time, they were surely driven to some extent by the presence of a local professional photographer who was a party activist. It was now in this field that

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Avedaghayan was contributing his skills. Far from leaving the revolutionary cause behind, he was leading a double life as both a public photographer and a more clandestine image-maker, with one account informing us that he was the producer of ‘all the photographs of the revolutionary figures and groups of Van’.52

If our source is correct then Avedaghayan was responsible for a portrait of Vanetsi Sarpach Khecho (Figure 5.4). Certainly, a professional photographer was at work here, that much is evident from the careful composing and staging of the scene, both subject and camera positioned flush with the wall, the frame hugging the revolutionary body closely, making full use of the photographic space available. It is a portrait that can, like the image of the student produced by Movses Papazian in Erzurum, be considered important in being commonplace, demonstrative as it is of an aesthetic we see repeated across innumerable revolutionary images. Repetition, as we have seen, was baked into photographic practice, but here it needs to be placed in the context of Figure 5.4  Uncredited photographer. a revolutionary movement that was Sarpach Khecho, Van, no date. ARF Archives, Watertown, MA, box 30, photo 32. itself in part an act of mimicry, with roots in Khrimian’s post-Berlin speech apparently calling for the lead of the Balkans to be followed. It was the Bulgarian example, above all, that left a lasting impression, providing a template for future actions by Armenian political parties, and there is no reason to think that such mimicry did not also extend to the visual sphere.53 Like the ‘Bulgarian national heroes’ examined by Martina Baleva, political Armenians saw photographs as important instruments, the means by which they might court renown and create public personas.54 As Baleva argues, the writing of national histories has prevented an examination of the way similar imagery operated across the region, and with this in mind we might speak of a transnational history, even, perhaps, another form of imperial history, for at different stages in the empire’s history diverse imperial subjects utilized related visual modes as part of campaigns against their overlords.55 In this sense, Armenian political imagery had a distinct lineage, its means of picturing an heroic defence of the homeland being inherited from other

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homelands. At the same time, Armenian activists worked with a picture-making practice already familiar to them. After all, the carte de visite portraits of the ‘Bulgarian national heroes’, with subjects pictured full-length amidst typical studio props, most often resting an elbow on a plinth, were largely formulaic products closely resembling what came out of Movses Papazian’s studio in Erzurum and other studios of the Ottoman East.56 Mass portraiture was no longer confined to the carte de visite by the time that Armenian activists took to the stage, and yet it retained its standardized processes, processes that repeated themselves with each new photograph. Certainly, Sarpach Khecho’s photograph has innumerable counterparts, the very same pose, props and composition repeated from frame to frame. They are, at heart, in logic, cartes de visite, but with their structures invigorated, small shifts imbuing old formats with new energy, setting their subjects in motion. The body now lifts itself, the hand once put down on a plinth or pile of books becomes the hand raised up with a weapon; raised also, on the other side of the body in a complementary sign of action, is a knee, planted firmly on a rock. The body is also freed of its accoutrements, the literal trappings that held it in place, with only weapons and ammunition now left as props. Thus emerged the fixed motifs of a new standard form, the systematized visual code of the global bourgeoisie modified for use by political activists espousing nationalism and socialism. Fedayi photographs harnessed the subjunctive potential of the carte de visite, its capacity, as Michèle Hannoosh describes, to free its subjects ‘from the defined hierarchies and identities in which they lived’.57 Constructed in the process was a variant on the ‘new man’ of the carte de visite, a ‘new, self-respecting man’.58 They pictured their heroes as acting in defiance of the constraints of law and an unjust society; importantly, theirs was also a campaign against the constraints imposed upon identity and the self-images that had become dominant among Armenians, particularly the rayah, the meek and acquiescent Armenian of the provinces whose lot in life was to live under the thumb of Ottoman rule and Kurdish banditry. They reclaimed a lost manhood, with the fedayi ‘participating in a revolution, his own. The act of becoming a guerrilla fighter is the assertion, rather reassertion, of Armenian virility.’59 As important as it is to recognize the way in which this mode follows in the tradition of previous Ottoman insurgent movements, it must also be understood in its own context, ‘a product of its own history’. Photographs must be thus be considered in the context of the wider Ottoman Armenian image world, of the mourners addressing the lens in the great cemetery of Erzurum and the ‘happy’ emigrants staring out of a photograph in a burnt-out house in Harput province. While borrowings are readily apparent, Armenian revolutionary images stem from their own history and likewise seem to call upon their own mythos and folklore. It is difficult not to read the traces of the Armenian narratives of the age and see subjects channelling the heroes of those epics recently ‘discovered’ and set down, notably the ‘wild rebels’ of Sasna Dzrer, or of their modern counterparts, the works of Raffi (Hakob Melik-Hakobian) requiring particular mention. The romantic tales of the Russian Armenian writer, similarly connected to Khrimian’s circle, having been a contributor to Ardzvi Vasbouragan, are known to have served

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as inspiration for Gougounian and the generation that followed.60 His idealized protagonists include Sahrat, who rides to the aid of villagers in acts of defence and of protest in Jalaleddin (1878), based on eyewitness accounts, collected by Raffi himself, of Sheik Jalaleddin’s targeting of Armenian communities in the Aghbag region to the south-east of Lake Van;61 and Vardan, the protagonist of Khente (The Fool, 1880), whose dream of Armenians living in a free and fair future world led to him being held up as a powerful embodiment of the Armenian struggle.62 In their own minds, Armenian fighters were not so much following in the footsteps of the Balkan revolutionaries as their own heroic forebears, mythical counterparts and fictional avatars. In line with those figures, Armenian activists roamed the land, and their repetitious picturing thus inverted the metropolitan as well as the bourgeois aspect of photographic practice. A particular base of Dashnak operations was Lernabar, the collective name given to the mountainous locales south of Lake Van, ‘a maze of mountains and valleys, most of it unknown’.63 Elke Hartmann writes of the variety of costumes sported in Lernabar by Ishkhan, one of the Dashnak leaders, further placing them in the context of photography as a performative act.64 Those photographs, a makeshift backdrop suggesting again professional productions, constitute variants on his own act of naming, with Nigol Mikayelian’s full nomme de guerre being Vana Ishkhan, Prince of Van in other words, like many other fedayis wearing anachronism and historical allusion in the very name he chose for himself. Photographs played a role in this process of assuming guises and constructing identities. They were acts of reconnection with an Armenian identity present in history and fable but felt to be missing from the contemporary world. As with bantoukhd photographs, fedayi portraits can be understood as future visions, images of idealized, dream selves that, once conjured, might be ushered into the world. Self-conscious enactments of male heroism constituted a breaking away from the imposed strictures of everyday life, activists performing for the camera as part of the creation of heroic alter egos.65 Could this be what Mahari implies by staging a photograph both in a dream and at a festival? In a character’s dream, the fedayis Ishkhan and Vramian ride up to a celebration by local villagers of the Feast of the Holy Cross at Varak. They become ‘frozen like statues on their horses’, the ground beneath their feet rising to turn them into a form of living statue, ‘making such an amazing picture that Arshak Dzetotian took out his camera’.66 Even more than it was for the bantoukhd ‘lord’, the image of the fedayi ‘prince’ was clothed in heroic commentary. This was particularly so of the Dashnaks. Photographic images, circulating widely through the ongoing extraction of ‘form from form’ as postcards and reproductions in their journal Droschak, formed part of an ‘aggressive propaganda campaign extolling unprecedented – and often embellished – acts of Armenian heroism’.67 Once again, the principles established by Disdéri are seen at work, photography’s iconic potential and propensity to play into cultism – its promise, in other words, to include its subjects in the Galerie des contemporains. Armenian political groups recognized photography’s capacity for homage and put themselves forward as objects of adulation.

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While it is possible, likely perhaps, that Avedaghayan travelled to Lernabar to photograph revolutionary parties, by and large those wishing to be photographed came to him in the city. An additional role he performed during these years was that of revolutionary innkeeper, providing lodgings at his Van home for Dashnak activists travelling along the lines of fedayi networks that brought them from Nakhichevan and Yerevan across the Russian border and from Salmast in Iran.68 These were their own ‘tebi yergir’ acts; Van, while a great centre of activity and a destination in itself, also served as a stopping point on the road onwards, through Lernabar and on to Sasun, the mountainous region lying between Lake Van and the plain of Harput, a particular focus of revolutionary attention. This gives us some clue as to who he was photographing during these years and how such photographs came about, for one would imagine that these visiting fighters, just as they passed through Avedaghayan’s home, would have passed too through his studio (or whatever space he was using for revolutionary image-making purposes). During this time Avedaghayan continued his day-to-day life as a studio photographer, serving the families and institutions of Van and its environs. People crossed the city to be photographed, and indeed came to the city for the purpose, travelling from outlying districts and further afield. A group from the orphanage at Sourp Krikor, a monastery complex on the northern slopes of Varak, nestled in the hollow between its two peaks, look, as they pose in front of Avedaghayan’s distinctive backdrop, to be telling their story of descending from the mountain to have their picture taken (Figure 5.5).69 Avedaghayan’s portraits hardly evoke the

Figure 5.5  Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Sourp Krikor Monastery Orphanage for Girls, Van, 1907. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Vart Shirvanian Hachigian.

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fabled beauty of Aikesdan, yet his practice certainly seems set in the courtyards of the garden city, away from the dense walled city. If there is natural life in these photographs, it generally lies in the single flowers held by his sitters. Flowers, as has been seen, form a regular feature in studio photography of the region, and yet nowhere is the floral motif maintained quite so consistently as it is in Avedaghayan’s work. The motif is consistent and so too is the manner of its presentation – perpetually held in front of, or even clasped to, the chest, at waist height or slightly higher – pointing to this being a concrete instance of a detail crafted by the photographer rather than his sitters, with directions given from behind the camera. In the group from Sourp Krikor, four of the five photographed, evidently the orphanage’s wards, offer a flower to the lens. As they offer flowers, so does the photograph appear to offer them, either as model pupils, seeking potential donors, or, perhaps more likely, as ‘picture brides’, seeking potential husbands. It is only the older woman on the left who does not proffer a flower; instead, she gestures towards a book in her lap, a prayer book perhaps, as if to indicate the terms under which the photograph’s offering is made.

Capturing Attention We might think that anyone wanting to have their photograph taken had no choice but to turn to Avedaghayan, for as it appears on paper in the form of the trade directory, he had a monopoly on photography in Van during the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet the more we study images and texts, the more we find the traces of an unheralded image economy, with previously unknown photographers, like the revolutionaries skulking around Aikesdan, suddenly emerging from the shadows. A number of photographs indicate the presence of a photographer with a familiar prop. It seems that after leaving Boston in 1901, Movses Papazian returned to the Ottoman Empire and led for a time possibly an itinerant existence in the vicinity of Lake Van, his gnarled tree in tow. Here he photographs the Gakavian family, and according to custom we find the family patriarch Haroutiun Gakavian, a noted Vanetsi jeweller, at the centre of the image (Figure 5.6). And yet Haroutiun shares the space, for this is an image of several patriarchs, the portraits of Mgrdich Sanasarian and Victor Hugo on conspicuous display.70 The latter represents a particular photographic forebear. In the 1850s, during his time in exile from the France of Napoleon III, first in Jersey and then in Guernsey, Hugo became interested in photography as a means of disseminating his image beyond his island confines, so that he might still be known in the world and participate in its daily life. The camera ensured that physical absence was no disbarment to public presence.71 Being an age of visually centred renown, Hugo continued the practice even after his return to Paris, most notably with the production of a number of portraits by Nadar that became icons as the author’s fame continued to increase. Finding one of those portraits – one made by Nadar in 1878 – now in Van, we might recognize the extent to which Hugo’s likeness

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travelled and the extent of the fame that those portraits helped to build for him.72 Equally, glancing over to Sanasarian, we can recognize the way in which that man had benefited from the same. The reappearance of Mgrdich Sanasarian’s portrait serves as a further suggestion of the philanthropist being a genuinely popular figure. The reason for its presence in Van and exhibition by the Gakavians are difficult to fathom at this point. The family had no links to Erzurum that we know of, and the display might relate instead to the Sanasarian school in Van or else might be taken as a display of local pride in the Vanetsi family origins of this notable figure. Haroutiun Gakavian is said to have Figure 5.6  M.G. Papazian. The made business trips to Paris – a city that Gakavian Family (seated, from left, was home to several thousand Armenians, Vosgehad, Haroutiun, and Aghavni; many of them law and medical students – standing, from left, Dikran, Set and and it is thought that the picture of Hugo Hrant; in front, Vahram), Van, 2 April was picked up on one of those journeys 1906. Christine Gardon collection. and brought back to Van.73 Hung in a prominent position – first in the family home, later in the photograph – Hugo’s portrait served as a signal for Gakavian. Just as it was a vehicle for the French author, the means by which he could define himself, so too was it for the Vanetsi jeweller. It tells, of course, of Gakavian’s admiration for Hugo, an admiration not unusual among Armenians, whether for the Frenchman’s romantic literature or his liberal politics, with his novel of the barricades Les Misérables being hugely popular since being published in Armenian in the 1860s by the Dedeyan brothers of Smyrna. According to poet and critic Arshag Tchobanian, it was a book that ‘everyone in the land, even the humblest schoolmaster, has read and reread’ and the name of Hugo had come to signify for Armenians ‘justice, liberty, beauty, courage and the nobility of suffering’.74 These values were of clear importance for Gakavian, a member of the Armenagan party, and with his display he declares that he has imported the ideals embedded in the photograph as surely as he had imported the physical object. In this light, the portrait no doubt stood for his wider love of France and the ideals of the French revolution that were so important to his party. France was home, also, to specifically Armenian narratives of liberation, notably those of Mgrdich Portukalian. The Armenagans’ spiritual leader had been in Marseille since 1885, the year that he had been expelled from Van by the Ottoman authorities and his Central School had been forcibly closed, and from that city he produced his prorevolutionary journal Armenia.75

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Portukalian could never bring himself to commit to armed struggle, providing a key difference between the Armenagans and the Dashnaks.76 In terms of their revolutionary philosophies, there was often little to separate the two competing groups, and once this essential fact is acknowledged, largely ‘what remains is the activity itself ’, activity that in the Dashnak case was marked by a willingness to employ violence.77 A central difference, for our purposes, is the Dashnak use of the image to mount exhibitions of violence. Armenagans, by contrast, although they were involved in self-defence actions, 1896 being a notable example, seemed little disposed to give this aspect of their activity photographic form. That said, it is perhaps here in the Gakavian portrait that we find a distillation of what it was that Dashnak images attempted to do. Like Hugo, they acted in the manner of exiles separated from the world, projecting themselves from the sidelines into the heart of the political arena. There had grown from the suggestive kernel of Khrimian’s ‘iron ladle’ fable the sense that salvation required not simply violence but visibility, the demonstration of the active nature of struggle. ‘Reforms are granted a people up in arms, in protest’ was the lesson that the Dashnaks drew.78 A central site for this protest was the imperial capital, a space that is read by Florian Riedler as a stage for theatrically violent events laden with political messages.79 The revolutionary actions mounted there hinged on the capture of foreign attention, one of the most famous being the 1896 Dashnak armed takeover of the Ottoman Bank, a form of propaganda of the deed that was accompanied by formal protest demands addressed to the Great Powers.80 The party’s Yıldız assassination attempt in 1905 is in some senses less clear-cut as an example in that there were limited means of enacting its clear practical objective of killing the sultan, the virtual recluse Abdülhamid only appearing in public for Friday prayers at the Yıldız Mosque. Yet the visuality of the event is difficult to deny, taking place as it did at a noted site and ceremony, one that tourists were positively encouraged to visit, both by the state, who made special arrangements for them on site, and their guidebooks. It was celebrated in tourist albums and indeed the Abdülhamid albums too. The assassination attempt appears now as a competing visual claim, an attack mounted with the intention of disrupting the veneer of tranquillity propagated by those visual forms. Photography gave activists the ability to extend the stage into other geographies, the studio coming to perform the same function as the city. This return to the pages of the Abdülhamid albums allows us to recognize how Armenian revolutionary photographs form a sort of unofficial parallel venture. Narrated in the established modes of the photographic studios, they shared a language; seeking international recognition and protection, they had a common intent. Indeed, theirs was also a project of image management; in their own way, Armenian activists were contending with Western constructions, carried by even their most ardent supporters, which saw them as having ‘little political interest and no ambition’ (British Liberal politician James Bryce),81 and being unwilling to ‘fight for themselves as the Greeks did’ (William Gladstone).82 When they acted out their scenes in front of the camera, their ceremonial expulsions of the rayah targeted not only the figure of Armenian self-image but of foreign imagining too.

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The desire for visibility finds perhaps its clearest expression when armed Armenian activists pose for the British vice-consul in Van, Bertram Dickson. There is an evident willingness to perform for Dickson’s camera, the aim surely being to turn it to their own advantage in order to deliver a message to the British government. We can go further and position such attention-seeking as a part of their typical experience of photography; after all, they recreate the modes established in their own self-produced images. Examining one of the vice-consul’s photographs, we see a number of revolutionary tropes at work, the figure, brandishing a weapon and wearing ammunition, being pictured against the plain background of a wall; the same in format to many revolutionary images, it simply lacks the exactitude, being essentially an amateur version of the usual professional product (Figure  5.7). Yet it simultaneously constitutes a notable departure from the norms of revolutionary photography owing to its female subject. Although such portraits of armed women can be found, they are the exceptions amid the great cascade  of images celebrating men. The revolutionary oeuvre was hardly unusual Figure 5.7  Bertam Dickson. Armenian woman in this regard, and yet the revolutionary, Van, c.1908, Royal Geographical diminishment of women that Society, London. is a not uncommon aspect of Armenian-produced photographs became amplified in political imagery, a mode of image-making so evidently predicated around the assertion of masculinity having little space for women. Dickson appears to have offered an opportunity, on this occasion, for one armed woman to bypass the usual strictures and codes of locally produced photographs. Some women took up arms on the revolutionary stage, many more acted behind the scenes. The mention of Avedaghayan’s roles as photographer and innkeeper give us a sense of the wider revolutionary network that activists relied on, a network whose agents tended to be neglected, by images and literature alike, in favour of the more ostentatious contributions of fedayis; where we do find mention, we find little trace of the women who largely occupied such positions (one might conclude, for example, that Avedaghayan’s role as a revolutionary

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innkeeper meant a similar role for his unnamed wife).83 The absence of women from revolutionary photographs should thus not be taken as indication of a lack of involvement in the revolutionary cause. Meanwhile, perhaps for image-makers it was in their absence that women had a role to play. Fedayis were expected to lead lives of asceticism, devoted only to the cause of liberation. This might provide explanation for the pared-down portraits that are lacking in props, the material trappings of wealth found in other photographs, and lacking in women too. Asceticism included abstinence from sex, and there is the distinct feel of a variant of namus at work in Gerard Libaridian’s suggestion that the fedayi might feel he ‘has to absolve himself as well as past generations of the sin of being unable to defend his women from rape and kidnapping by conquerors, and that he had no right to such relations until he had regained his honor and proven his manhood in his own eyes’.84 Accordingly, the women absent from revolutionary photographs, perhaps no less than the women present in family photographs, figure as attributes of the male protagonist. They are signs of his dedication, his abstemiousness, his ‘becoming a man’.

The proliferation of photography in Van appears to have been supremely aided by the sort of light, handheld camera employed by Bertram Dickson, and employed by revolutionaries themselves too. A June 1904 British consular report from Van details a raid by Ottoman authorities on a revolutionary hideout somewhere outside the city and the capture of dynamite, rifles, cartridges and ‘a very good Kodak camera, of the most recent type’.85 We have here evidence of an amateur camera in activists’ hands (the latest technology, no less), and also, importantly, an official view of this camera, its seizure apparently speaking of an understanding of it as a weapon of a sort, a recognition of its capacity for telling stories, forging myths and attracting attention. Indeed, it seems to precisely indicate that power did have cause to fear photography. At the same time, it might suggest that others might have cause for fear also, for could it be that the official intention was to turn portraits against their sitters? The camera had a habit of producing incriminating evidence, sometimes with the unwitting assistance of its subjects, as the forerunners of the fedayis, the Parisian communards, had experienced when the products of their festivities were later used to hunt them down.86 Armenian activists could not have posed for pictures without understanding photography’s power and yet they failed to appreciate its lack of steadfastness and left themselves open to the possibility that those pictures might return to them in unwanted ways. Their acts bring to mind those of their predecessors in the Bashdban Haireniats group of Erzurum, who made for themselves, against the warnings of Khrimian and others who looked on, membership cards that in due course provided evidence against them.87 The garland could, in time, become a noose. Equally, photography’s evidentiary powers and laudatory inclinations could operate in another direction. Just as photographs could act as status symbols for revolutionaries and testify to their heroism, so could they do the same for

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government functionaries. Seized photographs had the potential to demonstrate their good work on behalf of the state (G.P. Devey, a previous British consul in Van, had observed in 1889 that local officials did not let pass ‘so fine an occasion for the display of their zeal’ that Armenian political groups represented).88 At the same time, they might have helped those officials who saw it as their job, as Selim Deringil describes, to tell ‘the sultan what they thought he wanted to hear’.89 Situating such photographs within a transnational history allows us to imagine not only how they came about but how they were received and perceived, including by Ottoman authorities. Armenian fedayi photographs could only have awakened memories of previous imperial insurrections and the loss of power and territory that had accompanied them. It is here that any nuance of policy is lost; the declared intent of the Dashnaks, producers of the great majority of these photographs, was not independence but the creation of an autonomous, self-governing region with the Ottoman Empire, and yet it is difficult to see how their photographs could have been read as anything other than the products of a breakaway movement. Further details of the account of the seizure attest to a central characteristic of the revolutionary image, its propensity to proliferate in a variety of forms. Also confiscated were ‘6 medallions, 2 of which bear the portrait of Sirop’, a reference to Aghpiur Serop, one of the more famed of Dashnak activists. Indeed, his fame is in part attested to in this instance by the way in which his likeness alone appears to have been identified or deemed worthy of note (the other seized medallions no doubt also carried revolutionary visages or some other related ‘national’ symbols). This in itself suggests how the revolutionary image was largely predicated on the building of a small number of modern myths and legendary personas. It further suggests how such myth-making, while leaning heavily upon the tales inherited from yesteryear, relied on the modern mass reproduction offered by photography, its extraction of ‘form from form’. The revolutionary photograph was regularly recast, moving from cabinet photograph to postcard to revolutionary journal. In this instance, we are presented with evidence of a more literal recasting – produced by a local Van silversmith, perhaps. While the means of reproduction was hardly modern, there can be little doubt that the model was the same photographic portrait of Serop that widely circulated at the time.

The professional photographer ensured that revolutionary actions were not confined to Constantinople. The Kodak, an invention of the 1880s that was first introduced into Ottoman lands by Onig Diradorian in 1888, represented a further liberation. With its advent even the professional photographer might be dispensed with – to a certain extent, for the new amateur picture-makers relied upon studios for the processing of films (as happened during Sachtleben’s visit to Erzurum in 1895).90 So perhaps Avedaghayan had a practical role to play in support of these other picture-makers, in addition to having provided a model to follow – the famous portrait made in 1904 by Vahan Papazian at Aghtamar, the island monastery complex on the southern side of Lake Van, of Gevorg Chavush, his arm on a rifle and his bent leg planted firmly before him, shows how conventions

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had transferred themselves from professional photographers to amateurs.91 Despite being freed from the studio, photography persisted in replicating the tropes and practices established there. As too it maintained its purposes, for with Chavush leaving for an expedition to Sasun, Hartmann sees his photograph as one of a number that cement photography as a ‘part of the ritual of departure’ in revolutionary circles, conforming to a pattern already examined while adding an important factor to the paradigm. With their subjects leading dangerous lives, the departure the photograph prepares for is the final departure, death. Such photographs, Hartmann asserts, were intended above all as ‘visual entries in the Armenian revolution’s history and book of heroes’.92 This helps us to understand how photography’s mediation of the revolutionary narrative was performed alongside and in tandem with other forms. The movement was steeped in literature, the newly emergent genre of revolutionary song, notably ballads that lionized the movement’s central figures, being especially important.93 We find a photograph being accompanied by a song, and itself becoming a form of visual ballad, in Mahari’s Burning Orchards. In one scene, Syusli Der-Aristakesian stands before a picture memorial of the deceased Armenagan Sebouh (‘It’s not a bad photo – Arshak Dzetotian enlarged it’ declares his host), while the song dedicated to the dead man plays on his lips, as if a conditioned response to the image.94 The photograph is one element in an audio-visual environment. Of Sebouh, we are told: All of Van mourned his death: someone wrote the Lament of Sebouh’s Mother and this was sung at gatherings of all sorts. Even the Dashnak leaders attended the funeral. His grave at Arark church was the beginning of a Van Pantheon. Van was not to be the inferior of Paris, it too came to have a Pantheon. And now, Sebouh, with his thick black beard, bow tie and black coat, looked down from a wall of the Avetisian library. The photo had been taken beneath a lilac tree in the Mughsaghian’s rose garden, and no one believed that such a serious, even sternlooking, man was only twenty years old.95

Mahari here references a real photograph, one that, while closely focused on the figure and showing little of its surroundings, gives an impression of a scene, a rose garden, constituting a rare photograph of the fabled garden city.96 And the photograph itself joins the Van landscape. Image, song and built environment are all put to work as part of Van’s commemoration – and narration – of the revolutionary hero. The community, Libaridian writes, participate in the construction of the image of the hero through acts of storytelling.97 In photographic terms, this equates to the figure of the revolutionary being performed as much by the viewer as the photographed subject, created in the very act of viewing. Ultimately such photographs ask to be recreated – in the flesh, for those viewing them to take to the revolutionary life themselves. With this, the photograph extends beyond its subjects and incorporates the viewer through direct appeal, its narrative turning to instruction, imparting moral lessons of national ideals and directives on how life is to be lived. In the same way that photographs of migrants encouraged the pursuit of bantkhdoutioun through evocations of wealth and success, so did revolutionary enactments of heroism draw others to

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the cause and to the life of the fedayi (an important difference being that what was the largely unintended corollary of one became a central rationale of the other). There is certainly evidence that photographs were, to at least some extent, successful in bringing new recruits into the revolutionary fold. In his memoirs, Onnig Avedissian recalls the early formative impact of seeing a picture of Aghpiur Serop in Droschak: ‘This made me dream [that] one day too I would be like him.’98 It is an indication of the feelings of community and comradery that portraits were capable of inducing, while returning us also to the notion of the photograph as future vision; as it might have been for students at the Sanasarian gazing upon the founder’s portrait, some Armenians found in revolutionary portraits images of potential and possibility. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that some who were inspired to follow in the footsteps of fedayis followed them only as far as the photographic studio.99 Acts of emulation were themselves emulated, and emulated by those who perhaps acted more for the lens than for the cause. It was not simply the ‘leadership ranks’ that spent time in the studio; photography offered volunteers at all levels of revolutionary involvement the opportunity to share in the heroics and write themselves into the grand narratives of struggle and resistance, even if such pictures travelled in infinitely smaller circles.

Longing for Varak Given that what we are dealing with here is a male-dominated world of dreams, it’s hard not to draw parallels between revolutionary images and portraits of migrants. For each, the camera offered opportunities for the creation of new identities and the photograph marked a passage into a new world, projecting them into heroic futures. Perhaps such correspondences should come as no surprise, for in the migrant and the revolutionary we have parallel figures, shaped by the same forces. The paths they forged constituted two responses to the predicament Armenians found themselves in at the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the twentieth. Indeed, theirs was at times a shared story. Itinerant lives frequently followed and fed one another, the roving of the revolutionary overlapping with or springing from the roaming of the migrant, a pattern perhaps suggested in Avedaghayan’s own life. Another example is Kayl-Vahan (Minas Dolbashian), who had joined the Dashnaks while away in the USA, and in the early twentieth century was to be found in the Caucasus launching expeditions into Ottoman territory. The fedayi and bantoukhd modes might be brought into dialogue with one another, as we introduce alongside a photograph of Kayl-Vahan’s team another image, a portrait made by Avedaghayan of eight friends from Avantz, the lakeside village to the north-west of Van that acted as the city’s port (Figures 5.8 and 5.9). We see how closely they map onto one another: the tightknit group arranged across three rows; comradery shown by hands on shoulders, purpose by the exhibition of a flat image in the foreground, turned at a slight angle to the right. That image is (most likely) a map in one scene and a photograph in the other, one of a number of shifts in attributes that also see quasi-military uniforms turning to suits, waistcoats to bandoliers, medallions to flowers, rifles to umbrellas.

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Figure 5.8  Uncredited photographer. Kayl-Vahan’s fedayi group, Russian border region, no date. ARF Archives, Watertown, MA, box 30, photo 47.

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Figure 5.9  Hovhannes Avedaghayan. ‘The boys of Avantz village’, Van, c.1913. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Seroon Dilbarian Yegeshian, Genocide Survivor born in Avantz.

The parallels are unmistakeable. We are faced here not with evidence of a shared author in the form of Avedaghayan (Kayl-Vahan’s photograph likely having been made in Yerevan or its environs),100 but instead an indication of the degree to which photography fed off itself, reusing its tropes and compositional principles in an array of settings. Despite aesthetic similarities between the products of the political parties and photographs associated with the migratory phenomenon, the two sets of images are inherently at odds, for they point in contrapuntal directions. Photographs from these different realms, like the men they depict, are on different paths, and their visions to a certain extent are competing. The parallel props of the photograph and the map wielded by sitters is enlightening in this regard. For the friends from Avantz, the photograph suggests an almost limitless, unbounded expanse of community relations; by contrast, Kayl-Vahan’s group exhibit their map as an indicator of a closely circumscribed place of operations and a concrete place of belonging. Theirs is a bounded sense of home. Their pictorial campaign is against not only the deterretorializing forces of their imperial overlords but also those represented by other Armenians and members of their own community. Where migration created a modern, expansive notion of home and community, the revolutionary movement attempted to recentre Armenians and focus their eyes on the physical turf of the yergir. Revolutionaries implicitly lodged protests against those Armenians for whom home could be Worcester

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or Manchester or any of the myriad places in which bantoukhds had installed themselves, a world away from the yergir (even imploring US-based migrants not to send home photographs that made their experience look attractive).101 They responded to the emptying of the land and, acting very much the heirs of Khrimian and Portukalian, they prevailed upon Armenians not to abandon it. The fedayi photograph thus comes to form a counterpoint to that of the migrant, for in it the young man returns to his native land, a movement tebi yergir rather than tebi ardasahman. For revolutionaries, picture-making is always a form of homecoming; it charts a ‘return’ to a land in the same manner as it charts a ‘return’ to an ancient, heroic Armenian identity.

While photographic modes bleed into one another, some tropes seem to belong more to one form of picture-making than another. Avedaghayan’s frames tend to be rife with reflections and doublings, nowhere more so than in the regular occurrence of pairs of figures draped across the image foreground. It is a staple of revolutionary images, but with Avedaghayan it appears as a feature of his regular studio practice as well, as witnessed with the friends from Avantz and now again with the Goergizian family (Figure 5.10). Here the placement of two brothers

Figure 5.10  Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Goergizian Clan, Van, 1908. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Annie Goergizian.

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at the front of the scene does at least seem to address a compositional problem, namely how to incorporate very tall men into a group without disrupting the picture plane. The problems their bodies might have posed as disruptive forces are hinted at by the one tall figure given a standing role at the back, tamed a little by being placed at the centre of the group but remaining a somewhat awkward presence. By having the tall brothers lie prostrate in the foreground, Avedaghayan not only minimizes the disruption but actually uses them for wider effect, their length now tying the image together. Like the flowerpots to left and right of the group, they serve as framing devices. Indeed, they perform a pictorial duty that Avedaghayan’s backdrop, now dwarfed by a large group, can no longer alone fulfil. Elsewhere, however, bodies do not need to be made horizontal in quite the way that they are, and they speak more of a commitment to a format than anything else. Writing of the revolution in Mexico, John Mraz suggests that local photographers pictured the unfolding rebellion in the only way they knew how, via the elements of their already cemented studio aesthetic; it is tempting to say that Avedaghayan, by contrast, pictured Vanetsi families and other groups in the only way he knew how, through the revolutionary lens.102 It might be in these moments of cross-pollination that we are able to discern Avedaghayan in revolutionary images. The similarities between the Goergizian portrait and a photograph of fighters from Shadakh in Lernabar (Figure  5.11) is unmistakeable: the two figures lying prostrate in the foreground; the striped rug beneath, which appears an exact match; and the positioning of flowerpots as decorative features and framing devices. We might finally have concrete evidence of Avedaghayan’s revolutionary work and, with the two Figure 5.11  Uncredited photographer (likely photographs side by side, a Hovhannes Avedaghayan). Men from Shadakh, Van, demonstration of the spectrum no date. Courtesy of The Arshile Gorky Foundation. on which he worked. Looking at these photographs together, Avedaghayan’s diverse output appears to cover a great swathe of Armenian life, indeed incorporates almost a clash between different sides of Armenian life. The native garb of the Shadakh group stands in direct contrast to the westernizing appearance of the Goergizians, and one can only imagine that their wider lives too were markedly different. The Goergizian portrait points far afield: a Protestant family, with the central seated figure probably being the Reverend Aghajan Goergizian; his sons lie at the front, on the left Arsen Aghajan Goergizian, at the time of the photograph enrolled in Anatolia College, the missionary school in Marsovan; the holding of photographs suggests  an

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additional migrant connection.103 By contrast, the Shadakh group assert a more distinct identity and, borrowing from Stephen Sheehi and a different context, we might see them as ‘unapologetically local individuals who refused to be assimilated into the levelling patterns’ of the modern age.104 These two groups might have all been Vanetsis, might have even been inhabiting the very same courtyard space as they posed for their photographs, with its flowerpots and crumbling brickwork, but they existed in different worlds. Yet even with this distance acknowledged, to bring these photographs together might also be to recognize their proximity and overlap. Viewed alongside a family, the Shadakh fighters start to resemble one themselves – the familial now overpowering the fedayi. Its intimate qualities sing out, the men squeezed as close to one another as the more sprawling Goergizians, despite the extra room they have, while those flowerpots – as well as the cushions that become noticeable behind the middle pot – places them in a close, domestic world. While there were those revolutionary images that sought to speak loudly and to speak abroad, a great number of ‘political’ photographs simply performed the quiet, private work of celebrating and securing close personal bonds. For Avedaghayan, ideas of home and homecoming are most clearly expressed not in a revolutionary image but in a scene captured at Varakavank (Figure 5.12). It is an image that, quite unintentionally of course, provides a strong contrast to Lynch’s scene of many years earlier (see Figure 5.2). It is a photograph made late on a bright day. Long shadows point eastwards toward the churches. A number of those photographed stand with umbrellas or parasols, either open above their heads or closed by their sides. Some shade their eyes as they look towards the west and the photographer and his camera that lay between them and the setting sun.

Figure 5.12  Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Varakavank, Van, c. 1910. Vasbouragan. (Venice: St Lazzaro Mkhitarian Dparan, 1930).

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Standing further back than Lynch, Avedaghayan better communicates the space of Varak. We see the courtyard almost in its entirety, the school on the left-hand side, rooms for pilgrims stretching along the right.105 And, perhaps counterintuitively, given the extra space and depth involved, Avedaghayan provides a more intimate image. This derives from the human presence – clergy of the vank, teachers and students of the Zharankavorats, and what might be a group of visiting pilgrims – and the way they are all enclosed in the courtyard, seemingly embraced by the site itself. Avedaghayan in turn wraps all before him in a photographic embrace. Adding to this sense are the words that the photographer has appended to the photograph, words that, appropriate to their sentiment, occupy the skies above Varakavank: ‘To you, oh my beautiful nest of Varak, I fly across the infinite expanse.’ If they appear to channel Mgrdich Khrimian and echo his Ardzvi Vasbouragan, it is because they come from a closely related source. We can trace them to his nephew Khoren Khrimian, and it is worth looking at the rest of the poem, Longing for Varak: Can love be weighed, or the ocean measured? Infinite is love, unbounded its longing that burns with the desire for home Could this desire of mine possibly be small, after ten years of wandering? Let me embrace the nest of Varak, the place where I mourn my ancestors.106 The longing the poem describes is clearly the longing of an exile, and it is not difficult to locate what must have been its resonance for Avedaghayan. It could well have provided him with a strong poetic rendering of his own life, his own wanderings and return. With this in mind, it is not such a leap to see the twinpeaked mountain of his painted backdrop as representing Varak and his home in Van. Yet the message goes beyond that, for the poem presents Varak as both a particular sacred site and a metonym for a wider place of belonging, a sense propagated through the teachings of Khrimian, through his schools and the national movement. Avedaghayan is hidden from the viewer, as he was most likely invisible to those present on that sunny day; and as words about birds hover in the air above Varakavank, so does the mark of the man in the dark itself lie in darkness. It is in the shadows, cast by the structure on which he has positioned himself, that he chooses to place the handwritten credit: ‘Photo by Hov. K. Avedaghayan.’ It is rare to find in this era a photographer signing their name in such a way. It serves to strengthen the importance of the scene, Avedaghayan seemingly laying claim not simply to the authorship of the photograph but, perhaps more importantly, the sentiment it expresses. We can link it back to those Sanasarian students who, with their names, personalized the garlands that they placed around the founder’s bust. Avedaghayan’s photograph is his offering and his tribute to Varak and all that it stands for, a sense further confirmed when we see that he has attached further identifying marks to his name: a small, square cross and one final, discreet word, pilgrim.

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Chapter 6 L O O K I N G F O RWA R D, L O O K I N G B AC K

It’s unclear whether or not Stepan Aghazadian was in attendance that day at Varak. It certainly seems possible that the man who served as one of Khrimian’s successors as the Vartabed of Varakavank, and later as primate of Van, might be among the clergy gathered in a row; the second figure from the right, whitebearded and cowled, carries a resemblance to the figure that appears in a portrait made by Avedaghayan around this time.1 Either way, we might discern the mood of the times, and thus read the photograph, through the speech he made in 1910 at the festivities marking the fiftieth anniversary of Khrimian’s founding of the school.2 A sense of great progress was expressed by Aghazadian when he spoke of how far the monastery had come since the dark days of 1896.3 They are words that help us to recognize the physical changes that had taken place on the site. Gone is the small bell tower atop the portico seen in Lynch’s photograph, destroyed in 1896 but since replaced with a more substantial, imposing structure. The portico itself now stands white in its upper section, clearly the result of the repair work done over the previous decade or so, paid for by subscriptions from Armenians in the US, the Caucasus and elsewhere.4 On this note, it is worth remarking on the way in which Khoren Khrimian, in the final verse of his Longing for Varak poem, implores Varak, a site increasingly identified as home (‘my Varak, my homeland’), to return to life: ‘You must rise again and heal your wounds.’5 In line with the poem, Avedaghayan’s photograph of Varak can be read as not simply concerning Armenians returning to their homelands, but moreover about those homelands returning to life, Varak rising from the ruins. It was a return to life symbolic of a larger resurrection and sense of healing. The jubilee held at Varak was a belated one, but the fact that these celebrations took place at all was a sign of progress – such festivities had not been possible in the actual anniversary year of 1907 and only became so later amidst the new freedoms of the constitutional era. A revolution had been mounted against the sultan in July 1908 by members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also referred to as the Unionists, or the Young Turks), a reformist political party, yet one with centralist and nationalist inclinations (it is interesting to note that the movement was but another product of the Imperial Medical School).6 As revolutions go, it was bloodless, with Sultan Abdülhamid relenting to CUP threats that continued failure to restore the constitution suspended thirty years earlier would be met

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with an armed response (threats sent via telegram, demonstrating that power, as Roderic Davison observes, ‘could emanate from either end of the telegraph line’).7 There followed the restoration of the constitution, the transference of power away from the sultan, and the relaxation of limits on freedoms of movement, association, assembly and the press. A new discourse of Ottoman identity seemed to suggest that those most elusive of things, equality between subjects and renewal of the empire, might finally be attainable. In place of the sultan’s divisive rendering of Ottomanism in the form of an empire dominated and characterized by its Turkish Muslim elite, there was now a new vision of the ‘Unity of the Elements’ that echoed an earlier, pre-Hamidian discourse, holding up as its aim an empire based upon a shared Ottoman citizenship of the different ethnic communities.8 New public figures emerged, such as Enver Bey, the Young Turk ‘hero of liberty’ who had spearheaded the movement to restore the constitution and who recognized in the camera a means of sculpting a public persona.9 The raising of Enver to the status of ‘national’ figure was greatly aided by his willingness to pose for the lens and the dissemination of the resulting images by way of a greatly expanded illustrated press, allowing photographic images to be increasingly woven into the daily fabric of Ottoman life.10 The new ‘heroes’ were not restricted to the ranks of the CUP, however, for there existed a strong strain of rhetoric dedicated to saluting the various groups that had previously opposed the government. Armenian revolutionaries emerged from hiding to be ceremoniously welcomed by Armenians and Turks alike; ‘militants, villains only yesterday, were suddenly being celebrated as heroes’.11 The new Ottoman discourse distanced itself from Hamidian paternalism and projected instead ideas of brotherhood. The return of revolutionaries was but one ceremonial staging of the new imperial vision, a prime example of the ‘theatrical production of revolutionary brotherhood’ through a rhetoric of kinship, equality and togetherness.12 Van, for example, witnessed the release of political prisoners. In long columns led by military bands, the newly freed men returned home along a Khatch Poghots dotted with flower- and bunting-adorned victory arches. Into the evenings and the nights, torch-lit processions took place along the same streets and fireworks illuminated the sky.13 Amongst the celebratory photographs is one made by the jewellers’ association of Van, gathering before the lens with a display that includes the tools of their trade, the Ottoman flag and, in the very foreground, a sign in Armenian reading ‘Liberty, Equality, Justice, Fraternity’ (Figure 6.1). They celebrate the constitutional period as jewellers, as Armenians and as Ottomans, marking a turning point in the history of the city and of the empire. One can imagine how the Armenagan and Francophile Haroutiun Gakavian (sitting in the second row, second from the left, his attention caught, like the man beside him, by something ‘offstage’), felt about the events of a revolution that borrowed so heavily from French antecedents. In those days it must have seemed as if he had indeed succeeded in importing the ideals of Victor Hugo.

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Figure 6.1  Uncredited photographer. Armenian jewellers’ association after the proclamation of the Ottoman constitution, Van, 1908. Harutyun Marutyan collection/Harutyun Marutyan, Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van (Yerevan: Gitutyun Publishing House, 2013).

We might now recognize subtle signs of the revolution in other photographs. The Pasdermadjian family portrait, for example, could only have been possible at this particular historical juncture when Armen Garo was able to return to Erzurum (marking the great reversal of fortunes, he was serving as a deputy in the Ottoman parliament at the time the photograph was made) (see Figure 3.16). Equally, can we find traces of this moment is another photograph from the Voskertchian studio? Nine friends are pictured together; at the centre, the table upon which Armen Garo plants his elbow in the Pasdermadjian portrait is the scene now of a different display, one of bottles, glasses and a silver platter (Figure 6.2). Thus the site of the pronouncement of hierarchy and the traditional order appears to morph into one of freedom and celebration. Adding to this sense, the friends elsewhere in the scene are seen lifting a glass, a bottle, a cigarette, a tobacco case and a lute. Among them, although only partially visible, his face peering out from the back row, is Yervand Voskertchian. It is strange to see him obscured in this way; it adds a note of dissonance to the scene and serves as a reminder of how carefully regulated such studio portraits normally are. They often incorporate an element of the random but figures are sacrosanct and are only rarely obscured. It is not clear why we should find it here – perhaps Yervand had, a moment before, been behind the apparatus, orchestrating the scene. Further implying that this was a playful, relaxed gathering before the camera, with actors wandering on and off

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Figure 6.2  D. Voskertchian et frères. Group of friends, Erzurum, c.1910. Voskertchian Family collection, with thanks to Kevork Imirzian.

stage, is the empty chair visible on the right. It is another in our series of empty chairs in Armenian studio photography, but on this occasion it at least appears as though it might have been occupied until shortly before the photograph’s exposure, its inhabitant perhaps now behind the camera. It cannot be said which of the Voskertchian brothers made the photograph (if indeed it was one of the brothers), and there is also a question about when the photograph was made. It is thought to have been taken in 1910 but by that year the studio label adorning the mount – D. Voskertchian et frères – would already have been displaced in favour of a more egalitarian version announcing all three brothers in turn (at least by initial). Therefore 1909 or even 1908 might be a possibility; certainly it belongs to the excited, optimistic days of the constitutional period, that much is clear. The photograph seems to mark this new era, the friends looking confidently ahead to a future full of possibility. The changes at the Voskertchian studio that brought the three brothers into positions of parity with one another were perhaps not purely the product of a ‘natural’ ascent of Dikran’s younger brothers Yervand and Haroutiun as they gained in experience behind the lens; they might speak also of an expanded business. Photography seems to have boomed everywhere during the constitutional era, with new photographers and new clientele emerging. Among the new image-

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makers setting up shop in Erzurum were Stepan Stepanian, an advertisement in Harach, one of a plethora of newspapers that now circulated thanks to the freedoms of the age, announcing his arrival in the city. Stepanian promotes his ‘excessively favourable’ photographs, and offers also to school students in photographic processes.14 Other forms of image arrived in Erzurum, too, with a cinema business from the Caucasus, the Armenian Motion Picture Company, opening a theatre near the main Armenian marketplace around the church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin and showing films twice a day.15 Meanwhile other developments were afoot in the city. Apparently taken from the roof of a building directly opposite it on the Gumruk road, a 1914 photograph of the Zhoghovaran Protestant church seems as though it was designed to document a specific feature, its new belfry (Figure 6.3). The church had existed in ‘modest but presentable’ form as a basilica alone since

Figure 6.3  Alexandre Papazian. Armenian Protestant Church, Erzurum, 1914. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Helen Paragamian, granddaughter of Rev. Kirk Yasharian.

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being built in 1847.16 It was only in the second decade of the twentieth century, with the coming of the constitutional revolution, that a belfry was permitted. The new structure, modelled on that of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, was completed not long before the making of the photograph (an inscription in the ironwork of the railing suggests 19 August 1913 as the likely date of completion). It takes part in a mode of photography at work in Armenian communities at that historic moment marking developments and advances in civic and community infrastructures. The most overt manifestation of this mode might be said to be the postcards issued by the Sarrafian Frères – Diyarbekir-born photographers who had left for Beirut after the 1890s massacres – of Diyarbekir’s Sourp Giragos church with its new, taller steeple, an inset image showing its previous incarnation and emphasizing the extent of the change through a variant of the before-and-after format.17 Alexandre Papazian’s photograph does not make quite so overt a nod to the notion of upward progress found in the Sarrafian postcard, but the significance of what it shows would not have been lost on its intended viewers. They would have welcomed the image as a report on the successful completion of a building project and, moreover, would have recognized how the progress being declared was one that, ultimately, pertained to people and a community rather than physical infrastructure. In these building projects and their documentation, we find a particular quest for standing and solidity. By building upwards they may well have sought a closeness to God above, but undoubtedly it was also a firmness on the ground to which they aspired, a solid basis for their community in freedom and security. The photograph of the Zhoghovaran is another suggestion of links between the Papazian family and English-speaking (or ‘American-Ottoman’) Erzurum. It begins to place Alexandre inside this community, as a series of images from July 1912 do in literal sense. In them, he records a meeting of the Erzurum mission, a form of report from the field it seems, with a contact sheet of the images being dedicated on the reverse to William Peet, the ABCFM treasurer stationed in Constantinople, by Robert Stapleton (Figure 6.4). The Stapletons are spread out across the ensemble collection: Stapleton himself appears in the last frame of the bottom row, while his wife Ida appears in the first frame of the middle row and their children (with another missionary Mr Maynard) the last frame of the top row.18 While the size of the frames suggests an amateur format – a light, handheld camera, made by Kodak or one of its rivals – the controlled handling of the instrument indicates a professional at work. The camera addresses a succession of people. Each has their moment under the gaze of the lens, sitting in an armchair designated for the task; a click of the shutter, an exposure of the photographic film, and then the next subject takes the chair (the only shift in framing is a clearly conscious move to incorporate the Stapleton children as they pose atop the chair). Papazian, in essence, turns this corner of the mission compound into a studio in miniature, and the intimacy of the portraits do much to suggest the photographer’s closeness to the missionary group, but also perhaps his distance, considering the fact that he remains hidden behind the camera apparatus throughout, going unrecorded in the field report.

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Figure 6.4  Alexandre Papazian. ABCFM meeting, Erzurum, July 1912. SALT Research, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Courtesy of ARIT.

The domesticity of the scene seems pertinent. We have a sense, from the evidence of the available photographs, of much of Alexandre’s life and work being conducted within the close confines of this small part of Erzurum. This is in contrast to the activities of his brother, who was once again on the move. Movses, who, as has been seen, spent time in Boston at the turn of the century, tried, unsuccessfully, to return to the USA a decade later. He arrived in New York from Le Havre in July 1910 but was deported three weeks later. Six months later, in January 1911, he made the same journey and another attempt at entering the country; the result was the same but on that second occasion he was deported so quickly – only four days after arrival – that he was sent out on the very same ship that had taken him to the USA.19 The reason for these deportations is listed as ‘likely public charge’, meaning that officials felt that Papazian would be reliant on the public purse, with a medical report declaring him to have significant eye problems, indeed being almost blind. This was a fate Papazian shared with hundreds of other Armenians, but perhaps it was for him a more painful experience, his eyes having been for so long his living. These journeys were of a piece with Papazian’s earlier peregrinations, but at the same time they formed part of a new migratory movement that tells another tale of these constitutional years. Armenian cities – their buildings, institutions and communities – were rebuilt and expanded, but so too did they recede as their citizens departed. After the Young Turk revolution, restrictions on movement, both within the empire and ‘towards abroad’, were lifted, and many Armenians took advantage of the new liberties.20 Nishan Toutounjian, a photographer in Harput, quite possibly a nephew of Mihran Toutounjian who, we can assume,

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worked in the Toutounjian studio, arrived in the USA in October 1908;21 Aram Soursourian arrived there in June 1909.22 It might have been these departures – and the associated loss of manpower – that brought about the partnership that existed in later years between Mihran Toutounjian and the ‘Soursourian Brothers’ (its unclear which of the family Toutounjian actually worked with). The timing of Aram Soursourian’s departure from Harput is particularly suggestive, for his journey was made at a time when the initial hope brought by the Young Turk revolution was tempered by counter-revolution and massacre. The new government briefly lost power, and on the suppression of the uprising it was able to implement what it had not been able to bring about the previous year, the removal of the sultan.23 New sultan Mehmed V, brother of Abdülhamid, proved an ideal figurehead for the reborn Ottoman Empire; he did not carry the bloody associations with which Abdülhamid had been burdened and the new Ottoman rulers attempted to turn him into a symbol of ‘national’ unity.24 Some remained sceptical as to the prospects of real change in the empire, with such fears seemingly confirmed in April 1909 when around 25,000 Armenians were massacred in a new wave of violence in Cilicia. The swirling of rumour played a part in the violence, and it is interesting to consider one particular accusation: that the bishop of Adana, Mushegh Seropian, had been photographed in the guise of an ancient Armenian king. The photograph, in fact, depicted the bishop in ceremonial dress on the occasion of a feast day, but it was read by some as revealing an Armenian desire to establish an independent kingdom.25 The incident is evidence of how readily semantic migrations could occur, an innate aspect of photographs that became heightened in charged environments in which changes to the social order threatened established power and privileges. Such readings, in short, revealed the fears and perceptions of the readers. The violence seen in Cilicia threatened to spread to other parts of the empire, and even when the tensions of the moment cooled, life for Ottoman Armenians retained its element of precarity, their place in the empire and thus their future being not truly known. ‘The question that obsessed the Armenians more than any other,’ Raymond Kévorkian tells us, ‘was whether the massacres represented the last gasp of the old regime or were rather the inaugural act of a new policy of extermination.’26 In circumstances of the ongoing threat of massacre and the relaxation of emigration policies, Armenian departures from the Ottoman East surged.27

Setrag Adoian was already out of Van, having in 1906 left the family home in Khorkom, a village on Lake Van, and travelled to the USA.28 His family made their own, more limited migration in 1910, Shushan taking her children Satenig, Vostanig and Vartoosh the twenty miles to the city of Van. They lived first in the old walled city before settling in the south-east of Aikesdan, between the Armenian neighbourhoods of Norashen and Arark, close to the American mission, where Satenig, Vostanig and Vartoosh attended school.29 That same year, established in Providence, Rhode Island, Setrag Adoian posed for a studio portrait, seemingly to be sent home to Van in the established manner of the migrant, as a substitute

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presence and as a report on his progress.30 Indeed, he seems to present his own version of that now familiar image, the prosperous migrant successfully forging a place for himself in the New World. Later, in 1911 or 1912, a reciprocal portrait was made in Van, and it seems likely that Shushan had some choice concerning the studio as substantial competition was emerging for Hovhannes Avedaghayan (see  Fig. 2.2). As happened elsewhere, a host of new photographic names appeared in the streets of the city. In 1912, the Annuaire Oriental’s listings for photographers in Van, for so many years a minute section that Avedaghayan had entirely to himself, suddenly expanded, seemingly overnight, to include Karekin Khandjian, Hagop Maghakian, Kegham Vasilian and Archag Tchitenian.31 Some of these studios were no doubt already in business before 1912, meaning that the Adoian photograph would have been made, even were we to give it the earlier date of 1911, at a time when a number of photographers were at work in the city. We can only make conjectures about the reason behind Shushan’s choice. In going to Avedaghayan she might have been following a revolutionary connection, her brother Aharon being a member of the Dashnaks, or patronizing the nearest studio, or else simply opting for the most established photographer in town. Nouritza Matossian is likely correct in thinking that Shushan entrusted the photograph to her son-in-law, the husband of Akabi, her daughter from her first marriage, when he left for the USA in the summer of 1911.32 Another departure reveals another aspect of these years, for Mgrditch is said to have left to avoid being conscripted into the Ottoman army. This was one of the reforms implemented with the constitutional revolution; Armenians were no longer liable for an exemption tax and were instead expected to serve in the armed forces in the same manner as other Ottoman subjects. Some relished the new roles and the chance of serving the empire that they offered, and we find Armenians taking to the studios to be photographed in uniform. As might be expected, the vital fortress town of Erzurum was the site of such celebratory military picturing, the Voskertchian Frères one of the studios used for the purpose.33 Yet what was seen as opportunity by some was felt as threat by others, as demonstrated in the story of Mgrditch, along with the stories of numerous other Armenians who migrated during these years. Indeed, shortly after Mgrditch’s departure the risk of conscription became more acute, with Italy invading the Ottoman province of Tripolitania in North Africa (present-day Libya) in September 1911, plunging the Ottoman Empire into a year-long conflict. The photograph entrusted to Mgrditch may well have been specifically designed to capture Setrag’s attention (‘to say “Here we are back in Van”’, according to Peter Balakian).34 Setrag is a man who, as he is largely pictured in biographies of Gorky at least, bears a resemblance to Goulig’s negligent husband in Tlgadintsi’s story. In his absence, Shushan does not hold open the patriarchal chair, as seen in Harput, but does what women increasingly do in the absence of their husbands: she assumes the mantle of family head and assumes the role of the photograph’s central seated subject, commanding the photographic space. But as things change, so do they stay the same – Vostanig takes his place by her side, the eldest and indeed only son. That is to be expected perhaps, surprising are the absences. Missing from the scene are Vostanig’s sisters, elder sister Satenig and younger sister Vartoosh,

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around ten and five years old respectively at this time, glaring absences for which no explanation has been offered or even sought.35 Children in photographs tend to be subject to a collective ruling: either all of them appear or else none of them. Rarely does a family portrait present a limited selection from the younger generation. Indeed, the inclusion of the young indicates an expansiveness, the very idea of family, and therefore to present one son alone makes little sense, even in the domain of male privilege that was the Armenian photographic studio. If one of the aims of the photograph was to show Vostanig’s ‘father in America […] what a fine young man he had become’, as seems a fair assessment, then the inclusion of his sisters could only have aided this purpose, for surely they would have emphasized, as female figures do elsewhere, his centrality.36 It is a curious feature of the photograph. Curious too is its murkiness and propensity to shadow, its lack of detail and closeness of crop. But otherwise, it might be said that there is, in fact, very little to mark the photograph Mgrditch carried with him as being any different to the numerous others that made similar journeys across the seas. Its resemblance to other products of the same studio is observable, for it was just another portrait commission for Avedaghayan. The painted backdrop has now been seen many times, as has the woven rush matting. Vostanig’s floral offering is consistent with the motif that has been observed running through Avedaghayan’s work. It is a motif that takes the form of a gesture, and just as that gesture of the flower proffered by the chest-level hand can be seen in multiple Avedaghayan works, so too can more subtle aspects of composition. In pose and positioning, Shushan and Vostanig have their counterparts in other images; we might recall the portrait of Khisarji Kevork’s family (see Fig. 5.1), particularly its centre with the comparable close pairing of seated parent and standing child, or the similar correspondences provided by the group from the Sourp Krikor orphanage, particularly by the two figures on the right of the frame (see Fig. 5.5). We even start to find in these other examples echoes of the Adoians’ gazes and expressions – gazes and expressions that had seemed to belong uniquely to them and which, accordingly, have been held up as the most salient features of the portrait. Shushan ‘looks bravely at the camera’, Vostanig ‘prematurely solemn’.37 Elsewhere, her face is ‘a mask of numb despair’, while he ‘appears slightly embarrassed’; the ‘faces of both mother and child have the look of a plea’.38 Yet once we establish the photograph as but one of many products of a particular studio, with numerous visual counterparts, the expressions on the faces of the Adoians appearing as neutral as those of Avedaghayan’s other sitters, such assessments begin to unravel. These are the repetitions inherent in photography, indeed repetitions nestled within repetitions. They are the repetitions of studio photography, the heritage of André Disdéri; they are the repetitions of the communal language that emerged as a product of encounters between Armenian photographers and sitters; and they are the repetitions of one particular image-maker in the Ottoman East, the tropes and conventions that he himself developed and deployed over the course of a career. When they pose for the lens, Shushan and Vostanig are taking part in the same process as hundreds of others before them. Yet they do so in order to speak of their own lives, to declare the uniqueness of those lives. The particularity of the

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photograph lies not in pose or expression or composition but in those lives. For all its repetition, the photograph remains the record of a unique encounter, particular people in a particular place at a particular moment. It captures the likeness of Shushan and Vostanig and puts that likeness at their disposal, an object that not only records life but plays a role and has a force within it.

In 1913, another acknowledgement of Varak’s change in fortunes came with a visit by Tahsin Bey, vali (governor) of Van province. In salute of the progress made there, he presented the monastery with a poultry incubator and posed for a photograph with the orphanage’s wards.39 With this, the vali seemed to acknowledge the photograph as both the mark of a moment and a sign of hope for the future. Yet the Ottoman Empire was turning in a different direction, threatening a return to the world of ruin from which Varakavank had only recently emerged. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 reduced the empire’s European holdings to a small toehold on that continent. As it was in 1878, military loss precipitated authoritarian rule; a Unionist coup d’état in 1913 concentrated power in a few hands, Enver becoming one of the three de facto rulers of the empire, and brought about a return to Hamidian forms of governance. The CUP’s devotion to the constitution lay exposed as paper thin, as was their commitment to the principle of the ‘Unity of the Ethnic Elements’. It was clear, as Erik Zürcher explains, that they ‘identified themselves with the interests of the state […] and of the Muslim majority. Their perceived enemy was as much an “enemy within” as an “enemy without”.’40 The loss of the Balkans provided the lens through which imperial spaces and subjects were viewed, what remained of the empire being now watched over with a heightened sense of possession and vigilance, the Ottoman leaders alert to any perceived nationalist breakaway threat. There occurred a redefinition of what constituted the territorial essence of the empire, the borderlands now being reconceived as the heartlands. At the same time, with the loss of Christian populations and the corresponding influx of Muslim refugees from the Balkans significantly altering internal demographics, the very identity of the empire was being reimagined, delineated in narrower terms along ethno-religious and increasingly proto-national lines. This was the double movement by which Armenians found themselves as an alien element in their ancestral lands; more than that, their alienness was seen as something dangerous that threatened further imperial dissolution. With the spectre of the Balkans firmly in mind, when a package of Armenian reforms was finally agreed with the Great Powers in 1914, it was not an image of a reformed Ottoman East that presented itself to the CUP but instead one of an independent Armenian state.41

1914 When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in October 1914 on the side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austro-Hungry, a central focus became

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the Russian border region. As in the 1870s, conflict brought those that dwelt in those lands, their identities and allegiances, real and imagined, into the spotlight. In photographic terms, an important final vignette involving the Erzurum-Tiflis photographic axis should be recorded. Armen Garo, the former deputy for Erzurum, was one of a small number of Ottoman Armenians who decided to join the Russian ranks in 1914.42 The notion of performance lay at the heart of a stinging rebuke later delivered by Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest and fellow Sanasarian graduate who, surviving the genocide, became one of its first memoirist-historians. Balakian states that Garo had his photograph taken in Tiflis with some armed friends, despite being ‘without military merit or experience’ and ‘not once having done anything real in war’. The photograph is, in this view, little but the fantasy of its creator, and Balakian continues by suggesting that Garo produced the photograph as a piece of advertising or promotional material.43 Garo engaged with photography in precisely the way it had come to be understood by Armenian revolutionary and Ottoman state actors alike, as an international diplomatic performance. It is akin to the photographic statecraft of the Ottoman sultans, or Enver’s public image constructions. Indeed, it was through a variety of collision with Enver’s own posturing that Garo’s image performance became problematic. Balakian mentions a particular printing of the photograph – in The Daily Graphic in London – but not the date; it seems of some significance that it received this high-profile outing just as Enver was arriving in Erzurum in retreat from a disastrous Caucasus Campaign.44 His reckless march into Russian territory had ended with heavy defeat and the near total destruction of the Third Army at the Battle of Sarikamish. Crucially, despite it being a battle in which Armenians fought on both sides, the role played by the Armenian volunteers in Russian ranks was subsequently held up by Enver as proof of Armenian sedition. From the moment of this early catastrophic defeat, Unionists promoted an image of Armenians as a treacherous nation.45 The actual extent to which Garo’s photograph informed the Ottoman agenda cannot, in truth, be known. It certainly presented an opportunity; it was later amongst a diverse array of images collected, decontextualized and semantically reconfigured in a range of propaganda publications that detailed the Armenian ‘rebellion’, including a 500-page book and a photographic album in two volumes.46 Sent to foreign diplomatic offices and Ottoman embassies abroad, the books and albums registered little success outside the empire.47 However, internally their impact was likely very different. Grigoris Balakian goes as far as to present Garo’s imagemaking as an act of photographic incitement, ‘provoking the already hateful and vengeful passion of Turkish government officials and the mob against a defenceless, bewildered and ill-fated Armenian populace’.48 There is some evidence to suggest that the albums did play a role in mobilizing Ottoman Muslims against Armenian communities. Writer and journalist Yervant Odian records seeing the albums, ‘specially published to inflame the Turkish mob and the Turkish police against the Armenians’, being distributed by Unionists in Konya later in the war. Their circulation, he writes, ‘was nothing but laying the groundwork for a massacre’.49 As in the Balkan Wars of previous years, state propaganda operations aimed to militarize society in order to eliminate non-Muslim communities,50 a process that Jay Winter has termed the ‘cultural preparation of hatred, atrocity, and genocide’.51

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The state’s use of photographs in this way stands as a dark counterpart to Garo’s own mobilization efforts, for he had surely intended his picture, at least in part, to act in the manner of the revolutionary imagery of old, which asked to be performed by viewers in Armenian communities and encourage volunteerism. Garo’s picture, in this regard, went unperformed, for few Ottoman Armenians joined Russian ranks. The power of narrative instead belonged elsewhere, for the image was performed by the state, and performed so that the figure of the revolutionary became all-encompassing. The official wartime discourse of the Ottoman state took a small kernel of truth, that Garo and some other Ottoman Armenians fought in Russian ranks against the Ottoman Empire, and extrapolated to create an image of mass Armenian insurrection. While Garo’s actions, as Dikran Kaligian writes, could legitimately be construed as a betrayal, ‘the actions of one individual cannot be generalized to an entire political party, much less an entire people’.52 Yet this is exactly what happened. The generalization at work did not hinge entirely on Garo, and it is important to stress that his image played only a small part in what occurred, but the notion remains true. Armenians had entered an era of generality in which identity and intent was projected upon them, forced upon them en masse. The photograph of Garo, along with revolutionary photographs resurrected from yesteryear, were turned into a collective portrait of the Ottoman Armenian population. The asymmetry of power – ‘the great inequality of agency’ – that existed in the late Ottoman Empire was in part an imbalance of narratival power.53 It was with the Armenian population at large that the loss of narratival power can be sensed most acutely. Photography had provided many of them with a powerful means of defining themselves but it also contained the potential for them to be given definition by others, to be assigned identities not of their choosing. Their lives were now being narrated for them. They had become ‘photographic people’ in the most dangerous sense; they had become themselves images, mobile in meaning, especially in moments of crisis. Erzurum was one site where, in the months after the defeat at Sarikamish, a ratcheting of tensions was felt and early attacks on the Armenian community were witnessed. A particularly infamous incident was the murder by two soldiers of Setrak Pasdermadjian, Garo’s brother and the assistant director of the Erzurum branch of the Ottoman Bank, in February 1915, clearly a specifically targeted act of revenge.54 Coinciding with the murder was an incident in which around ten members of the Armenian Protestant community were arrested, later to be released after a two-week period of imprisonment.55 While it might be considered a lesser incident it is one with particular relevance to this study, for among the arrested was Alexandre Papazian, a definite biographical detail at last. It is only in their disintegration that some lives begin to take on concrete form for us.

Van 1915 In March 1915, Christian soldiers started to be disarmed and placed in labour battalions while, in Cilicia, the first deportations of Armenian civilians took place.56

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In April, Van became a particular site of tension. Armenians had been cooperating with vali Tahsin Bey, the Dashnaks helping to mobilize Vanetsis for military service, but relations changed with the appointment of new vali Cevdet Bey, the brother-inlaw of Enver and a veteran of massacres against Armenians and Assyrians in Iran, who arrived accompanied by Kurdish and Circassian irregular forces. The tensions stoked by his insistence on more Armenians joining the labour battalions, which by now had begun ‘to be associated with an uncertain future – quite possibly death’, were exacerbated by the ambush and murder of Ishkhan and a Dashnak delegation as they travelled to Lernabar.57 As Van started to be cut off from outlying regions, Armenians organized two separate self-defence committees, one for Aikesdan and the other for the old city, in preparation for an expected attack. Over the coming days, what ‘had begun as preparation for self-defense against potential massacres […] turned into destructive urban guerrilla warfare between government forces and the fighters’ of those committees.58 In Aikesdan, Armenians occupied most of the Varak side of the garden city, from midway through Javshin eastwards. The site of the photographic studio referred to by Mahari would have sat on the front line of the Ottoman attack, facing Armenian defensive positions that ran from the central crossroads of Khatch Square down to the church at Arark, with many of the consulates and schools being right in the firing line at this point where the town was cleaved in two.59 While the siege was in full flow, major events were unfolding elsewhere. On the infamous night of 24 April 1915, Armenian political, religious and cultural leaders were arrested in Constantinople, many being subsequently murdered.60 The round-ups established a pattern of targeted destruction that was repeated across the empire, the arrest of notables followed by the deportation of civilians into the Syrian Desert. They were actions taken under the guise of clearing war zones of threats, yet they belied any notion of military necessity, encompassing regions far from the front lines, their focus falling instead on all areas of Armenian concentration. Indeed, deportations themselves created war zones where none had existed previously – and not war zones resembling Van, where resistance was staged, but instead the sites of a one-sided war waged on civilian populations, with forced migration everywhere accompanied by massacre, kidnap and sexual violence. With civilians at Van hemmed in along with committee fighters, they too joined the defence, the skills of everyday professions put at the disposal of the besieged. For instance, Vahram Gakavian, the restless figure at the forefront of the Gakavian family photograph, and Vostanig Adoian were among the young boys who delivered food, ammunition and messages to fighters on the front lines.61 In such circumstances, was Avedaghayan doing something similar, putting to work his skills as a photographer? It seems inconceivable that a man reported to be so heavily involved in revolutionary photography would not have pictured a siege in which the Dashnaks played a major part. After all, the photographs made in Van in 1915 do cling to many of the set structures of revolutionary photography  – the group photographs are near identical to

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what was being produced ten years previously – while also introducing a new mode that pictures defenders on the front lines (Figure 6.5). The besieged came to be known as the ‘Commune of Van’.62 It was not a label intended to suggest a photographic parallel but one might be discerned all the same. As it was in Paris, we find the defenders at Van Figure 6.5  Uncredited photographer. Aikesdan, Van, being willingly photographed 1915. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris. at the barricades; and as in Paris, we find those products being later turned against them. They were not used to identify individual fighters; such a process was hardly necessary in an environment in which all Armenians had been declared insurrectionists. Indeed, it was for that purpose – the task of characterizing whole communities – that the Ottoman state used the images, publishing them alongside Garo’s portrait and others in propaganda publications that serve to illustrate the very fantasy of Armenian conspiracy that brought about the uprising and siege in the first place (the former vali Tahsin Bey was later to say that the ‘revolt’ would not have happened ‘if we had not ourselves created [it], with our own hands, by using force’).63 The Van photographs clearly took a circuitous route into the hands of state officials, as is made evident by the way in which the Ottoman albums reproduce not only the images but wider sections of the US newspapers that originally housed them. The result of this intriguing editorial decision is that captions both old and new are legible, and the supreme role of text in guiding interpretation is made evident. ‘Armenians defending themselves from the Turks’ reads one still visible newspaper caption; ‘Armenians fighting in the trenches against the Turks for the purpose of facilitating the occupation of the city of Van by the Russians’ is the caption with which the first has been overlaid.64 The second text inverts the scenario laid out by the first, in the process turning defence into attack and victim into aggressor. More than that, the viewer is encouraged to sense an approaching Russian menace, to find in pictures of Ottoman Armenians the spectre of foreign invasion. The treatment of these photographs and others by propaganda arms of the Ottoman state provide ample support for Sontag’s assertion that ‘all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions’.65 At the same time, would the response to them really have been any different had their captions been less pointed? Evidently not, for a caption is but one plank in a wider context.66 The photographs were deployed into Melson’s ‘field of action and perception’ in which narratives of rebellion and treachery were already in circulation, narratives that ensured these photographs could only be seen in one

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way, regardless of the captions they carried (even Balakian’s scathing assessment of Garo’s photograph notes that the ‘passions’ of the Muslim populace were ‘already’ inflamed).67 After all, the discourse in circulation was an old one, with roots in the narratives of the Hamidian era.68 State narratives of the genocide years harked back to and consciously stirred memories of the late-nineteenthcentury broad brush characterization of the Armenians as a conspiratorial community, a longstanding negative image that the rhetoric of the constitutional years had not dislodged. It is precisely this negative image that is on display in the redeployed Van photographs, for those images give physical form to what had already been pictured in the imagination. A related observation is made by a witness to the assault on Van, Rafael de Nogales, a Venezuelan officer serving in the Ottoman army. Later in Diyarbekir, de Nogales encountered an example of the state’s own picture-making efforts in the form of an accusatory photographic tableau depicting supposedly confiscated Armenian weapons. Recalling a meeting with Mehmed-Asim Bey, commander in the gendarmerie of Diyarbekir, de Nogales describes how ‘this gentleman overwhelmed me with attentions; and offered me two photographs, showing him and his secretaries aligned behind a stack of arms which, so Mehmed-Asim Bey pretended, had been found hidden in the houses and even the churches of the Armenians’.69 Presented as loose prints, the photographs were free from the texts that guide interpretation in the printed albums, and yet they had their own determining narrative, the commander painting Armenians as the agents of a Russian-sponsored plan of revolution. Of this Nogales writes that ‘it is impossible to know whether things were thus in hard fact, or merely in the Dantesque vision of the Sublime Porte, which, habituated to its own regime of blood and darkness, believed that the rest of the world acted in the same way’.70 It’s an account that suggests, albeit in tentative fashion, that what might actually be located in these images and placed under examination is the Ottoman state and its own outlook. Through its photography the imperial state holds a mirror up to itself, revealing its own preconceptions and imaginings – its ‘Dantesque vision’ – rather than any objective ‘facts’ concerning Armenians. From another perspective, the ‘evidence’ provided by photographs from the siege of Van is evidence of the city itself. Strangely, it seems that it was really only now, in 1915, at the moment when the city was facing its greatest threat, that Armenian photographers went into the streets and fields and photographed the place itself. Like the maps of the siege that have since been produced, showing where in Van combat lines and fortified positions became established, photographs from 1915 record a particular historical moment while at the same time allowing us to imagine and to navigate the living, thriving city it once was. Discernible in the background of front-line scenes are the scattered trees of the famous orchards; street irrigation channels now form trenches, garden walls are ready made barricades. Our photograph above appears to have been taken along the south-eastern section of the besieged part of Aikesdan, and with Varak plainly visible in the background, we are at last given a sense of how that mountain loomed large over Van and dominated life in the city. It played no less a role during

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the siege, acting as a place of refuge, with around 6,000 Armenians finding shelter at Varakavank, Sourp Krikor and the other monasteries of the mountain, and a means of escape, being the principal safe route out of Van, the ‘last link to the outside world’.71 This was the route eventually taken by Vanetsis. The arrival of the Russians in May precipitated the retreat of Ottoman forces and the start of an Armenian governorate in the city, one that lasted until Russian troops fell back in July. Over 100,000 Armenians followed them eastwards on foot, two-thirds reaching their destination in the Caucasus.72 Van in 1915 had become a photographic city, in the sense of being committed to photographs and, importantly, in the Benjaminian sense of flaring into view at the moment of its disappearance, becoming ‘present in passing away’.73 It is an instinct that finds an unexpected parallel in historian Arnold Toynbee’s contribution to the 1916 British Foreign Office ‘blue book’ The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire – presenting evidence of the wartime massacres – as he writes of an unexpected corollary of the conflict: ‘it is one of the strangest ironies of war that it fuses together and illuminates the very fabric it destroys’. The labyrinth of civilization was ablaze, its previously unseen corners standing revealed by the light of the destructive flame, the Armenian people finally visible: Then the fire masters its prey; the various parts of the labyrinth fall in one by one, the light goes out of them, and nothing is left but smoke and ashes. This is the catastrophe that we are witnessing now, and we do not yet know whether it will be possible to repair it. But if the future is not so dark as it appears, and what has perished can in some measure be restored, our best guide and inspiration in the task will be that momentary, tragic, unique vision snatched out of the catastrophe itself.74

In the glare of war and genocide, the camera lens opens, capturing a world briefly perceptible in the moment of its vanishing.

Erzurum 1915 Mirroring actions elsewhere, members of Erzurum’s political and intellectual elite were rounded up on 24 and 25 April. Over the course of the month of May, the villages of the surrounding countryside were emptied before vali Tahsin Bey (previously of Van) turned his attentions back to the city, targeting with the first deportation its most prominent merchants and traders, apparently owing to the fact that they had local support from the city’s Turkish population.75 The fact that the three Voskertchian brothers were part of this first convoy that left Erzurum on 16 June 1915 tells us much about the milieu in which they had lived in the city and the position they had attained. The list of those they travelled with suggests they belonged to the upper echelons of Erzurum society, the convoy consisting of twenty-five of Erzurum’s most prominent families (some 150 people in total), who had been at the centre of banking (including brothers Hovhannes, Armenag,

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Diran and Rupen Hanesian), insurance (Mardiros Dikranian, local representative of the Societe Generale D’Assurances Ottomane), the jewellery business (Hagop Nalbandian), law (Hagop Karagulian) and the press (Ardashes Kagakian, one of the editors of Harach).76 Families were deported together – lawyer Hovhannes Der Melkisetegian was put onto the road with his son Hampartzum, also a prominent lawyer, and their loved ones. Friends likewise travelled together – one source suggests that Yervand Voskertchian’s circle of friends, pictured in the optimistic scene of the early constitutional era, formed part of this first convoy (see Fig. 6.2).77 These business families left Erzurum via the Harput Gate, heading south-west towards Keghi. Given special dispensation to transport a significant amount of goods on muleback, they travelled, for a time, in relative comfort. This comfort did not last long, for on the third day of the journey the first killings took place. In a display of the power of the ‘Van rebellion’ narrative, the perpetrators spoke of the atrocities alleged to have been committed by Armenians there, using rumours, ‘spread by the Turkish press, to justify the crimes they themselves were committing’.78 On the fourth day, with the convoy between Keghi and Palu, they were surrounded by a group of Kurds, 1,000 strong according to reports, led by chetes (government-sanctioned killers). In the ensuing massacre, practically every male member of the deportation party was murdered, including Dikran, Yervand and Haroutiun Voskertchian and most of their children.79 There was only one survivor from the group of Yervand’s friends who had posed for the photograph, a man by the name of Vahan Dikranian (one of two men to survive the massacre).80 That group photograph is no doubt but one that represented members of this first convoy. Given the prevalence of photography among well-to-do Armenians, the photographs in the otherwise now empty, uninhabited Voskertchian studio must have resembled something of a catalogue of the vanished. It was one not destined to last long, however, as the studio, according to family history, was soon destroyed in what might be considered the first wave of cultural vandalism.81 As studios were wrecked so too, of course, were their contents, and Robert Bevan’s words on the destruction of architecture – ‘a crazed and dusty reflection of the fortunes of people at the hands of destroyers’ – applies equally to the destruction of photographs.82 Some of these were in the form of prints, objects of display such as those in Der Raphaelian’s Erzurum studio, portraits that ‘hung on the walls of his studio until his death’ in Tarbassian’s words.83 Although its unclear whether Der Raphaelian died during the genocide or immediately prior, these few words become notable for what they suggest about the lifetime of photographs and their own propensity towards disappearance. Far from being permanent, a photograph is mortal (‘like a living organism, it is born on the level of the sprouting silver grains, it flourishes a moment, then ages […], it fades, weakens, vanishes’).84 This mortality is not purely its own, for it is bound up in the mortality of those that care for it. Photographers were custodians as well as makers, their chief charge not the prints on the wall but the glass plate negatives in storage, retained so that there would always be the potential to produce further prints for customers, and it was thus these that made up the greatest part of studio losses. Indeed,

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negatives were the ‘negative’ in more than just their light distribution, the way in which their dark areas corresponded to the light areas of the photographed scene and the light areas of the resultant print. They were also antitheses in terms of physical attributes, brittle and fragile where prints were pliant and durable. Innately vulnerable, they embodied the impermanence that photography at large was thought to stand against, existing only in the careful conditions of the photographic studio and surviving the destruction of the genocide years in but the rarest of circumstances.85

We lose sight of Movses Papazian after his second failed attempt to enter the USA in 1911, so his whereabouts in 1915 are difficult to state. There can be found, however, a detailed account of what befell Alexandre and other members of the Papazian family. When given his deportation orders, Alexandre went to the mission station for help and was given their horse and three gold pieces. ‘He loaded a mattress, a little food, his mother and two babies on the horse while his wife and six-year-old walked alongside and they joined a small caravan’, which formed part of the second convoy to leave Erzurum, on 18 June.86 In contrast to the first deportees, this second convoy left by what would become the central deportation route from Erzurum, through the Erzinjan Gate and onto the road westwards towards Baiburt.87 Papazian’s small caravan was led from the road some fifteen miles from Erzurum and directed into a remote valley where, after having their money extorted from them, his family group were set upon by a band of chetes. Papazian was stripped by the assailants and stoned to death, as was his youngest child. His mother disappeared, surely murdered. His wife Anna was subjected to sexual assault, passed around Ottoman officers, but managed to survive. She protected her two remaining children for eight months until she heard of the approach of Russian forces in early 1916 and managed to return to Erzurum, by that time under occupation. It was then that she delivered an account of her husband’s death to Ida Stapleton at the mission station, who later included it in her own testimony to the ABCFM concerning the events of the war years. It is through Stapleton’s second-hand account of his death that we learn about Alexandre Papazian, the man the missionaries called Baron Alexander (Mr Alexander). It confirms his links to the Protestant church and the American mission and further tells us that, in addition to being a photographer, he served as a teacher at the American school and had remained a ‘faithful helper’ at the mission’s Sunday school.88 In this light, the photograph of the Zhoghovaran now becomes more distinct as an image describing Papazian’s own life (see Fig. 6.3). Standing, inspecting the new belfry, he brought photography into his service of the Protestant community – and indeed, in photographing his church, his renewed church, he was paying his own act of homage as well. We might also realize, meanwhile, how the contact sheet of portraits made by Papazian in July 1912, far from being simply a visual record of the attendees at an ABCFM meeting, captures the face of the person who will record the details of his death

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(see Fig. 6.4). It becomes a record of his own disappearance, his absence from the images all the more meaningful. Thanks to the testimony of Ida Stapleton, we are left with some small detail about Alexandre Papazian’s life, and were it not for the caravan turning off the road fifteen miles from Erzurum, we might not have even that. Thousands of people in the second convoy from Erzurum, and in the convoys that followed along the same stretch of road in ensuing weeks, were channelled towards Kemah. In a topography of genocide in which the very features of the landscape were used as instruments of killing, the Kemah gorge was perhaps the most infamous site. The Armenians who were led there found themselves ‘caught in a trap from which there was no escape’.89 More than a site of mass death, it was a place of complete disappearance, thousands of lives – and histories – being swallowed without trace by the Euphrates. It was at Kemah and ravines like it, and then later in the Syrian Desert, where the vanishing act of genocide was performed, and it is to those sites that we can trace the ‘non-event’ and the ‘non-document’ of the Armenian Genocide.90

Harput 1915 Arriving on the plain of Harput, the tattered remnants of the first Erzurum convoy – a group of around thirty survivors – entered the town of Hussenig. It was only upon seeing them that the townspeople fully understood the fate that awaited them, for at that time deportations from Harput Kaghak and Mezre were just beginning.91 It was the fact that Harput formed a transit zone for deportees from elsewhere in the empire that led Leslie Davis, the American consul in Mezre, to describe it as ‘the slaughterhouse province’.92 The grim appellation also serves to characterize the particular aspect that the genocide took in Harput, for events there, even by the standards of an horrifically violent process, possessed their own distinct brutality. Starting in April, official searches had been conducted of the churches and schools of Mezre, Harput Kaghak and Hussenig, followed by private homes.93 Mass arrests took place, first of political activists and then of intellectuals and community leaders, many teachers included, Tlgadintsi and the staff of Euphrates College amongst them.94 Askanaz Soursourian was detained ‘along with the other most prominent men’ of Hussenig in May;95 there are suggestions that Haroutiun was among this group also.96 The men were tortured at a house in Hussenig before being sent to Mezre, most likely to the Tirmizi Konak (‘Red Mansion’) at the western side of the city, furthest from Hussenig, which had been converted into a prison where, at its height, 3,500 arrestees from Mezre, Harput Kaghak and Hussenig were confined.97 The place was a ‘hell’ of nightly punishment and murder;98 Askanaz Soursourian was ‘tortured […] mercilessly’ there.99 Prisoners, told that their families and the wider community would suffer if they did not produce the weapons they supposedly had hidden away, resorted to purchasing guns from local Turks in efforts to appease the authorities.100 As had happened elsewhere, these arms were put on display as exhibitions of the

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‘threat’ posed by a ‘treacherous’ Armenian community, and also photographed so that those exhibitions could be viewed further afield. One clear target was superiors in the Ottoman state apparatus. The Mezre photographs also featured officials and soldiers, a clear indication that they were twin-pronged objects meant to speak not only of collective Armenian villainy but also of individual acts of heroism by agents of the state.101 The vali, after all, is recorded as sending the photographs to Constantinople to accompany a ‘report on the conspiracy he had brought to light’.102 Similar photographs were made across the empire, as already suggested by the scene in Diyarbekir, and those making them were similar also, a great many of them Armenians.103 Even with the recent expansion of the photographic profession, the state’s desire to use pictures went far beyond its ability to make them, and thus it came to ‘employ’ the very people it was targeting. The photographs in Mezre, according to an account provided by Donabed Lulejian, a teacher at Euphrates College, were made by Askanaz Soursourian and Mihran Toutounjian.104 We thus find the state once again calling upon the skills of the Soursourian family, but on this occasion, in contrast to the situation faced by his father more than twenty years previously, Askanaz surely had little choice but to accept the ‘commission’, and Mihran Toutounjian likewise. The people who photographed the weapons were no doubt subject to the same threats as those who had ‘surrendered’ them. Those threats produced concrete results for local officials – their desire for arms, pictures and other such tangible proofs of Armenian guilt was fulfilled – but brought no reprieve for Armenians. Over a period of weeks in June, most captives were killed; the Kirmizi Konak was by turns emptied and then filled again with new victims. Vahe Haig (who himself ‘survived the massacres by a miracle’)105 reports the destruction of the Soursourian and Toutounjian workshops, ‘their masters murdered in the most savage manner’.106 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, a survivor from Hussenig, records in her memoirs that ‘[j]ust before [Askanaz Soursourian] died, they carted his bleeding body to the front door of the Soursourian home and left him there’.107 General deportations from Mezre, Harput Kaghak and Hussenig were carried out in July. Many Kharpertsis set out along ‘the old Roman road’, many did not have far to travel. During the late summer and early autumn, Leslie Davis made journeys across the Harput plain and witnessed Lake Dzovk littered with hundreds of corpses.108 It was close to those shores that Tlgadintsi is reported to have met his end, murdered along with numerous other Harput notables.109 Davis also visited the towns and villages along the way, amongst them Mezre, Sursur, Hussenig and Tlgadin/Khuylu, each place ‘a scene of desolation and destruction’.110 The American made a number of photographs, which he subsequently buried in Mezre to prevent their being discovered, mirroring the attempts of Armenians to hide, sometimes even to destroy themselves, texts and images that they feared might be taken as incriminating (in an environment in which incrimination required very little).111 In Harput, these included Tlgadintsi’s papers, many unpublished stories among them, and Donabed Lulejian’s manuscript of his history of Harput.112 Lulejian’s account also provides a further telling detail. When they heard of impending deportations, he records, some Kharpertsis started to destroy bantoukhd photographs for fear that they would be used to target their loved ones abroad.113 It adds a final turn

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to the complex emotional responses engendered by those photographs. Having elicited pride and longing, they now turned into objects of dread. However, unlike glass plates, prints also had a means of survival, being privileged in form, transportable and relatively durable objects. Some were actively carried away from the scenes of destruction, held close during deportation, kept safe in the most harrowing of circumstances. Besides, many products of Armenian studios, and the Kharpertsi studios in particular, were already in places of safety. Photography amongst Armenians was born out of their being a mobilized diaspora, and photographs endured for this reason too. Had they not, after all, often been produced specifically to be sent away to distant lands? It was this, their own absence from the homelands, that accounts for their continued existence, standing as the reason why they survived while many of those whose images they carried did not. If we think of photography as predicated on exchange, then the fates of photographs lay in inverse proportion to the fates of their sitters. Photographs of  bantoukhds were destroyed while their subjects were at a safe distance; portraits of provincial families were safely abroad while their subjects suffered in their towns and villages, in torturous makeshift prisons and on deadly deportation routes southwards towards the Syrian Desert.

The Following Years We see one remnant of Harput on display in a portrait of the Koobatian family (Figure 6.6). They pose in Worcester, Massachusetts, ten years after they gathered for  a similar portrait in Harput, a portrait now held in the hands of Mihran Koobatian (see Fig. 4.8). The Worcester photograph stands as a fascinating revision of the earlier image (one realizes, looking at this photograph, that while Armenian photographs often contain references to American-made counterparts, the formula is rarely replicated from the other direction). The ostensible impetus behind the display of the earlier photograph is the death of family patriarch Hovannes Koobatian in 1917, shortly before the making of this portrait. His image is included in the frame in the same way as migrants’ photographs once were. Thus we see adapted from earlier modes a means of visual acknowledgement and inclusion, one that speaks of and perhaps also to the ‘departed’, now a different kind of ‘departed’. Although evidently performed as an act of remembrance, perhaps this act of holding up the photograph consciously echoes and recalls the hope and anticipation that played a role in the original photograph, thus telling a story of the family’s progress and indeed survival. If events in the Ottoman Empire do play a role – and it seems impossible that they are not a consideration in the display of a photograph made in homelands now emptied of their Armenians – then it is likely in a feeling of relief that the family were at a distance from those events. It is not that they were untouched by the genocide, for there was not a single Ottoman Armenian family that did not experience some degree of loss during these years. At the same time, with their immediate family unit largely intact and their sole loss

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Figure 6.6  Uncredited photographer. Koobatian family of Worcester, Massachusetts, March 1917. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Agavny Koubatian Bagdigian.

of these years taking place on American soil due to natural causes, the Koobatians had apparently not suffered to the degree of other families. It is during these years above all, amidst mass upheaval and convulsion, that it becomes clear how the unsettled nature of photographs is inherently related to the instability of the world around them. This is most readily apparent when the photograph becomes unsettled in form, as with the hybrid objects addressed by Geoffrey Batchen, photographs that have been added to and altered in order to create objects more befitting to processes of memorialization.114 This is important to the history we are dealing with here, and yet even before we can address such practices a more immediate hybridity must be considered, one that engulfed photographs as surely as those they represented were engulfed by violence. It is absolutely clear that with the genocide, photographs became memorial objects with the power to evoke the ‘uncanny sense of the enigma of disappearance’.115 Yet for a long time, their sense of disappearance did not relate to death, the form of ‘disappearance’ that most commonly haunts photography, death in the form of ceasing to be, the bodily finality of death that can be attested to and certified. It was, rather, an utter lack of information and documentation with which most relatives had to contend during this era, the unknowns that were born of Kemah and its partner sites, of the genocidal abyss that had been opened up across the Ottoman Empire. The process that occurred during these years was experienced as one of mass disappearance. There could be, for a great

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many families at least, simply no certainty concerning the fates of their loved ones. What, for example, might we say about the Vaznaian family portrait at this stage (see Fig. 4.1)? What did that photograph mean to Mgerditch in the USA while he actively searched, as so many Armenians did, for a trace of his loved ones? The advert he placed in the Armenian newspaper Hairenik in 1919, seeking information on his missing family, states that they were last seen two years previously in Rakka in the Syrian Desert. As long as people like Mgerditch Vaznaian held onto the possibility that loved ones might still be alive, then the photograph could never be any sort of a static object but instead surely subject to the hopes and fears that predominated at any given moment of viewing. Thus photographs assume another form of hybridity, a heightened instability in which they oscillate between states. The two lives of photographs, their two paths of possibility, find expression in Varujan Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers: For the Armenians of those days photographs were like a last will and testament or like a life insurance policy. If the persons came back from the convoys of deportees, the orphanages, the voyages in the holds of ships, the photograph was once more put away for safekeeping, and the person resumed his place among the living. If he did not return, then the photograph brought the deceased back to the midst of his family when they opened the old, handsomely carved boxes on feast days.116

Of course, the delineations were not always so clear. The expansion of the picture plane to incorporate numerous figures inevitably meant that it could splinter in separate directions in reflection of the divergent fates of family members. The two Vaznaian daughters, Maritza and Victoria, were traced to Aleppo; the rest of the family had perished.117

For an insight as to how photographs were experienced by those in the very midst of cataclysm, we might return to almost where we began, to Trebizond via the memoirs of Leon Surmelian. In fact, it is a literal moment of return for Surmelian, his account detailing how, having experienced deportation and life as a fugitive in the inland area, he was finally able to go back to his hometown in 1916 once it had fallen under Russian occupation. He finds the place much changed, the house that he had grown up in, the house of the fine upstairs room where the portrait of his grandfather had hung, now plundered and empty. Seemingly the only vestiges – found in a hoard of looted possessions stored in the nearby Armenian church – are three photographs, one a family photograph that the writer meets with disbelief.118 ‘Was that little boy in the starched white turned-down collar and flowing cravat, holding a hoop, really myself?’ he asks, ‘I could hardly believe it as I gazed upon my likeness at the age of seven, many thousands of years ago.’119 This is, in a sense, a common experience, one felt by all when looking at photographs of themselves as youngsters, an unease stemming from the disjuncture

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between subject and viewer, one and the same person and yet separate beings (‘we are faced with the evidence of the being we most certainly once were, but can never recall’, writes Brian Dillon).120 Yet the photograph here is but a few years old, and the sense of vertigo in Surmelian is vastly accentuated by, if not completely the product of, the traumatic gulf that his recent experiences have opened up in his life, a great disjuncture between past and present that now makes it possible for him to look upon a recent family photograph as if it belongs to a different age, to another person’s life. He appears to experience it for the very first time, through the eyes of a stranger. It returns to him not as a familiar friend but as an object of curiosity and of revelation. Surmelian’s is a dual account of memory and forgetting, the forms presented by the photograph corresponding inversely to memory voids within himself, what is imprinted upon the image being no longer imprinted upon him, or at least, he feels, no longer reliably imprinted. From this shock encounter with a seemingly unknown and distant past there slowly emerges recognition and a form of comfort and evidence. The family portrait proves an important link to a past life, one that the young boy requires in order to verify what he can no longer verify himself: I wept bitterly over these photographs […] At last I had found something linking me with my dream-like past. At last I had definite proof in my hands, to convince myself that I had not been always alone, not always an orphan, that I was not just imagining I, too, once had a mother and family, which I had begun to doubt.121

Surmelian’s account appears to perform almost an inverse of photographs made by Near East Relief (NER), an aid agency offshoot of the ABCFM that was responsible for the bulk of the relief work carried out in the Near East. With roots in missionary work and education, it is perhaps no surprise that tropes of beforeand-after were deployed in their photographic work, plotting the trajectories of orphan children, ‘many [with] no remembrance of parents or home’, who ‘formed the raw material that had to be remolded and remade’, according to James Barton, principal architect of NER and one-time head of Euphrates College in Harput.122 Surmelian, rather than being made anew, is returned to a semblance of his former self. Unsettled in the present day, no longer moored by those things that once held his life in place, it is a photographic encounter that restores him to a semblance of his past self. The photograph marks the return of the disappeared – the return of Surmelian’s mother, and the return of his own self. Yet its powers are limited; Surmelian regrets the absence from the portrait of his father, who had been too busy to join the family on the occasion of its making, and who, like his mother, had not returned from deportation. The photograph is a revelation that does not reveal enough.

An armistice was signed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire at Mudros in October 1918, carrying strict provision for the occupation of the areas of the

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empire of specific geopolitical and economic interest to the Allies but leaving the eastern provinces in the hands of the Ottoman authorities until matters could be settled at a peace conference. Armenian survivors started to return to their homes or to emerge from hiding, chiefly in protected areas such as Cilicia, now under French occupation, but also, in smaller numbers and at far greater risk, in parts of the Ottoman East.123 As it always had done, geography played a huge part in dictating the conditions in which Armenians lived, as we find in correspondence between the Chitjian brothers and other members of their family, dispersed at this time across numerous locales, including Harput, Zonguldak (on the Black Sea), Constantinople and Chicago.124 Their letters continually return to the subject of photographs, particularly those of Hampartzoum, the eldest of the four brothers, last seen by us admiring a glimpse of ‘the light from the stars and moon’ in the electric bulb exhibited in Mezre, who had spent the war years fugitively in the Harput region.125 The requests for photographs that he addresses to his family shows the medium still held up to be a point of contact between separated family members, with all the functions established in previous bantoukhd correspondence. Yet in these new circumstances, the correspondence takes on an even more vital aspect, as if Hampartzoum has a sense of his fate being linked to the establishment and sustenance of a thread of visual contact with his family. He frequently exhibits signs of despondency and desperation, his requests for photographs seemingly as frequent as his laments over their failure to arrive, a failure that appears to him as a sign of his abandonment. Finally receiving a portrait from Chicago of his brothers Bedros and Mihran, he replies with an ecstatic description of the moment: ‘upon opening your letter, I pulled out the important object – behold, the light-filled photograph, upon which I stared in stunned amazement […] It took several glances for me to realize who [the subjects] were. The reason for this is that nobody would have thought that we would ever have had this fortune to see this day.’126 Hampartzoum thrives on such visual contact, photographs cherished objects that soothe his longings and seem to hold the promise of future rescue and family reunion. Yet they also tap into his feelings of isolation and abandonment, their innate muteness seeming to signal his brothers’ neglect of him: ‘Taking your photographs in front of us, we weep a little and we laugh a little. But you are not saying anything […] will that day ever come when you will reply to our words?’127 In the difficult, fluctuating conditions of Harput, as his hopes for being rescued wax and wane, his responses to photographs change accordingly, rapidly shifting registers, joy and gratitude turning to despair and aggression. When they do ‘speak’, seemingly innocuous studio portraits sometimes take on ugly complexions and appear to mock him, inducing a melancholia. They aggravate his sense, on display elsewhere in his letters, of the great contrast between his own life and those of his brothers, so much so that he begins to suspect – and accuse – his brothers of boasting of their good fortune through their photographs and sneering at his own impoverished condition.128 The impression we are left with is one of photography as an intensifier of difference. If we are to accept photography as balm, as a bridger of distance, we might also have to accept another power, its ability to heighten divisions and to make distance seem even greater.

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‘Let it be a memento for the future, from me’, Hampartzoum declares as he sends a portrait of himself to his brothers.129 He seems, however, uncertain as to what this actually means. Shortly to leave Harput for Iran, the photograph seems to carry the potential to act either a placeholder, holding open a space in the family in preparation for Hampartzoum’s safe return, or a memorial object, should that return never occur (or, returning to Vosganian’s words, ‘like a last will and testament or like a life insurance policy’). ‘Perhaps I shall see you in the distant future, or maybe never’, he later writes from Iran.130 Many other Armenians also made their final departure from their homelands, the rise of Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist movement and the return of massacre snuffing out any chance there once was of Armenian communities re-establishing themselves. The removal of Armenians was not confined to the war years but continued into the 1920s. Harput, for instance, saw a campaign of violence and land seizure, which resulted in the Armenians that had remained in the villages on the plain fleeing first to the Upper City, and then from there to Aleppo.131 In time, they were being forced from not Ottoman but Turkish lands. The treaty signed at Lausanne in 1923 marked the international recognition of the new Republic of Turkey. As a counterpoint, it implicitly signalled a disappearance, with Winston Churchill describing how within the Treaty of Lausanne ‘history will search in vain for the word “Armenia”.’132

We have been examining throughout a particular vernacular practice based upon the repetitions of established studio portraiture, far removed from the more inventive forms of vernacular found elsewhere. This studio practice still continued after the genocide; it survived even if the studios themselves did not, for the language cemented in those places was retained and was perhaps more necessary than ever for the remnants of Ottoman Armenian communities, scattered across great distances. Distinct modes remained in use, transferred to a new daily reality. Photographs of orphan relief built on a history of educational photography; ‘picture brides’ were now photographed in refugee camps rather than in professional studios; the tropes of bantoukhd exchanges showed themselves to be adaptable to a different kind of separation, as suggested already by the Koobatian portrait.133 However, practices characterized by distinctive interventions in and alterations of photographs do emerge amongst some Armenians after the genocide. In one sense, these photographs speak of and take part in wider processes of photographic memorialization. Transformed and adorned, seemingly so that they might better aid the tasks of memory and mourning, the resultant photographs can be associated with the hybrid objects studied by Geoffrey Batchen, providing ‘a skeptical commentary on the capacity of photography by itself to provide a compelling memorial experience’.134 Surmelian’s account has already suggested how photographs exist between omnipotence and inadequacy, being simultaneously powerful and precious vestiges of the past and weak and insufficient objects that

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do not properly summon up the world from which they hailed. They do not – and cannot – provide all that is asked of them. That being the case, memorialization involves – demands even – that there be some intervention into the image, a physical rewriting. There is resonance here with the artistic employment in later years of fictional and semi-fictional modes in response to genocide and its denial, and Marie-Aude Baronian’s assertion that ‘fiction is not the opposite of historical reality but the only possible imaginable answer – the only space that (re)connects the Event and its re-presentation’.135 Memorial image-making in the post-genocide period suggests that such forms of ‘fiction’ were long in use to contend with the enormous losses suffered and to straddle the gulf between new lives and the world once known. In this way, while they are forms that fit with the wider patterns identified by Batchen, we should not lose sight of the essential principle that photography in Armenian communities is ‘a product of its own history’. Armenians had to contend with their own specific loss, the loss not only of loved ones but also of homeland; they had to contend too with the violence of those losses, and indeed the denial of that violence. With this in mind, we might associate a certain shift seen among some makers and users of photographs away from the repetitive meaning-making processes of the studio as a sign that, with the widespread destruction of Armenian communities, the communal system that studio portraiture represented and enacted no longer functioned in the same manner. A collective approach continued, but it was tempered and interrupted by distinctive acts of image-making related to isolated processes of memory and mourning, and individuals seem to search for their own pictorial language, adequate to their particular needs and circumstances. Photographers in the new diaspora adapt themselves to these demands, producing memorial objects in a variety of forms. Many seek simply to reproduce existing, surviving photographs, the products of Ottoman Armenian provincial studios. The photograph (see Fig. 0.1) with which we began, for example, was most likely originally made in Harput by the elder Soursourians, yet in the form in which it reaches us it carries the mark of the Zaza Photo Studio in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a seemingly minor detail that in fact carries great weight, proposing a sense of exile and dislocation. Another mark also becomes telling, for with it we can read part of the process of this later image-maker, as we did with the photographers of the original scene. At the centre of the photograph’s upper edge, a slight recess into the image presents evidence of a print having been pinned to the studio wall for rephotographing. To its left is a shadow, seemingly cast by whatever has been used to keep the photograph in place, the double loop of scissors even suggested. It is the faintest of traces but it is pregnant with meaning. It is, in essence, the shadow of the destruction that has necessitated such a rephotographing, the shadow of the void into which glass plates disappeared and the shadow of the photograph’s distance from its origins. The accepted logic, following Walter Benjamin, is that since any number of prints can be made from a photographic negative ‘to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense’.136 However, in the post-genocide world most photographs lacked their negative counterparts, necessitating the creation of new ones through acts of rephotographing. We are thus dealing with not purely images of exile but

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images in exile. Separated from their original technological source (the glass plate) as much as from their organic source (the people and places that are their referents), they might be thought of as pictures in exile from themselves, or a part of themselves. Prints like this, taken from newly created copy negatives, might indeed be themselves described as copies, second generation incarnations of earlier iterations, ‘inauthentic’ even. Yet they were prized specifically for the authenticity they were felt to offer. The first photographers’ largely successful efforts to forge a still image of the family acted, unbeknownst to them, as a preemptive embalming process, offering the future an ‘authentic’ lifelike presence of those who would be absent.137 Not all the original sitters, of course, have been offered a presence in the new photograph. At some point there has been a further intervention, either by the later photographer or another hand entirely, the latter being the more likely as the marks lack the neatness and order that tends to be the hallmark of the professional photographer. Indeed, these marks do not simply lack polish but have a certain rawness that verges on the frenzy as they endeavour to remove someone from the left of the frame. Whereas Surmelian’s family photograph did not contain enough for him, this photograph appears to have contained too much. It suggests the portrait as a powerful vestige of the past, a past that someone, at least in part, did not want to be reminded of. Indeed, there is perhaps nothing that demonstrates the power of photographs so much as efforts to destroy them.

Elsewhere, images are built up, but building too can produce edited, simplified versions of the past, as found in the work of K.S. Melikian, a Kharpertsi and one-time furniture maker in Mezre.138 Like the photographer at the Zaza Photo Studio, Melikian often reprinted scenes from Harput (the 1907 Koobatian portrait we’ve been looking at is, in fact, one of his copy prints), while also employing photographs as constituent parts in more complex practices, such as his depiction of Azniv and Sarkis Deranian for which he inserts drawn figurative elements into a landscape of Harput, one with its origins in a photograph already seen (Figure 6.7; see also Fig. 4.2).139 The Golden Plain has been rid of its orphans and, ironically, the only ‘original’ figures still (partially) on view are not the intended subjects of the orphans but two men who appear to have wandered into the scene that day (one either side of the frame, the figure on the left more discernible). The only orphan left on display, we might say, is the photograph itself, for it is now a long way removed from its original orbit. The Deranians had migrated to Worcester in the 1890s, but during the First World War Sarkis returned to the Near East where he was killed fighting with the French Légion d’Orient (the volunteer brigade established in 1916 as a means for Armenians outside Ottoman lands to contribute to the defeat of the genocidal Ottoman state).140 The portrait that Azniv subsequently commissioned from Melikian is a homecoming, bringing, with refence once again to Varujan Vosganian, ‘the deceased back to the midst of his family’. It provides both a ‘living’ image of Sarkis and a site of mourning where none previously existed (according

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Figure 6.7  K.S. Melikian. Azniv and Sarkis Deranian, no date. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA.

to Marderos Deranian’s telling of the story, Sarkis was left ‘without a grave on earth’), thus acting like the post-mortem photographs that had previously allowed migrants to participate in funeral rites despite their physical distance from the deceased and from the community.141 More than returning the husband to his wife, the image also returns the couple to the moment of their first meeting, a moment in time and, importantly, also in space, for this is a memory deeply embedded in a specific site. The place of the meeting is the Set Khassem Spring in Hussenig; the image thus restores them to their hometown and in the process restores that hometown itself. Hussenig can be glimpsed intact in the distance, lying on the plain below Harput Kaghak as it always did. Directly in the centre of the frame, beyond Azniv, can be seen Sourp Varvar. Another photograph in Melikian’s archive shows the great church as it actually was, reduced to the meagre remnants of a ruined wall and arch. Sourp Varvar remains a place of pilgrimage, but one that might only be visited through photographs; the picture of Sarkis and Azniv does for the church and the whole town of Hussenig what it does for Sarkis, it brings them back so that they might ‘live on’ while also providing a site where their demise might be mourned. This memory of the plain, with Sourp Varvar and its painted dome in the distance, bring to mind the words of Vahan Totovents as he ends a reminiscence of his family life on ‘the old Roman road’: ‘The blue canopy of heaven has collapsed on all that; it has collapsed like the turquoise dome of an ancient church during an earthquake.’142

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In contrast to the later creative use of the vernacular described by Baronian, the processes here are not about the public assertion of loss; they do relate, however, to ‘the very nature of the genocidal event as a sort of “private”, even secret, event’.143 The silence of these years was the silence not only of perpetrators but of victims also. A generation of survivors kept their experiences and their memories to themselves. This contributed to the scenario Baronian sketches of a lack of circulating images, for photographs, along with other vestiges of past lives and loss, were largely not for public contemplation, and were perhaps not even for close family. Victor Gardon begins Le vert soleil de la vie (1959) with the motif of private, hidden images waiting to break out into the open: ‘how many times over the years have I wished for the friendship of a stranger so that I might project in front of him a film which nobody had seen, a film which was my life’.144 Beneath the Gardon name was Vahram Gakavian (his choice of nom de plume, being in part a homage to Victor Hugo, showing the Frenchman’s continued influence on the Gakavian family), and the novel, the first in a trilogy to tell the story of the author’s early life in Van and subsequent exile in the Caucasus, constitutes a relatively early public account of what had befallen the Armenians earlier in the century, and furthermore an example of the fictional mode being deployed for the purpose.145 Meanwhile, his archive reveals some of his own private memorial image practice (Figure 6.8). Another print of Papazian’s portrait of the Gakavian family resides there, almost identical to the one previously addressed (see Fig. 5.6) but with a large section of photographic paper missing, one corresponding exactly with the position of his mother Aghavni, thus excising her entirely. It is one of those rare photographs that, like the photograph from the Zaza studio, openly displays its absences, alerting us to the fact that something is missing from its frame. The motives behind the excision, however, most likely lie in contrast to those at work in the other photograph; although not known for sure, it is thought that the section containing Gardon’s mother might have been removed so that it could form the basis of its own exclusive portrait.146 The rest of the family portrait Figure 6.8  M.G. Papazian. The Gakavian Family, now stands as a surviving Van, 2 April 1906 (altered version). Christine remnant, a vestige of a wider Gardon collection.

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process. It is an excision that seems to declare the rest of the image superfluous (we might think of it as excess to requirements, rather than actively unwanted, as with the Zaza photograph), and in practical terms it leaves what remains of the print without presentational purpose. And yet something has happened in the process, the remnant seems to have become a memorial object itself. The proof of this seems to lie before us, in the print’s very existence and survival. It is as if even in this bowdlerized state the photograph retained a power and a hold over Victor Gardon – owing, we might presume, to the likenesses that it still bears, including that of his father Haroutiun who had died from typhus in Vladikavkaz (North Ossetia, Russia), in 1919, and was buried in the cemetery of the Armenian church there, a long way from the family’s new home in France.147 To destroy his image would have been unthinkable, even with that image seemingly unusable. The fragment of the family photograph thus becomes an inadvertent memorial; indeed, it seems to become so only in the process of becoming fragmented, of being threatened with destruction, as if the process of removal reactivates the rest of the picture. And because it continues to hold meaning, it continues to exist, if only perhaps in a box or a drawer; it might not necessarily be looked at but it is enough that, somewhere out of sight, it lives on. The isolation of the section containing Aghavni Gakavian is an instance of an individual portrait being constructed from a group image, a reversion to a semblance of an earlier form of photography, to older carte de visite conventions. To give a subject their own space, alone and secluded, within the frame seems still to be the ultimate accolade that photography can bestow. It is not quite, of course, the ‘default setting’, for it becomes noticeable how often memorials hinge not on men but instead on women, mothers in particular. Amongst these we can count the painterly renderings of the Adoian photograph, the young boy Vostanig, now the grown man and painter Gorky, laboriously refashioning and reinventing the image of him and his mother, a woman with whom, after the July 1915 march from Van, he had shared a hand-to-mouth existence in Yerevan, a city of tens of thousands of refugees where famine and disease were rife and where, in 1919, Shushan had died of starvation. The comparison, however, risks reducing individual loss to a pattern. As Barthes writes of his mourning for his own mother: ‘what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable.’148 It is a statement that might, in fact, help to explain the wider interventions at work in memorial photography; they strive for the particular, constituting efforts to contend with this quality. The repetitions of studio photography that served Armenian communities well for so long were not always up to the challenge; what suited communication between the living was often inadequate in this new world of the dead. Its repetitions might have seemed singularly incapable of communicating the uniqueness of lives lost; they might have even seemed as though they actively generalized their subjects. Recreations endeavoured to remove photographs from this realm of the general, seemingly desirous of returning not to the individual portrait of the carte de visite but something older still, to photographic portraiture’s earliest incarnations that seemed imbued with the ‘aura’ of unique existence.149

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Bringing Gorky into this discussion about memorial photography, its excisions and additions, returns us to Avedaghayan’s photograph (see Fig. 2.2 on page 37 and details below). Just as comparative examinations have shown how closely numerous aspects of the Adoian portrait can be mapped onto Avedaghayan’s other photographs, so too do they show us the way in which it deviates from the template. Its distinct, peculiar aspects have already been remarked upon: its murkiness, lack of detail and closeness of crop. Looking back at the photograph now, it seems as though a process of recreation had already been embarked upon within its frame, even before the commencement of Gorky’s paintings. The details of the backdrop, those very similarities and overlaps that have indicated Avedaghayan as the photographer, do not, in fact, quite match. The backdrop, as has been seen, presents a series of arches, each with their own interior details, the smaller spaces house buttresses while the largest presents a view of the twin-peaked mountain. Yet none of that is visible in the Adoian portrait, neither to the left of Vostanig nor to the right of Shushan, spaces that are largely blank. With scrutiny, other forms and subtle details begin to emerge. A line of whiteish hue hugs Vostanig’s side, mimicking his contours, following his form down along the arm, inwards at the elbow and then down again along the lower portion of the coat. A corresponding dark line can be discerned along the inside edge of the coat, lending the garment a bold accentuated outline. These are signs of an intervention into the picture frame, the movement of a brush across its surface. Something not entirely dissimilar has been seen in the photograph from the Zaza Photo Studio, yet in contrast to the rawness in evidence there, the process of mark-making here is careful and deliberate. Indeed, it is a form of mark-making that endeavours to remove its own traces, that aspires towards invisibility. That a paintbrush has traced the line of his body reveals the reason for the discrepancy with the backdrop; the architectural features and the landscape of the design have been blocked out. We also see the way in which the frame of the hanging backdrop disappears, with the line of its bottom edge coming to an abrupt halt near each edge of the photographic frame, just to the left of Vostanig’s thigh on one side and the right of Shushan’s knee on the other. The far sections of the woven mat meet a similar fate – their progress halted at comparable points by some invisible force. Indeed, while Vostanig casts a shadow across the middle of the mat, Shushan’s on the right is not to be found. Each wing of the photograph contains a ghostly void, dark on Vostanig’s side, light on Shushan’s. Perhaps overfamiliarity with the photograph has bred blindness, or else the insistent focus on the two figures, and particularly their expressions, has prompted the neglect of other parts of the picture, but there seems little doubt, now that we look closely at ‘peripheral’ forms and details, that something is missing, something has been removed. Exactly what is another matter, but we could hazard an informed supposition. The spectral spaces at the edge of the frame echo, to a certain extent, the figures in the centre, carrying the suggestion that they once contained human forms. Is it possible that these spaces relate to the absence of certain sitters, that the erasure – now evident erasure – accounts for what we know to have been missing all along? The more the photograph is scrutinized, the more it is examined in the light of Avedaghayan’s other portraits, then the more it becomes apparent that it

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started life as a larger scene, similar perhaps to the group photograph of the contingent from Sourp Krikor, not an intimate vertical image of two people but a wider, horizontal portrait of four. The larger form on the right could well have been the elder sister Satenig, while the slighter form on the left could have been the younger sister Vartoosh. What we are looking at is a modified version of Avedaghayan’s original photograph. Considering how the photograph has been left, a simplified image of mother and son, it seems likely that the son himself commissioned this version for his own purposes. The excisions enacted do not declare the sisters to be lacking in importance, rather that they are not integral to the particular task with which the new photograph has been charged. It is, simply put, the image of a man in mourning for his mother. All else is superfluous. This might begin to explain why it is that this particular image has found itself so suited to wider memorialization: we have inherited something already in the form of a memorial. There seems, accordingly, no escaping the iconic nature of the photograph; perhaps it cannot be rescued from iconicity and restored to the world of the living. It was designed as an icon and has performed that function ever since. There are the stirrings here of an echo with one of the photographs first examined. The reduction of Avedaghayan’s group portrait finds its strange reflection in the multiplication of individual portraits made by Movses Papazian of students at the military high school in Erzurum (see Fig. 3.1). Later sewn together in Constantinople, Papazian’s portraits expand outwards, serving the expansive desires of empire and proclaiming the sameness of what the photographic frame contains. It is a process that relishes repetition, feeding off it even; it finds in the repetitions of studio photography, with its carte de visite origins, an outlet for and Figure 2.2  (details, for full image, see page 37) Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, c.1911. Courtesy of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation.

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an expression of its desire to produce and reproduce sameness in the Ottoman world. Hovhannes Avedaghayan’s photograph, meanwhile, is made to retreat inwards in a statement of uniqueness; it is reduced in order to isolate a particular individual – a life, a quality – in the form of Gorky’s absent mother. Indeed, it seems to turn, fold in on itself, protecting a feeling, a sentiment, the memory of a relationship, the memory of a central – the central – figure in a person’s life. In an effort to explain it we might borrow some words from another photograph with which we began, one that carried the deceptively simple sentiment: ‘To my all-loving mother.’ Of course, Shushan was not Gorky’s mother alone. It would be remiss not to consider how his sisters would have had their own relationship and sense of connection to the photograph. Gorky’s loss was theirs also; they had grown up together, and they too had experienced the siege of Van, the march to the Caucasus, destitution in Yerevan and migration to Watertown. At the same time, they would have felt bereavement and trauma in their own ways, in accordance with their own particular experiences, memories and outlooks. Satenig left Yerevan in 1916, several years before her siblings. Although Setrag had aimed to fund passage to the USA for the whole family, he sent only enough money to cover one of them. Shushan insisted that Satenig go (an act that might in itself be taken as evidence that she would never have left her eldest daughter out of the family photograph in the way she is supposed to have done). Much against her will, Satenig made the journey and was in later years haunted by a sense of abandonment, becoming convinced that her mother had forsaken her. Vartoosh stayed with her family in Yerevan and was with her brother when they saw their mother die, and likewise was with him when, soon after, they started their long journey to the USA. As it was with her siblings, the trauma of these years remained with her. She was the only one of them to return to the site of their loss, resettling in Armenia, now Soviet Armenia, with her husband in the 1930s (the repatriation was not a success and the two later returned to the USA).150

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These different lives ought to be considered, for the portrait would have appeared differently to each of them. And that portrait too, it seems, had different lives, with a number of physical manifestations. If the above findings are correct, then at least one other version of the photograph exists or has existed in the past, a version of the photograph in which Satenig and Vartoosh appear. This might suggest to some a diminishment, conjuring notions of an ‘original’ and a ‘copy’ separated on a spectrum of ‘authenticity’. On the other hand, perhaps the Adoian portrait becomes, in light of these observations, even more the quintessential photographic image of the Armenian experience. With its different forms it straddles, and reveals in the process, the wider range upon which Armenian-made photographs exist, their different roles, their different lives, their different fates. It is a memento from lives being lived and it is a vestige of a vanished world. It is the mechanical product of the studio and it is the psychological product of destruction and trauma. It is what we can look upon and what we can only imagine. It is what has survived and it is what has been lost. Of course, we cannot truly describe the ‘other’ photograph as lost, for it is possible that it awaits rediscovery somewhere. It is a reminder that nothing is fixed when it comes to photographs. We cannot say ‘this is lost’, for what is lost may yet return, just as we cannot say ‘this has survived’, for what has survived might be shown to be but a fragment.

S A I L I N G A WAY F R OM A C O N C LU SIO N

Everything began to blur, everything was growing further away. A ship went past them, hooting as it did so. Everybody knew this ship, ‘Kerlangedi’, which belonged to ‘Seyre Sefayin’, with its characteristic hoot. The Jewish youths started shouting in Turkish ‘May you get buried, Istanbul, get buried!’ They were beyond reach now. A donkey, standing on the Sarai Bourni quayside, turned its head and looked at them lengthily: it was the Turkish district saying its farewell. And there was the ‘Armenian Island’: he had never noticed that the other side of it was so bare and red, like a monkey’s bottom. He recalled the young girl he had loved there and who had played so many tricks on him. He was at the ship’s stern: there was the French flag between him and Istanbul now: later, when they lowered this tricolour, Istanbul had vanished in the way that a fictitious coin disappears under the conjuror’s handkerchief. A life ended here.1

Shahan Shanour’s 1929 novel Retreat Without Song begins with the departure of an Armenian from the post-war capital, now officially Istanbul. It is a departure that stands in strong contrast to the oft-described romantic arrival of the Westerner in nineteenth-century Constantinople; the city does not appear as if from a dream but disappears like a cheap trick. The scene marks the final exit of an Armenian photographer. With the Armenian Genocide, photography was eviscerated in the Armenian homelands. Many photographers, as we’ve seen, were representatives of their communities even at the very end, dying along with scores of others, dying along with their cities and their towns. A photographic practice survived, only elsewhere. It becomes interesting to note the way in which Ottoman Armenian photography returned to those very regions from which it sprang, those places Dickinson Jenkins Miller has identified as its places of origin. Indeed, the process of re-establishment was in motion even while the genocide was still in full flow. The ability to adapt to new places and find new sources of income could be the difference between life and death, and photography meant, for some, survival. Arriving in the Syrian city

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of Hama in December 1915, Yervant Odian witnessed the success of businesses opened by Armenian deportees, including the city’s very first photography studios.2 Armenian survivors turned to photography across the Arab lands, in Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus and Jerusalem. They did likewise in the Caucasus. Armenians established themselves and became photographers in Yerevan, the capital of the short-lived First Republic of Armenia, as they did in Tiflis and Baku. It was in Baku, then part of the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, that Hovhannes Avedaghayan lived for a time before dying in 1923 at the age of sixty.3 And there was Constantinople/Istanbul, the last place of substantial Armenian existence on now-Turkish soil. It was thus the last place in the country where Armenian photographers continued to operate, the city’s established practitioners joined by those escaping from other parts. Yet the city might be said to have been more a place of departure – or disappearance even. With brief, ominous statements in histories of photography – such as how the Caracache Frères ‘remained in business until 1922’ – many of the city’s photographers seem to fall off the face of the earth.4 In other, more traceable lives, the city was a place of transit on journeys away from danger, as it was in 1922 for the Dildilian family of Marsovan en route to Greece, where Tsolag Dildilian was to set up a new studio;5 or it was a temporary home, the Encababian Frères of Sivas arriving in 1922 and briefly running a photographic studio whilst they arranged their passage to the USA.6 Of all these people, as they sailed or simply walked away from Turkish lands, it could have been written: ‘A life ended here.’ Shanour’s protagonist ‘had chosen photography as a profession. He was trained and later employed at the same studio by a well-known Armenian in Pera. Then again, it was at that photographer’s that he had received the blow from the Turk’s jackboot that had hurled him to Paris.’7 These are the two sides of photography in Ottoman lands for Armenians. It was the site of choice, what they desired for themselves and what helped to sustain them, the medium they gravitated towards as photographers and as sitters; and it was the site of what was chosen for them, the site of receiving the blow, with an element of their murder recorded in the socalled ‘images that horrify and indict’. It is the latter that has tended to characterize and set limits on the study of photography. The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians has allowed them to be erased from the history of photography. It is, in that regard, a history like any other. Alternatively, that destruction, owing to its seismic, cataclysmic nature, has led to an enhanced focus on the destruction. These approaches might be classed as the two jackboots of our histories of photography, each one delivering its own blow to Ottoman Armenians. The earlier part, the ‘prehistory’ with its ‘choice’ lies buried. In these circumstances, it becomes almost revolutionary to begin before the end. It is perhaps not enough to say ‘A life ended here.’ We need to know what that life entailed, so that at the very least we can say ‘This is the life that ended here.’ To the extent, of course, that such confident statements are possible. The devastation of the genocide has assured the incompleteness of our history, the traces removed along with people. The Armenian experience, as Edward Said writes, is one of those that belongs at the ‘terrifying frontiers where the existence

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and disappearance of peoples fade into one another’.8 Acknowledgement of those frontiers serves to reinforce the importance of marshalling what remains, what abides. Photographs offer us passage; they allow us to sail back, to approach the land once again and glimpse the lives lived on that land. It is always an approach, always a glimpse, the journey is one without the promise of an arrival. But we sail regardless and we make progress, seeing more on the horizon each day. This study constitutes, in essence, just one set of observations, made at a particular moment with particular materials; more will be glimpsed tomorrow and much more material surely found. The Dildilians were, amazingly, able to carry away with them a sizeable part of their studio holdings.9 A rare instance indeed, for by and large photographs, if they travelled at all, went not in crates but in hands and in pockets. And in suitcases – Leon Surmelian writes of sailing away from Constantinople/Istanbul with ‘all my worldly belongings in a valise of imitation leather: a few French and Armenian books, my mother’s ring, our family photograph, an extra shirt and some clean underwear’.10 His is an image of precious, unique objects from a lost past mixing with mundane items of ongoing daily existence, an indication of the quiet, domestic – even hidden – lives that photographs would lead for many Armenians. They stayed in their valises for a long time, and indeed a great number remain there still. Each family has one, it seems (in different forms – some are cabinets, others shoeboxes) and Surmelian’s valise reminds me of another, with Taline Voskeritchian, Yervand Voskertchian’s granddaughter, writing of how a valise and its objects figure in her family’s life: ‘Around the valise, out of maps and fabric and photographs, we create something new. An event, a project, a path, an anecdote takes shape; a unknown, distant relative is made visible; an ancestral detail becomes real, becomes vital.’11 It is a wonderful evocation of the richness of photographs, what they might offer when approached with love, curiosity and imagination – paths, possibilities. This in itself guarantees that there is always more to be said, more to be contemplated. We can speak of richness at the same time as we speak of glimpses, for photographs carry these contradictions. They constantly belie their smallness – their smallness of size and number, the smallness of the places in which they are kept – for in them there lies a world. They put us in communication with that world and, despite offering only limited views, they encourage a vastness of vision and myriad opportunities for meditation. And in a similar mode of contradiction, we can look forward to more photographs returning to us in the future. The genocide wrought great destruction and it sparked a great dispersal, and while the former carried a finality, the latter signals continuity and survival. It has assured the prospect of the constant return of the past as more of its vestiges come to light. Each day in our world a new valise is opened, ensuring that each day more of the Ottoman Armenian world is revealed and reflected upon.

NOTES Chapter 1 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol.2, Part 2, 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA; London: The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 507–530, at 507; For more on Benjamin’s ‘fog’ and impossibility, see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, MJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 5–7. 2 Stephen Bann, ‘Against Photographic Exceptionalism’, in Photography and its Origins, ed. Tanya Sheehan and Andrés Mario Zervigón (London: Routledge, 2015), 96. 3 N.P. Lerebours, Excursions daguerriennes: Vues et monuments les plus remarquables du globe (Paris, 1841). 4 Joan M. Schwartz, ‘The Geography Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies’, Journal of Historical Geography 22, no.1 (1996), 16–45. 5 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic 6 (1859), available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/thestereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/ (accessed 5 July 2014). 6 Quoted in Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and His Times’, October 18 (1981), 90–107. 7 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), xx. 8 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855’, 92. 9 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Peregrine Books, 1985), 3, 21 (original emphasis). 10 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographic “Types”: The Pursuit of Method’, Visual Anthropology 3, nos 2–3 (1990), 235–258. 11 This can be linked to what Johannes Fabian identifies as the anthropological discourse that places cultures ‘on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, some downstream’, resulting in a ‘denial of coevalness’. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983), 17, 31. 12 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855’, 100. 13 Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 14 Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 34. 15 Michelle L. Woodward, ‘Between Orientalist Clichés and Images of Modernization: Photographic Practice in the Late Ottoman Era’, History of Photography 27, no.4 (2003), 363–374, at 363. 16 Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (eds), Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840–1914 (Istanbul: Koç University Publications, 2015), 12.

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17 Edhem Eldem,‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, in The Indigenous Lens?: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Markus Ritter and Staci G. Scheiwiller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 29–56. 18 See for example Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (ed.), Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2013). It also serves as an indication of the way in which the status of these albums has been augmented by the Getty’s own symposia and publications. 19 Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 69. Edhem Eldem reminds us ‘of the fact that collections are not archives, and that any study based on such material is bound to reflect and to reproduce its biases and inconsistencies’. Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 30. 20 We even find in analyses signs of what has become a hallmark colonial pictorial crime, the removal of indigenous people from the photographic frame. We find Behdad proposing Henri Béchard’s ‘empty’ view of Thebes as evidence of such ‘photographic unpeopling’, and yet the sight of indigenous people in the midground suggests the erasures to be, in fact, the author’s own. Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 34. 21 It has been argued that this is a flaw contained within Said’s own thinking as originally laid out in Orientalism, a book that reinforces the power relations it seeks to expose, reproducing ‘the stereotypes of the orientalist as the infallible master whose power of representation allows him or her to dominate indisputably the victimized Oriental’. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 1994), 11–12. Edward Said came to recognize this flaw and later developed his ideas substantially in order to include nonWestern voices and the ‘response to Western dominance’. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994). 22 For a critique of the ‘Eastern question school’, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2011), 4–8. 23 See for example Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1983). 24 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th Century Istanbul (Istanbul: Aygaz, 2003). 25 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 26 Engin Özendes, Abdullah Frères: Ottoman Court Photographers (Istanbul: YKY, 1998). 27 Engin Özendes, From Sébah & Joaillier to Foto Sabah: Orientalism in Photography (Istanbul: YKY, 1999). 28 Bahattin Öztuncay, Vassilaki Kargopoulo: Photographer to His Majesty the Sultan (Istanbul: BOS, 2000). 29 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 282–291. 30 Dickinson Jenkins Miller, ‘The Craftsman’s Art: Armenians and the Growth of Photography in the Near East (1856–1981)’ (MA diss., American University of Beirut, 1981), 70–72. 31 Quoted in Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 55–56. 32 Sophie Gordon, Cairo to Constantinople: Francis Bedford’s Photographs of the Middle East (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2013), 15, 46. 33 Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 38.

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34 Bahattin Öztuncay, ‘The Origins and Development of Photography in Istanbul’, in Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840–1914, ed. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul:Koç University Publications, 2015), 66–105, at 101. 35 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 11. 36 Engin Özendes, Abdullah Frères, 197. 37 Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame: The Panoramic City Albums of Istanbul’, in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 93–114, at 101. 38 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855’. 39 Mary Roberts, ‘The Limits of Circumscription’, Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 53–74, at 56. 40 Mary Roberts, ‘The Limits of Circumscription’, 56. 41 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession (1991), 33–40. 42 Mary Roberts, ‘The Limits of Circumscription’, 53. 43 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 155. 44 Carney E.S. Gavin and The Harvard Semitic Museum (eds), Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums, special issue of Journal of Turkish Studies 12 (1988). The motif of the self-portrait is echoed elsewhere, for example in Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 150–165. 45 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 156. 46 We also find the quotation in, for example, Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography: Circulation and Mobility in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean’, History of Photography 40, no.1 (2016), 3–27, at 19; Michelle L. Woodward, ‘Between Orientalist Clichés and Images of Modernization’, 365; Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’, 95. 47 Quoted in M.I. Waley, ‘The Albums in the British Library’ in Carney E.S. Gavin and The Harvard Semitic Museum (eds) ‘Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums’, Journal of Turkish Studies 12 (1988), 31–32, at 31. 48 Zeynep Çelik, ‘Speaking Back to Orientalist Discourse,’ in Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography, ed. Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2002), 19–41. 49 Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman in Ottoman Photography: Producing Identity through its Negation,’ in The Indigenous Lens?: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Markus Ritter and Staci G. Scheiwiller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 173–192, at 181. 50 William Allen, ‘Analyses of Abdul-Hamid’s Gift Albums’ in Carney E.S. Gavin and The Harvard Semitic Museum (eds) ‘Imperial Self-Portrait: The Ottoman Empire as Revealed in the Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s Photographic Albums’, Journal of Turkish Studies 12 (1988), 33–37, at 34. 51 Abdülhamid’s tuğra was commonly found in the imperial realm, appearing as a prominent feature of all public works commissioned during his reign. Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 29–30. 52 William Allen, ‘Analyses of Abdul-Hamid’s Gift Albums’, 34 53 Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 32.

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54 Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 52. 55 Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 52 f1. Vernacular photography has resisted definition and tends to be described in part by what it is not. Geoffrey Batchen writes of ‘ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought (or sometimes bought and then made over) by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.’ Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2000), 57. There are overlaps with ideas of ‘local photography’, which, as defined by Nassar, concerns not the maker’s identity and hinges instead on the work itself: ‘If their photographs reflected the fabric of Palestinian society at the time by representing its life from within, and if it catered to the local demand for photographs, rather the tourist demand for holy land paraphernalia, then the title of local photography can be assigned to such work.’ Issam Nassar, ‘Early Local Photography in Jerusalem’, History of Photography 27, no.4 (2003), 320–332, at 325. 56 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990), 61. 57 Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 57, 199 f1. 58 Nancy Micklewright, ‘Late Ottoman Photography: Family, Home, and New Identities’, in Transitions in Domestic Consumption and Family Life in the Modern Middle East: Houses in Motion, ed. Relli Shechter (New York, NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 65. 59 Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’. 60 Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (eds), Camera Ottomana, 13. 61 Wolf-Dieter Lemke, ‘Ottoman Photography: Recording and Contributing to Modernity’, in The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire, ed. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Würzburg in Kommission, 2002), 237–249. 62 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains. 63 For example, a photograph entitled ‘Vue de Tophané’, showing the shoreline of Tophane and the Nusretiye Mosque from the Bosporus, appears in both the Abdülhamid albums (Abdullah Fréres, ‘Tophane Camii Nusretiye Mosque seen from the sea’ [Between 1880 and 1893] Photograph: https://www.loc.gov/ item/2001699651/) and the Pierre de Gigord collection (Abdullah Frères, ‘Vue de Tophané, Neg. no.441’, 1880s, Pierre de Gigord collection of photographs of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Series III. Loose and mounted photographs. ID/Accession Number: 96.R.14 (C17.7b). Permalink: http://hdl.handle. net/10020/96r14_ref7254_1jj). What we are faced with are not exactly doubles, owing to variations in printing (the Getty’s is a warmer print, while the version at the Library of Congress is cooler, crisper) and condition (the Getty’s print is mottled, carrying the marks of an exposure to the elements that its counterpart, sheltered in the Abdülhamid albums, has not experienced). Yet that they are the same image, with their origins in the same photographic plate, is unmistakeable (and in case there should be any doubt, the same image reference number helpfully adorns both photographs: no.441 from the Abdullah Frères studio). 64 Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’, 97. 65 Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’, 97. 66 Akcan continues by stating: ‘Only a few such scenes fell between the cracks, such as the Armenian massacre in the town of Karahisar that appeared in an album prepared by a German soldier in 1917, which is currently in the Getty’s collection.’ The essay

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67 68

69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85

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Notes at that point returns to the theme of panoramic photography. Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’, 97. Ahmet Ersoy, ‘A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i ‘Osmaniyye Album’, Muqarnas 20, no.1 (2003), 187–207. Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14; Eugene L. Rogan, ‘Aşiret Mektebi: Abdülhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892–1907)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28, no.1 (1996), 83–107. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, 144. For ‘Indian school’ photography, see Jacqueline Fear-Segal, ‘Facing the Binary: Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens’, in Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts, ed. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 153–173. Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no.2 (2003), 312–313. Holly Edwards, ‘A Million and One Nights: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930,’ in Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11–57. Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review, no.108 (2002), 768–96, at 768. We might connect this with the spatial reorganization of Egypt described by Timothy Mitchell. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 65–67. Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 20–26. Said’s exact reference is to ‘Istanbul’s rule over the Arab world’, a signal perhaps that the postcolonial turn in Ottoman scholarship would focus largely on the imperial centre’s relationship to its Arab periphery. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxv. Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”’. Wendy M.K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, CA & London: University of California Press, 2003), 143. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), 19. Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, 768. Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An “Innocent” Modernism?’, History of Photography 33, no.1 (2009), 80–93, at 85. Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 19 Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman in Ottoman Photography’, 181. Ahmet Ersoy, ‘The Sultan and His Tribe: Documenting Ottoman Roots in The Abdülhamid II Photographic Albums’, in Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots, ed. Özge Ertem and Bahattin Öztuncay (Istanbul: ANAMED, 2018), 31–63, at 54. The same bias traceable in wider Ottoman history – the ‘étatist inclinations’ of scholarship that in privileging the documents of the state comes to reproduce its viewpoint – is found at work in the history of photography. Richard E. Antaramian, Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 10. Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 220–221.

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87 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 11. 88 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 239. 89 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 179. 90 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 179 f2. 91 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 327–328; For Nadar, see Jillian Lerner, ‘Nadar’s Signatures: Caricature, Self-Portrait, Publicity’, History of Photography 41, no.2 (2017), 108–125. 92 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 319, 323. 93 Michael Berkowitz writes of photography’s ‘problematic relationship with respectability’, which allowed Jews to enter the profession, their presence in turn shaping perceptions and depictions of the profession. Michael Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015), 14. 94 Notably, Boghos Tarkulyan seems to be redeemed thanks to his services to the state, ‘loyal’ where other Armenian subjects are ‘disloyal’: after the failed attempt on the sultan’s life by Armenian revolutionaries, Tarkulyan prepared a series of photographs depicting confiscated bombs for the Ministry of Public Security, also presenting a dedicated set to the sultan as a gift. We might have been able to refer to Tarkulyan as the ‘good Armenian’ of Öztuncay’s narrative were it not for the fact that he leaves his Armenian identity behind; he is alone in being described not as Armenian but as being ‘of Armenian origin’. Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 289. 95 Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Towards Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 95. 96 Erik Jan Zürcher’s criticism of Bernard Lewis’s approach to Ottoman history becomes relevant as it can be applied to a whole school of history writing that depicts the Ottoman Empire as a Turkish space: ‘late Ottoman history almost automatically acquires a teleological character. It turns into “prehistory” of the republic. This in turn changes late Ottoman history into Turkish history avant la lettre, which misrepresents the multicultural, multi-ethnic character of that history in which Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Arabs, Albanians and Bosnians all played important parts within a dynastic and religious political system.’ Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman Empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2010), 43. 97 Take, for example, the following warping of the historical record: ‘Many European photographers, the most renowned of whom were Abdullah Frères, Vasilaki Kargopulo, Guillaume Berggren, and Pascal Sebah, moved to Istanbul and opened studios.’ Kamil Firat, British-Ottoman Relations through the Yildiz Palace Photography Collection (Istanbul: Yildiz Teknik Üniversitesi, 2018), 17. Elsewhere, Wendy Shaw credits the 1873 Ottoman state album Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie to ‘the local French photographic studio Foto Sebah’, thus laying irony upon misidentification by describing Pascal Sébah as French while giving his studio a variation on the names it carried in the Republican era. Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An “Innocent” Modernism?’, 85. 98 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘Reframing Ottoman Art Histories: Bringing Silenced Voices Back into the Picture’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 6 (2015), 7–17, at 11. 99 Nancy Micklewright, ‘Late Ottoman Photography: Family, Home, and New Identities’, 77. 100 Nancy Micklewright, ‘Late Ottoman Photography: Family, Home, and New Identities’, 76–77 (my italics).

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101 Nancy C. Micklewright, ‘Personal, Public, and Political (Re)Constructions: Photographs and Consumption’, in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, ed. Donald Quataert (New York, NY: State University of New York, 2000), 261–287, at 276; As an example of repetition, we find the following: ‘Initially, Greek and Armenian citizens adopted photography as a profession, but it later spread among the Muslims as well.’ Mehmet Bahadir Dördüncü, The Yildiz Albums of Sultan Abdülhamid II: Mecca-Medina (New Jersey: The Light, 2006), 11. 102 Fatma Müge Göcek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789−2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 103 Armen Marsoobian’s study of the Dildilians, unique in the attention it pays to a provincial Armenian photographic history, has no doubt made it difficult for any survey to ignore the family. Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015). 104 Engin Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923, trans. Priscilla Mary Işın (Istanbul: YEM Yayın, 2013), 272. 105 The Dildilian family left first Marsovan in 1921 and then, after a Kemalist proclamation that declared the expulsion of Greeks and Armenians, Samsun in November 1922, given only a few days to secure passage for themselves and the group of orphans who were in Aram Dildilian’s charge. Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 308–323. 106 Donald Quataert, ‘The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no.2 (2006), 249–59. 107 Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (eds), Camera Ottomana, 15. 108 Nancy C. Micklewright, ‘Personal, Public, and Political (Re)Constructions’, 267. 109 Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East (London: Quartet Books, 1988), 116–117. 110 Taner Akçam, ‘Foreword’, in Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier (eds), Turkey and the Armenian Ghost: On the Trail of the Genocide, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan, (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2015), ix–xiii, at xii. 111 Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea, 59.

Chapter 2 1 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 29–33; Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 18–35. 2 H.J. Sarkiss, ‘The Armenian Renaissance, 1500–1863’, Journal of Modern History 9 (1937), 433–448; Robert Melson, ‘A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, no.3 (1982), 481–509. 3 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 78–79. 4 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 38–44. 5 Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian and Ali Sipahi, ‘Ottoman Historiography’s Black Hole’, in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities, Politics, ed. Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian and Ali Sipahi (London & New York, NY: I.B.Tauris, 2016), 1–15.

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6 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 44–46. 7 Selim Deringil, ‘“The Armenian Question is Finally Closed”: Mass Conversions of Armenians in Anatolia during the Hamidian Massacres of 1895–1897’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no.2 (2009), 344–371, at 349; See also Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 20–27. 8 Stephan H. Astourian, ‘The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power’, in Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 55–81. 9 Robert Melson, ‘A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896’, 496, 505. 10 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 135–149. 11 George H. Hepworth, Through Armenia on Horseback (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1898), 317–318. 12 Mark Sykes, Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey Through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey (London: Bickers & Sons, 1904), 244–254. 13 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘A Responsibility to Protest? The Public, the Powers and the Armenians in the Era of Abdülhamit II’, Journal of Genocide Research 17, no.3 (2015), 259–283. See also Arménouhie Kévonian, Les noces noires de Gulizar, trans. Jacques Mouradian (Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses, 2005). 14 London Daily News, 27 August 1889, 5; Arménouhie Kévonian, Les noces noires de Gulizar, 114–115, 142–145. 15 The Graphic, 7 December 1889, 701. 16 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso Books, 2019), 236–248. 17 Allan Sekula, ‘Reading an Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital’, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 443–452, at 451. 18 Stephen Sheehi, ‘Decolonising the Photography of Palestine: Searching for a Method in a Plate of Hummus’, in Imaging and Imagining Palestine: Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918–1948, ed. Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 340–358, at 347. 19 Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear, ‘Photography’s Time Zones’, in Before-andAfter Photography: Histories and Contexts, ed. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–11. 20 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, 197. 21 Edward Said writes of the Palestinian experience, ‘we can read ourselves against another people’s pattern, but since it is not ours – even though we are its designated enemy – we emerge as its effects, its errata, its counternarratives. Whenever we try to narrate ourselves, we appear as dislocations in their discourse.’ Edward Said, After the Last Sky (London & Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1986), 140. 22 Christopher Pinney writes of a process of recuperation, ‘the enclosing in a new space of domesticity and affection of images formerly lost in the public wilderness of the archive’. Christopher Pinney, ‘Introduction: “How the Other Half … ”’, in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–14, at 4. 23 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs, LOT 9520, no.17. Cacoulis, K.E, and Sébah & Joaillier, High School, Trabzon, Photograph: https://www.loc.gov/ item/2001699220/.

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24 William Allen, ‘Analyses of Abdul-Hamid’s Gift Albums’, 35. 25 See for example Orhan M. Çolak, ‘II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Vilayetleri Fotoğraflama Teşebbüsleri ve Fotoğrafçı Ahmed Fuad Bey’, in Gülden Sarıyıldız, Niyazi Çiçek, İshak Keskin and Sevil Pamuk (eds), Prof. Dr. Şevki Nezihi Aykut Armağanı (Istanbul: Etkin Kitaplar, 2011), 57–74. 26 Cacoulis appears regularly in the Annuaire Oriental du Commerce; in later years working with his brother (or brothers); The brothers ‘are thought to have left Trabzon in 1921’, writes Orhan M. Çolak. Orhan M. Çolak, ‘II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Vilayetleri Fotoğraflama Teşebbüsleri ve Fotoğrafçı Ahmed Fuad Bey’. 27 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, 510. 28 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, xxix. 29 Writing of the uses and meaning of photographs in the French peasant society of Béarn, Pierre Bourdieu states that photographs ‘are never considered in themselves and for themselves, in terms of their technical or aesthetic qualities’, and that ‘the photographer must simply provide a representation sufficiently faithful and precise to allow recognition’. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Peasant and Photography’, Ethnography 5, no.4 (2004), 601–615, at 605. 30 Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2012), 7. I think here also of what Zeynep Gürsel terms ‘the possibility of visual history’. Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, ‘A Picture of Health: The Search for a Genre to Visualize Care in Late Ottoman Istanbul’, Grey Room 72, no.6 (2018), 36–67, at 37. 31 Not ‘wholly distinct’, photographs ‘signify in relation to one another’. Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 11. 32 Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea 57. 33 John Berger tells us that ‘ingenuity uses whatever little there is at hand, to preserve experience, … to insist upon the permanent … fragile images, often carried next to the heart or placed by the side of the bed, are used to refer to that which historical time has no right to destroy.’ John Berger, Another Way of Telling (London: Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative Society, 1982), 108. 34 bell hooks, ‘In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life’, in bell hooks, Art on My Mind (New York, NY: The New Press, 1995), 54–64, at 59. 35 We might think of these materials as forming a ‘rebel archive’, to employ Kelly Lytle Hernández’s concept. Applied to Armenian history, the term is apt in many ways and yet is also potentially problematic, with ‘rebel’ referring in part to those who consciously oppose the actions of the state. It is a term, then, that cannot be deployed quite so readily when discussing a history in which the accusation of rebellion was made against an entire people, an accusation that was wielded as a weapon in their destruction. The term comes to fit better with the other part of Lytle Hernández’s proposition, that it is the archive itself that rebels; it rebels against its attempted destruction and it rebels against its banishment from the official record from public memory. See Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 36 Kim Servart Theriault, ‘Exile, Trauma, and Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother’, in Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective, ed. Michael Taylor (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 40–55. The two main canvases are The Artist and His Mother, 1926–36 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and The Artist and His

Notes

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

50

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Mother, c.1926–c.1942 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). See Michael Taylor (ed.), Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), pl.32–33. See also pl.26–31 for the studies. Peter Balakian, Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 162–163 (my italics). Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf, 1999), 182. Kim Servart Theriault extends this, writing, ‘Non-Armenians who engage with his works are also generally able to perceive its unresolved trauma.’ Kim Servart Theriault, ‘Exile, Trauma, and Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother’, 53. It seems pertinent that Gaïdz Minassian’s book The Armenian Experience takes one of Gorky’s canvasses as its cover image. Gaïdz Minassian, The Armenian experience: From Ancient Times to Independence (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2020). Peter Balakian, Vise and Shadow, 163 (my italics). Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 96. Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009). See Vartan Matiossian, The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and ‘Medz Yeghern’ (London: I.B.Tauris, 2021). Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2008). Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, xii-xiii; This is related to what Robert Melson has termed the provocation thesis. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 183–234. Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians’, in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15–41. Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘Reframing Ottoman Art Histories’, 12. See for example Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”: Pictorial Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of Armenians from 1877 to 1922’, The Armenian Review 45, nos 1–2 (1992), 53–184; Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Achieving Ever-greater Precision in Attestation and Attribution of Genocide Photographs,’ in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, Studies on the State Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor, 1912‒1922 and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory, ed. by Tessa Hofmann, Matthias Bjornlund and Vasileios Meichanetsidis (New York, NY & Athens: Aristide D. Caratzas, 2011), 389–434; Benedetta Guerzoni, Cancellare un popolo: Immagini e documenti del genocidio armeno (Milan: Mimesis editore, 2013). See for example Tessa Hofmann, Armin Wegner (Yerevan: National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia/Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum, 1996); Guerine e Associati, Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia: Immagini e testimonianze / Armin T. Wegner and the Armenians in Anatolia: Images and Testimonies (Guerine e Associati, Milan, 1996); Martin Tamcke, ‘Armin T. Wegners “Die Austriebung des armenischen Volkes in die Wüste” – Einführung zum unveröffentlichten Vortragstyposkript vom 19. März 1919 in der Urania zu Berlin’, in Orientalische Christen zwischen Repression und Migration: Beiträge zur jüngeren

200

51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64

Notes Geschichte und Gegenwartslage, ed. Martin Tamcke (Hamburg: Lit, 2001), 65–135; Martin Tamcke, ‘Die Kamera als Zeuge: Armin T. Wegners Fotografien vom Völkermord 1915/16 in Armenien’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.) Das Jahrhundert der Bilder, 1900 bis 1949 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 172–179. Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1984), 45. Armin T. Wegner, Die Austreibung des armenischen Volkes in die Wüste: Ein Lichtbildvortrag (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 88. Tigran Sarukhanyan, ‘Armin T. Wegner’s WWI Media Testimonies and the Armenian Genocide’, in Orientalische Christen und Europa: Kulturbegegnung zwischen Interferenz, Partizipation und Antizipation, ed. Martin Tamcke (Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2012), 267–279. Rebecca Jinks writes of the Western witnesses to the Armenian Genocide, notably Wegner and Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, that ‘are celebrated by the Armenian community, largely because of the value of their assumed impartiality in rebutting Turkish denial’. Rebecca Jinks, ‘Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013), 106. Armin T. Wegner, Der Weg Ohne Heimkehr (Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1919), 169–170. While consulting the orignal text I rely upon the translation that appears in Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 54. The passage also appears in Tessa Hofmann, Armin Wegner; Peter Balakian, ‘Photography, Visual Culture, and the Armenian Genocide’, in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now Remembers the Armenians? (London: Biteback, 2015). Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian state: ‘Only after successful identification (or verification) can a historical photograph be considered a document’. Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 56. On the legal front, it is particularly interesting to note Geoffrey Robertson’s use of Wegner’s words in his presentation of the ‘photographic evidence’ of the Armenian Genocide. Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, 76–78. Cornelia Brink, ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History and Memory 12, no.1 (2000), 135–136. Leshu Torchin, ‘Since We Forgot: Remembrance and Recognition of the Armenian Genocide in Virtual Archives’, in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London & New York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2007), 82–97, at 91. For a study of the relationship between the ‘genocidal imaginary’ and the ‘Holocaust imaginary’, see Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), 21. Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 53. Sybil Milton, ‘Armin T. Wegner, Polemicist for Armenian and Jewish Human Rights’, Journal of Armenian Studies 4, nos 1–2, Special Issue: Genocide and Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian Experience (1992), 165–186. See Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, 76. Wegner’s embellishments and constructions were not publicly acknowledged and he presented his show as proof and not, as Alloa suggests we should approach it,

Notes

65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82

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testimony. Emmanuel Alloa, ‘Afterimages: Belated Witnessing in the Photographs of the Armenian Catastrophe’, Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies 4, nos 1–2 (2015), 45–67. Jay Winter, War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 58. Marie-Aude Baronian, ‘Image, Displacement, Prosthesis: Reflections on Making Visual Archives of the Armenian Genocide’, Photographies 3, no.2 (2010), 205–223, at 208. Nefissa Naguib, ‘Storytelling: Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora’, Visual Anthropology 21, no.3 (2008), 231–244, at 236. Nefissa Naguib, ‘Storytelling: Armenian Family Albums in the Diaspora’, 238. For an example of such work in another context, see Andrea Noble, Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol.2 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1937). See also A. Teller, ‘Revisiting Baron’s “Lachrymose Conception”: The Meanings of Violence in Jewish History’, AJS Review 38, no.2 (2014), 431–439. For the importation of the ‘lachrymose conception’ to the study of Armenian history, see Sebouh D. Aslanian, ‘The Marble of Armenian History: Or Armenian History as World History’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 4 (2014), 129–142; Yaşar Tolga Cora, ‘Transforming Erzurum/Karin: The Social and Economic History of a MultiEthnic Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2016). Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley, CA & London: University of California Press, 1994). Yektan Türkyılmaz describes ‘a teleology of genocide which renders alternative scenarios impossible and downplays political agency, reconstructing genocide as the inevitable outcome.’ Yektan Türkyılmaz, ‘Rethinking Genocide: Violence and Victimhood in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1915’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 2011), 16. Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain, 33. Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), xii. Hrag Vartanian, ‘Fixed Point Perspective: Ottoman Studio Photography and its Contemporary Legacy’, Minerva Projects, Denver, Colorado (2017). Available online: https://minervaprojects.org/portfolio/hrag-vartanian-4/ (accessed 20 March 2022). Michael Ignatieff ’s words on the Jews of Vienna seem particularly apposite here: ‘In no field of historical study does one wish more fervently that historians could write history blind to the future.’ Quoted in Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 16. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2020), 13. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions, 14. John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), 52 (my italics). Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven, CT & London: Yale University Press, 1985). Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997), 112. Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 6.

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83 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-visite and the bourgeois imagination’, in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J.J. Long, Andrea Noble and Edward Welch (Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 80–97. 84 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, 111. 85 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life’, 92. 86 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen (London: Armenian Institute, 2019), 20. 87 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 6, xxv. 88 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, 50–58. 89 Engin Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1923, 138–139. 90 Badr el-Hage, L’Orient des Photographes Arméniens (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe/ Cercle d’Art, 2007), 42–43. 91 Issam Nassar, ‘Early Local Photography in Jerusalem’, 322. 92 Dickinson Jenkins Miller, ‘The Craftsman’s Art’. 93 Badr el-Hage, L’Orient des Photographes Arméniens, 42–43. 94 Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars (London: Hurst & Company, 2006), 89. 95 Vahé Oshagan, ‘Modern Armenian Literature and Intellectual History from 1700 to 1915’, in Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times vol.II, Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 139–174, at 142. 96 Badr El-Hage, ‘The Armenian Pioneers of Middle Eastern Photography’, Jerusalem Quarterly 31 (2007), 22–26, at 26. 97 Mohsen Yammine, ‘A Life-long Passion for Images: The Photographic Heritage of North Lebanon’, in Clémence Cottard Hachem and Nour Salamé (eds), On Photography in Lebanon: Stories & Essays (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018), 173–175. 98 I owe a debt here to Ruth Thomasian. The Armenian need for photographs has been a theme of her archival work since 1975 when she founded Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA, and it has been a theme also of our conversations together during my time spent at the archives. 99 Marcus Aurelius Root, The Camera and the Pencil; or the Heliographic Art (Philadelphia, PA: M.A. Root, J.B. Lippincott; New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1864), 413–414. 100 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands: Armenians in America, 1890 to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 40. 101 Sebouh Aslanian, ‘Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State: Armenian Merchants, the English East India Company, and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748– 1752’, Diaspora 13, no.1 (2004), 37–100. 102 Notably, Christopher Pinney has explored Indian photographic practice involving techniques of painting and collage. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997). 103 Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe. 104 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 41. 105 Christopher Pinney, ‘What’s Photography Got to Do with It?’, in Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation, ed. Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 33–52, at 42. 106 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Peasant and Photography’, 606.

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107 Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago, IL & London, University of Chicago Press, 2012), 14 108 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 24. 109 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, 510. 110 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol.2, 40. 111 Stephan H. Astourian, ‘Afterword: Shapes, Legitimation, and Legacies of Violence in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey’, in Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State, ed. Stephan Astourian and Raymond Kévorkian (New York, NY & Oxford: Berghahn, 2020), 525–567. 112 According to Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘[f]or the Hamidian regime, indeed for much of Ottoman history before and after the 1890s, the use of state violence and the deployment of military force, whether regular or irregular, was part of the governing regime. Occasionally the normal, everyday violence used to keep order, obtain revenues, fight crime or rebellion metastasized into much more systematic massacre and deportations.’ Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘The Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1897: Disinterring a Buried History’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018), 125–134, at 126. 113 Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’, in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 251–261, at 254–257. 114 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 20. 115 In the Ottoman context, this is best outlined by Mary Roberts as she writes of portraits of the Ottoman sultan made by the Abdullah Frères, and how, once they left the studio, they were essentially at large in the world, freed from their originally intended narratives and open to reconfiguration, consumers now ‘at liberty to weave all sorts of alternative narratives’ from them. Mary Roberts, ‘The Limits of Circumscription’, 67. 116 Oliver Wendell Holmes writes of the ‘incidental truths’ with which we might find for ourselves the ‘true center’ of a photograph. In a painting, ‘you can find nothing which the artist has not seen before you; but in a perfect photograph there will be as many beauties lurking, unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and meadows.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’. 117 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, 197. In this approach we hear an echo of Benjamin, for whom photographs registered as the means by which the past achieves an active presence that might be communed with by us. Perhaps we need only remember his evocative description of the New Haven fishwife, ‘the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real’.

Chapter 3 1 Sir Robert Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East: Personal Memories, 1879–1929 (London: Hutchinson & Co. 1933), 112–114. 2 Charles Issawi, ‘The Tabriz-Trabzon Trade, 1830–1900: Rise and Decline of a Route’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no.1 (1970), 18–27. 3 Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in NineteenthCentury Anatolia’, Middle East Studies 34, no. 4 (1998), 1–32. 4 Sir Robert Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East, 115.

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5 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), vol.2, 209. 6 Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Santa Barbara, CA & Oxford: Praeger Security International, 2009), 202–203. 7 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 210. 8 Yaşar Tolga Cora, ‘Transforming Erzurum/Karin’, 63. 9 A-Do, Vani, Bitlisi yev Erzrumi Vilayetnere: usumnasirutean mi pordz ayd yerkri ashkharhagrakan, vichakagrakan, irawakan ew tntesakan drutean (Yerevan: Tparan Kultura, 1912), 161. 10 Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society’, Poetics Today 14, no.3 (1993), 507–538. 11 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin): Its Armenian History and Traditions, trans. Nigol Schahgaldian (USA: The Garin Compatriotic Union of the United States, 1975). 12 Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society (London: Gordon Fraser, 1980), 61. 13 As Edhem Eldem has shown, specific named volumes, ‘too meaningful to be dismissed as an accidental contribution of the photographer’, are at times deployed to make explicit statements about sitters’ identities, but such instances are relatively rare. Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 38. 14 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 23. 15 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 16. 16 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 11. 17 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘Two Figures on a Bench, in a Park, Tiflis, 1914’, Jadaliyya, 20 September 2015. Available online: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32483/TwoFigures-on-a-Bench,-in-a-Park,-Tiflis,-1914#.Vf8X80UjsKk.wordpress (accessed 26 January 2022). Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213. 18 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213. 19 Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in NineteenthCentury Anatolia’, 3. 20 Owen Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 97–123, at 100. 21 Amherst College Special Collections, Royal M. Cole, ‘Interior Turkey Reminiscences: Forty Years in Kourdistan (Armenia)’, manuscript, 1910. Available online: https:// acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:20523 (accessed 20 March 2022). 22 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 200–201. 23 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 200–201. 24 Johann Strauss, ‘Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire’, in Imperial Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean: Recording the Imprint of Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Rule, ed. Rhoads Murphey (London: Routledge, 2016), 115–142. 25 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, The State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 71. 26 Barbara J. Merguerian, ‘The American Response to the 1895 Massacre’, Journal of Armenian Studies 4, nos 1–2, Special Issue: Genocide and Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian Experience (1992), 53–83. 27 Abraham Seklemian, ‘Prison Diary of Asbarez Founding Editor Abraham Seklemian’, Asbarez, 22 April 2017. Available online: https://asbarez.com/prison-diary-of-asbarezfounding-editor-abraham-seklemian/ (accessed 26 January 2022).

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28 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom, 12. 29 Selçuk Akşin Somel, The Modernisation of Public Education in The Ottoman Empire 1839–1908: Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline (Leiden, Boston & Köln: Brill, 2001), 167. 30 Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed, 143. 31 Ottoman State Archives BOA, Y.MTV. 77/51, 12 L 1310 (12 April 1893). Translation by Zeynep Akçakaya. 32 Christopher Pinney, ‘What’s Photography Got to Do with It?’, 49. 33 Lynch writes: ‘The most pretentious edifice is the old medresseh or college, called Chifteh Minareh or the double minaret […] My illustration is from a photograph taken many years ago, before the caps of both minarets had fallen away. I was unable to obtain permission to enter the edifice, which was being used as a military store.’ H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 211, 194. 34 Pamela J. Young, ‘The Sanasarian Varzharan: Making a People into a Nation’, in Armenian Karin/Erzerum, ed. Richard G Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2003), 261–280. 35 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum (Beirut: Dbaran Mshag, 1957), 186–192. 36 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, 73–74. 37 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 109–110. 38 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 20. 39 For example, the portrait is described as a photograph in Richard G. Hovannisian (ed.), Armenian Karin/Erzerum (Mazda Publishers, Costa Mesa, 2003), 285; The oil painting is listed in the Sanasaian inventory in Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 215. 40 Jean Sagne, ‘All Kinds of Portraits: The Photographers’ Studio’, in Michel Frizot (ed.), A New History of Photography (Cologne: Könemann, 1998), 103–129. 41 Geoffrey Batchen, Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination (Sydney: Power Publications; Prague: Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (AMU Press), 2018), 157. 42 The problems in composition might possibly be related to the fact that in Erzurum Lynch had parted company with Ernest Wesson, his travelling companion who had ‘rendered the most valuable assistance in the photographic work’. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.1, vii; vol.2, 199. 43 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, School Photos in Liquid Time, 26–27. 44 Virginia-Lee Webb, ‘Missionary Photographers in the Pacific Islands: Divine Light’, History of Photography 21, no.1 (1997), 12–22. 45 Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894: Mountains, Missionaries and Massacres at the End of the Ottoman Empire’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2015), 208. 46 Pamela J Young, ‘The Sanasarian Varzharan’, 269. 47 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 160–161. 48 Garabet K. Moumdjian, Struggling for a Constitutional Regime: Armenian–Young Turk Relations in the Era of Abdulhamid II, 1895–1909, 24–25. Available online: https:// escholarship.org/uc/item/2nq695jw (accessed 25 January 2022). 49 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘A Responsibility to Protest? The Public, the Powers and the Armenians in the Era of Abdülhamit II’, 265; Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 160–162. 50 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 219.

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51 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 51–57; For events in Sasun, see Owen Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’. 52 Edip Gölbaşı, ‘The Official Conceptualization of the anti-Armenian Riots of 1895– 1897’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 33–62. 53 Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities: A Reign of Terror (Philadelphia, PA: Edgewood Publishing Company, 1896), 412. 54 Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876– 1914’, in Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times vol.II, Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2004), 203–238, at 222–223; On the movement of perpetrators from massacre to massacre, Edwin Munsell Bliss writes: ‘Heroes from the Trebizond massacre, from the pillaging at Baiburt, from Erzingan and Kemakh, and from other places had come to Erzrum as the most likely place for another similar game.’ Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, 416. 55 Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, 420. 56 Gia Aivazian, ‘The W.L. Sachtleben Papers on Erzerum in the 1890s’, in Armenian Karin/Erzerum, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda, 2003), 223– 260; David V. Herlihy, The Lost Cyclist (Boston & New York: Mariner Books, 2011). 57 The Times, 16 November 1895, 6. 58 Ronald Grigor Suny argues that Abdülhamid’s ‘modernizing program contained within it a conservative restorationist agenda that sought order above all. His personal paranoia reflected his own and more broadly social anxieties about unregulated change, the loss of status of Muslims domestically and the empire itself internationally, and the special position within and outside Ottoman lands of a people, the Armenians, whose talents he and others recognized and resented.’ Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘The Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1897: Disinterring a Buried History’, 128. 59 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2008), 18. 60 Christopher Pinney, ‘What’s Photography Got to Do with It?’, 46 (original emphasis). 61 A photograph showing the bodies of two women at the great cemetery was later published in The Graphic with the caption, apparently supplied by Sachtleben or based on his account: ‘When the photograph was taken a woman was standing by the corpses weeping, and as our correspondent passed her, she, seeing that he was English stopped her tears for a moment and cursed him: “May your house fall on your head! You English have deceived us”.’ The Graphic, 7 December 1895, 726. Roqueferrier’s letter, meanwhile, contains an analogous report of a curse being placed by an Armenian woman on William Chambers, the missionary station chief. Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet d’Erzeroum (1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November 1895. 62 Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet d’Erzeroum (1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November 1895. My thanks to Yaşar Tolga Cora for bringing this source to my attention. The existence of prints produced in Erzurum runs counter to Gia Aivazian’s suggestion that Sachtleben sent the photographs abroad for developing. Gia Aivazian, ‘The W.L. Sachtleben Papers on Erzerum in the 1890s’, 248. 63 Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet d’Erzeroum (1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November 1895. 64 The Graphic, 7 December 1895, 725.

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65 Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004). 66 Gérard Dédéyan, ‘Un aperçu des contacts arméno-languedociens (début XIVedébut XXe siècle)’, in Exprimer le génocide des Arméniens: Connaissance, arts et engagement, ed. Patrick Ouvier, Annick Asso and Héléna Demirdjian (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016) Available online: https://doi.org/10.4000/ books.pur.46051 (accessed 22 November 2021). 67 Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 68 Quoted in David V. Herlihy, The Lost Cyclist, 273. 69 The journal was first published in French as L’Arménie and for a time in English as Armenia. Despite existing in different versions, the journal was generally referred to as L’Arménie, and so for clarity I retain this name. Where available, the quotations are from Armenia, where not, I translate from L’Arménie. 70 Tcheraz’s association with the Berlin conference was prominently signalled on the front page of each edition of L’Arménie, while Clause 61 was regularly cited both within its pages and in the illustrated lectures. 71 L’Arménie, 15 November 1889, 1. 72 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘A Responsibility to Protest? The Public, the Powers and the Armenians in the Era of Abdülhamit II’. 73 Armenia, 1 August 1895, 1. For Dillon’s reporting from the Ottoman Empire see E.J. Dillon, ‘The Condition of Armenia’ The Contemporary Review 68 (1895), 153–189; and Owen Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’. 74 Viscount R. Des Coursons, The Armenian Rebellion: Its Origin and Its Object (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1896), 26; In response, Tcheraz stated that ‘the dead persons had been photographed, after the massacre, in the Armenian cemetery of Erzeroum, by the art correspondent of the Graphic’. Armenia, 1 July 1896, 2. 75 Susan Sontag’s writes: ‘What determines the possibility of being affected morally by photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.’ Susan Sontag, On Photography, 19. 76 Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 73–81. 77 Edhem Eldem notes that the ‘albums were basically forgotten from their entry into these libraries until their rediscovery in the 1980s’. Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 33. 78 Oded Y. Steinberg, ‘The Confirmation of the Worst Fears: James Bryce, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018), 15–39. 79 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 214–215; H. Adjarian, Catalog der armenischen Handschriften in der Bibliothek des Sanassarian-Institutes zu Erzerum (Vienna: Mkhitarean Dbaran, 1900). 80 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 215. 81 Kevork A. Sarafian, History of Education in Armenia (Laverne, CA: Press of the La Verne Leader, 1930), 233. 82 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 211. 83 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 211–212. 84 Djerdjian departed Erzurum in 1895, and it is very possible that he is one of the students to whom Lynch is referring in winter 1894 when he writes: ‘It is desired that the teachers should have passed through this school, and then have completed

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their studies in Europe. A certain portion of the funds have been set aside to meet the expenses of one or two students during their residence abroad. Two have already proceeded to St. Petersburg, and two more are about to leave for Reichenberg in Bohemia in order to study in a technical school.’ See H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 215. 85 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants (Yerevan: Antares, 2015). 86 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants 46–47. 87 We might compare this to the distance and remoteness identified in the works of photographers such as Francis Frith and Félix Bonfils, where figures are ‘psychically detached from the architecture [and] from the cameraman who has depicted them’. Julia Ballerini, The Stillness of Hajj Ishmael: Maxime Du Camp’s 1850 Photographic Encounters (New York, NY & Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2010), 139. 88 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 566. Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), between 186 and 187. 89 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 125, 572. 90 In Nadar’s memoirs, the photographer and pharmacist become parallel figures: ‘in the same way that the pharmacist manipulates chemicals and drugs in his laboratory and can either cure or poison his clients,’ he writes, ‘the photographer also manipulates substances and chemicals and can produce either a good, lively image or a bad, deadly one.’ Eduardo Cadava, ‘Introduction: Nadar’s Photographopolis’, in Félix Nadar, When I Was a Photographer (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2015), ix–lv, at xxx. 91 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants. 92 There is also reference made to a chemist by the name of Papazian. However, this is most likely simply a misspelling of the name of another chemist, Papanian. 93 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76. 94 Clémence Cottard Hachem and Nour Salamé (eds), On Photography in Lebanon: Stories & Essays (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018), 369–376. 95 Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society, 61. 96 Author’s correspondence with Taline Voskeritchian; Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskertchian: Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted September 1996, 13 October 1996. 97 Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars, 86. 98 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Tiflis: Crucible of Ethnic Politics, 1860–1905’, in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F Hamm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 249–281, at 256–258. 99 Houri Berberian, ‘Nest of Revolution: The Caucasus, Iran and Armenians’, in Russians in Iran: Diplomacy and Power in the Qajar Era and Beyond, ed. Rudi Matthee and Elena Andreeva (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 95–121. 100 Vigen Galstyan, ‘Pertch Proshyan’, http://www.lusarvest.org/practitioners/proshyanpertch/; Vigen Galstyan, ‘Grigor Isahaki Ter-Ghevondyants’, http://www.lusarvest.org/ practitioners/ter-ghevondyants-grigor/; Vigen Galstyan, ‘Hamazasp Mamikonyants’, http://www.lusarvest.org/practitioners/mamikonyants-hamazasp/ (accessed 17 August 2020). 101 Author’s correspondence with Taline Voskeritchian; Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskertchian: Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted September 1996, 13 October 1996;

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102 Ali Behdad, ‘On Vernacular Portrait Photography in Iran’, in Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, ed. Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis (Gottingen: Steidl/Walther Collection, 2020), 127–133, at 133. 103 It is interesting to see how, in Saroyan’s autobiography Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who, the photograph is labelled in contradictory fashion as being the product of both Erzurum and Le Havre. This unrootedness perhaps says something about the migrants’ journey as a succession of transitory spaces, each significant only as a stop along the way to the ultimate destination. William Saroyan, Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who (London: Peter Davies, 1961). 104 David Gutman, ‘Travel Documents, Mobility Control, and the Ottoman State in an Age of Global Migration, 1880–1915’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 3, no.2 (2016), 347–368. David Gutman, ‘Agents of Mobility: Migrant Smuggling Networks, Transhemispheric Migration, and Time-Space Compression in Ottoman Anatolia, 1888–1908’, Interdisciplines 1 (2012), 48–84. 105 Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/ (accessed 30 November 2021). Ship manifest SS Caroline. 16 July 1910, Frames 32–33, Line 4, Passenger ID 101396010186. The details given for Papazian on this 1910 manifest indicate his earlier presence in Boston, 1900–01. 106 William Saroyan, Letters from 74 rue Taitbout, or Don’t Go but if You Must Say Hello to Everybody (New York, NY & Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1969), 24–25. 107 Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, Saroyan: A Biography (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1998), 172–173. 108 It seems relevant that the Papazian studio, despite having been in business since at least the 1880s, only begins to be appear in the Annuaire Oriental from 1900. Seemingly coinciding with Movses’s departure, the listing suggests itself to be Alexandre’s doing, one of the changes he implemented as the new studio head. 109 I owe a debt to Hazal Özdemir and her excellent work on state photographs of departing migrants. See Hazal Özdemir, ‘Osmanlı Ermenilerinin Göçünün Fotoğrafını Çekmek: Terk-I Tâbiiyet ve Pasaport Politikaları’, Toplumsal Tarih no.304 (April 2019), 82–90. Hazal Özdemir, ‘Osmanlı Ermenilerinin Göçünün Fotoğrafını Çekmek 2: Fotoğrafçılar, Arkaplanları ve Terk-i Tâbiiyet Fotoğraflarının Standartları’, Toplumsal Tarih no.310 (October 2019), 48–59. 110 Zeynep Gürsel, ‘Portraits of Unbelonging’ (manuscript forthcoming). Some of the work has been presented in public lectures and a podcast. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRmV6fj9KXA and https://www. ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/gursel.html (accessed 29 November 2021).

Chapter 4 1 Stuart Hall refers to ‘that moment of “waiting” just before you step off the end of the earth […] A liminal movement, caught between two worlds, hesitating on the brink.’ Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’, 254. 2 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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3 Robert H. Hewsen, Armenia: A Historical Atlas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 183, 197. 4 Vahan Totovents, Scenes from an Armenian Childhood, trans. Mischa Kudian (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 62. 5 Vahan Totovents, Scenes from an Armenian Childhood, 63. 6 Zeynep Kezer, ‘An Unraveling Landscape: Harput and Mezre during Turkey’s Transition from Empire to Republic’, in Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities: New Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek and Fiona Greenland (London: Routledge, 2020), 183–198. 7 Ali Sipahi, ‘Suburbanization and Urban Duality in the Harput Area’, in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities and Politics, ed. Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian and Ali Sipahi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 247–267. 8 Robert H. Hewsen, ‘Golden Plain: The Historical Geography of Tsopk/Kharpert’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002), 35–51. 9 Zeynep Kezer, ‘An Unraveling Landscape’. 10 David Gutman, ‘Agents of Mobility’. 11 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde (New York, NY: Kharpert Armenian Patriotic Union, 1959), 673. 12 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673. 13 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673–674. 14 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 1997), 112–120. 15 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673–674. 16 Dickinson Jenkins Miller dates the opening of the first Harpert studio to the 1880s. See Dickinson Jenkins Miller, ‘The Craftsman’s Art’, 33. The late 1870s would also seem plausible. ‘1874’ appears on the later studio stamps of A. & H. Soursourian, and A.D. Krikorian and E.L. Taylor suggest this to be the year in which the first Soursourian studio was established in Harput. See Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Finding a Photograph for a Caption: Dr. Ruth A. Parmelee’s Comments on some Euphrates (Yeprad) College Professors and their Fate during the Armenian Genocide’, Armenian News Network/Groong, 27 June 2011. Available online: http:// groong.com/orig/ak-20110627.html (accessed 4 July 2013). However, I would suggest that 1874 is more likely to be the year in which the Soursourian family began their photographic work in Tiflis. 17 Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Finding a Photograph for a Caption’. 18 Michael Pifer, ‘The Diasporic Crane: Discursive Migration across the ArmenianTurkish Divide’, Diaspora 18, no.3 (2009), 229–252. 19 I rely here upon Vazken Davidian’s translation. Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople: Late Nineteenth-Century Representations of Migrant Workers from Ottoman Armenia’ (PhD diss., Birkbeck College, University of London, 2019), 113. 20 Frank Andrews Stone, ‘The Heritage of Euphrates (Armenia) College’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2002), 209–238. 21 Frank Andrews Stone, ‘The Heritage of Euphrates (Armenia) College’, 209–210. 22 Ali Sipahi, ‘Narrative Construction in the 1895 Massacres in Harput: The Coming and Disappearance of the Kurds’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 63–95, at 67.

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23 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 36–44. 24 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 36–48. 25 Hagop Martin Deranian, Worcester is America: The Story of Worcester’s Armenians (Worcester, MA: Bennate, 1998), 13. 26 Boghos Jafarian, Farewell Kharpert: Autobiography of Boghos Jafarian (Claire Mangasarian, 1989), 47–49. Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 80–81. 27 Ottoman State Archives BOA, DH.MKT. 1495/27, 06 B 1305 B 06 (1889). Translation by Yaşar Tolga Cora. It should be noted that this document detailing the raid on the Soursourian home is among several cited in footnotes by Esra Akcan to support the assertion that ‘numerous photographs, probably those favored in Orientalist markets, were collected and banned because of their perceived suggestive/erotic content’. It is an erroneous claim in the context, and it presents further evidence of the flattening of the history of Ottoman photography. The misreading of the document seems to stem from the extension of a conventional understanding of photography in the capital (with its hoary tropes of the sort of mischief Armenian photographers were involved in) to the provinces (on the assumption that the same applies there). Esra Akcan, ‘Off the Frame’, 96, 112 f18. 28 Stephan H. Astourian, ‘The Silence of the Land: Agrarian Relations, Ethnicity, and Power’, 65. 29 Frank Andrews Stone, ‘The Heritage of Euphrates (Armenia) College’, 210. 30 Berin Golonu, ‘Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization: Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Landscape Imagery, 1876–1939’ (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2017), 43–45. 31 Author’s correspondence with Nevdon Jamgochian and Earl Jamgochian; Joan George, Merchants in Exile: the Armenians in Manchester, England, 1835–1935 (Princeton, NJ & London: Gomidas Institute, 2002), 71–72. 32 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 41. 33 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 41. 34 Barbara J Merguerian, ‘Kharpert: The View from the United States Consulate’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda, 2002), 273–325, at 281. 35 Frank Andrews Stone, ‘The Heritage of Euphrates (Armenia) College’. 36 Mesut Uyar & Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans, 203. 37 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 389–390; Krikor Beledian, ‘From Image to Loss: The Writers of Kharpert and Provincial Literature’, in Armenian Tsopk/ Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002), 239–272, at 245–246. 38 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz (Boston, MA: Union of Alumni of Tlgadintsi, 1927), 16–19. 39 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 71–91, 562–576. 40 Quoted in Marc Nichanian, ‘Vahan Totovents: Simulacrum and Faith Lent’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002), 419–451, at 429. 41 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 261–268. 42 S. Peter Cowe, ‘T’lgadints’i as Ideologue of the Regional Movement in Armenian Literature’, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 12 (2003), 31–42, at 40. 43 Isabel Kaprielian, ‘Migratory Caravans: Armenian Sojourners in Canada’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 6, no.2 (1987), 20–38, at 29.

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44 Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death: The Memoirs of Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian (London: Taderon Press, 2003), 256. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–81. 46 Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire, 112–120. 47 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig: The Origin, History, and Destruction of an Armenian Town, trans. Hagop Martin Deranian (Belmont: Armenian Heritage Press, NAASR, 1994), 160. 48 Houda Kassatly, ‘Photography and Emigration: A Tenuous Thread’, in On Photography in Lebanon: Stories & Essays, ed. Clémence Cottard Hachem and Nour Salamé (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018), 152–163. 49 Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images and American History (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2007), 52. See also Deirdre McKay, ‘Ghosts of Futures Present: Photographs in the Filipino Migrant Archive’, Visual Anthropology 21, no.4 (July 2008): 381–392. 50 Varteres Mikael Garougian, Destiny of the Dzidzernag – Autobiography of Varteres Mikael Garougian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2005), 20. 51 J. Rendell Harris and Helen B. Harris, Letters from the Scenes of the Recent Massacres in Armenia (London: James Nisbet, 1897), 150–152. 52 Clarence D. Ussher, An American Physician in Turkey: a Narrative of Adventures in Peace and in War (Boston, MA & New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 10. 53 Vahe Haig, after all, does not simply refer to the bantoukhd but also the kaghtagan – a word we might translate as emigrant or refugee, suggesting a figure whose departure, compared with that of the bantoukhd, and was more permanent and more informed by the situation in Harput. Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde. 54 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Arshalyse Madenigian, ‘Recollections of a Daughter’s Early Life History, Her Family’s Escape from a Turkish Massacre, Their Immigration to and New Life in America’, 1980. 55 Ottoman State Archives BOA. HR.TH. 309/37, 17.9.1904. Translation by Yaşar Tolga Cora. 56 Hazal Özdemir, ‘Osmanlı Ermenilerinin Göçünün Fotoğrafını Çekmek 2’, 51. 57 Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/ (accessed 30 November 2021). Ship manifest SS La Lorraine. 10 September 1904 (Le Havre) 17 September 1904 (New York), Line 26. See also Mark Arslan’s Armenian Immigration Project. Available online: http://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/PublicViewDetail-ArmenianImmigrants-Main.php?submit=View&Staging=&SourcePage= Public-ViewSummary-ArmenianImmigrants-Main-ByLastNameStd-All&SelectLastN ameStd=Soursourian&argument1=LLRN-17SEP1904-3-I-0026. 58 Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/. Ship manifest SS Chicago. 19 June 1909 (Le Havre) 28 June 1909 (New York), Frames 22–23, Line 19, Passenger ID 101628110403. See also Mark Arslan’s Armenian Immigration Project. Available online: http://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/Public-ViewDetailArmenianImmigrants-Main.php?submit=View&Staging=&SourcePage=PublicViewSummary-ArmenianImmigrants-Main-ByLastNameStd-All&SelectLastNameStd =Soursourian&argument1=CHGO-28JUN1909-3-7-0019. 59 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photographic Uncertainties: Between Evidence and Reassurance’, History and Anthropology 25, no.2 (2014), 171–188, at 174. 60 See for example Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories; Anthony W. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town

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(Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sigrid Lien, Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian–American Migration (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 61 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 48–51. 62 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2128. 63 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2130. 64 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673. 65 Issam Nassar, ‘Early Local photography in Jerusalem’, 324. 66 Badr al-Hajj, ‘Khalil Raad – Jerusalem Photographer’, Jerusalem Quarterly, no.12–11 (2001), 34–39. 67 Author’s correspondence with John Soursourian. As an example of A. & H. Soursourian being referred to as brothers, see Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress: The Genocide Remembered (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute, 1988), 53. 68 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2128, 2130. 69 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Talanian_Ann_2/96. 70 Carol Mavor, Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D.W. Winnicott (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2007), 373–383. 71 John Berger and John Mohr, A Seventh Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 16. 72 John Berger and John Mohr, A Seventh Man, 16. 73 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 104–109. 74 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, 30. 75 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 76 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 153. 77 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 47. 78 Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 101. 79 The ‘one-way vision’ relates to the colonial desire to see without being seen. See James R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 144. 80 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 47. 81 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 108–109. 82 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 153. 83 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Bethany_V_11-96. 84 My thanks to Zeynep Gürsel for instigating this line of thought. 85 The date of 15 October 1907 is inscribed on a print of the image found in the (as yet uncatalogued) K.S. Melikian collection, Library of Congress. 86 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 3. 87 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 71. 88 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 63–65. 89 Audrey Linkman, Photography and Death (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 17–19. 90 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673–674. 91 These followed the same pattern established by the Armenian homeland associations of Constantinople. See Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Institutionalized Migrant Solidarity in the Late Ottoman Empire: Armenian Homeland Associations (1800s–1920s)’, New Perspectives on Turkey 63 (2020), 55–79.

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92 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53; Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 66. Deranian also includes a group portrait of the Armenian National School Library Committee of Hussenig, including Askanaz and Haroutiun Soursourian: Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 69. 93 See map by B. Goulkhasian and Garo Partoian, trans. Phillip Ketchian and redrawn by Charles Sarkisian, in Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, np. 94 Berin Golonu, ‘Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization’, 43–45. 95 Nazan Maksudyan, ‘Visual Representations of Protestant Missionary Achievement in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Discourse of Civility and Before-and-After Photographs’, in Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-State: Anatolia and its Neighbouring Regions, ed. Leyla Keough (Istanbul: Sabancı University, 2011), 57–60. Nazan Maksudyan, ‘Physical Expressions of Winning Hearts and Minds: Body Politics of the American Missionaries in ‘Asiatic Turkey”’, in Christian Missions and Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850–1950, ed. Inger Marie Okkenhaug and Karène Sanchez Summerer (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 62–89. 96 Catalogue of Euphrates College, 1911–1912 (Boston, MA: Trustees of Euphrates College, 1911), 32. 97 Boghos Jafarian, Farewell Kharpert, 48; Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 73–74. 98 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 269–281. See also S. Peter Cowe, ‘T’lgadints’i as Ideologue of the Regional Movement in Armenian Literature’, 35. 99 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 392–393. 100 According to Peniamin Noorigian, for example, Tlgadintsi could be strict but his students knew that this was the constructive ‘strictness of a father’. Peniamin Noorigian, ‘Tlgadintsi ir Ashagerdnerun hed’, in Arti Hay Kraganutiun: Irabashd Shrchan, 1885–1900, ed. Moushegh Ishkhan (Beirut: Hamaskaïne, 1974), 140–141. 101 John Berger, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 56–57.

Chapter 5 1 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 113. 2 Dzovinar Derderian, ‘Mapping the Fatherland: Artzvi Vaspurakan’s Reforms through the Memory of the Past’ in Ottoman Armenians: Life, Culture, Society, vol.1, ed. Vahé Tachjian (Berlin: Houshamadyan, 2014), 144–169. 3 Vasbouragan: Van-Vasbouragan Abrilean Herosamardi Dasnehinkeagin artiv 1915– 1930 (Venice: St Lazzaro Mkhitarian Dparan, 1930), 250. Anahide Ter Minassian, ‘Van 1915’, in Armenian Van/Vaspurakan, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000), 203–244, at 223. 4 Rubina Peroomian, ‘The Heritage of Van Provincial Literature’, in Armenian Van/Vaspurakan, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda, 2000), 133–152. 5 Quoted in Rubina Peroomian, ‘The Heritage of Van Provincial Literature’, 137. To keep language uniform I have taken the liberty of altering the transliteration, rendering Վանտոսպ as ‘Van-Dosb’ rather than ‘Van-Tosp’ as Peroomian does.

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6 Owen Robert Miller, ‘“Back to the Homeland” (Tebi Yergir): Or, how Peasants became Revolutionaries in Muş’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4, no.2 (2017), 287–308. 7 Dzovinar Derderian, ‘Mapping the Fatherland’, 148. 8 Vahé Oshagan, ‘Modern Armenian Literature and Intellectual History from 1700 to 1915’, 171. 9 Sasuntsi Tavit (David of Sasun) is one of the work’s central characters, a warrior who gives his name to one of the four acts, also subsequently adopted as a collective name for the whole epic cycle. 10 Leon Surmelian, Daredevils of Sassoun: The Armenian National Epic (Denver, CO: Alan Swallow, 1964), 17. 11 Yervant Der Mgrdichian, Kantser Vasbouragani (Dbaran ‘Paykar’ Oraterti, 1966), 368–369. 12 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere (Boston: Hairenik Dbaran, 1950), 223–224. 13 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1963), 90–95. 14 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople’, 132. See also Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire: Rayahs and Revolutionaries’, in The Armenian Image in History and Literature, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1981), 155–169. 15 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 224–225. 16 Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 102. 17 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 224–225. 18 Akaby Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question 1915–1923 (London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984), 8–9. 19 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 28–29. 20 Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 49. 21 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 151–153. 22 Ernest Chantre, Mission scientifique de Mr Ernest Chantre, sous-directeur du Museum de Lyon, dans la Haute Mésopotamie, le Kurdistan et le Caucase (1881). Available online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8451574s/f1.item (accessed 25 January 2022). 23 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la Mésopotamie (Washington, DC: Université catholique d’Amérique, 1892), 234. 24 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la Mésopotamie, 189–219. 25 Daniel R. Brower, ‘Urban Revolution in the Late Russian Empire’ in The City in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 319–353. 26 Houri Berberian, ‘Nest of Revolution’. 27 Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019). 28 Vasbouragan, 250. 29 Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 250–251. 30 A major consequence of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, and the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) that brought it to a close, was the internationalization of the

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Notes Bosporus, allowing Russian ships – for the first time – passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This was another manifestation of the infringement on Ottoman sovereignty, ‘an “alien” presence in the seascape whose sight was difficult to come to terms with’. Paolo Girardelli, ‘Power or Leisure? Remarks on the Architecture of the European Summer Embassies on the Bosphorus Shore’, New Perspectives on Turkey 50 (2014), 29–58, at 53. Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead, 250–251. The island had been the subject of competing Russian and Japanese claims for most of the nineteenth century, and Russian sovereignty had only been recognized a relatively short time before by the Treaty of St Petersburg in 1875, making it part of the same era of imperial expansion that saw it occupy Ottoman lands in the wake of the Russo– Turkish war of 1877–78. Bruce Grant, ‘Empire and Savagery: The Politics of Primitivism in Late Imperial Russia’, in Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 294. Vasbouragan, 250. Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 155–161. Simon Vratzian, ‘The Armenian Revolution and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’, The Armenian Review 3, no.3 (1950), 13–31. Vlas Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s ‘Sakhalin’, trans. Andrew A. Gentes (London & New York, NY: Anthem Press, 2011), 115, 209–210. Vasbouragan, 250. Anton Chekhov, A Journey to Sakhalin, trans. Brian Reeve (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner Publishing, 1993), 338. Anton Chekhov, A Journey to Sakhalin, 342. Quoted in Michael C. Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 156. Vasbouragan, 250. Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, trans. Dickran and Haig Tahta and Hasmik Ghazarian (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2007), 49. Anahide Ter Minassian, ‘The City of Van at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Armenian Van/Vaspurakan, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000). Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI & Oxford: Berghahn, 1995), 131–138. Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 155. P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la Mésopotamie, between 186 and 187. Annuaire oriental du commerce (1906), 1745. Oksen Teghtsoonian, From Van to Toronto: A Life in Two Worlds (New York, NY & Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2003), 21. Oksen Teghtsoonian, From Van to Toronto: A Life in Two Worlds, 21. Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior: Clothing and Photographic SelfPortraits of Armenian fedayis in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century’, in Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives, ed. Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann (Würzburg: Ergon, 2012), 117–148, at 117.

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52 Vasbouragan, 250. 53 Donald Bloxham, ‘Terrorism and Imperial Decline: The Ottoman Armenian Case’, European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 14, no.3 (2007), 301–324. 54 Martina Baleva, ‘Revolution in the Darkroom: Nineteenth-Century Portrait Photography as a Visual Discourse of Authenticity in Historiography’, Hungarian Historical Review 3, no.2 (2014), 363–390. 55 Martina Baleva, ‘The Heroic Lens: Portrait Photography of Ottoman Insurgents in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans—Types and Uses’, in The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Staci Scheiwiller and Markus Ritter (Berlin, Munich & Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), 213–233. 56 Martina Baleva, ‘Revolution in the Darkroom’. 57 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 13. If the camera plays a role in Armenian lives as the ‘liberatory tool of […] self-representation’ that it was for African Americans, as described by Leigh Raiford, then it is here in these revolutionary images. Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 15. 58 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 169. 59 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 163–164. 60 V. Valatian, ‘Sarkis Gougouniani Arshavanke’, Hairenik Amsakir / Hairenik Monthly 35, no.9 (1957), 1–9, at 3. 61 Raffi, Jalaleddin, trans. Donald Abcarian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2021); Agop J. Hacikyan, Gabriel Basmajian, Edward S. Franchuk and Nourhan Ouzounian, The Heritage of Armenian Literature, vol.III: From the Eighteenth Century to Modern Times (Detroit, MA: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 94. 62 Raffi, The Fool, trans. Donald Abcarian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2021); Vahé Oshagan, ‘Modern Armenian Literature and Intellectual History from 1700 to 1915’, 164. 63 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, trans. Ara Sarafian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2017), 227. Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 267. 64 Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior’. 65 Scenes in front of the camera recall those on the barricades of the Paris commune, places as much of festival and frivolity as fortifications according to Jeannene Przyblyski, where ordinary people ‘explicitly laid claim to the theatricality that is intrinsic to photographic reality’; ‘awakened to the expressive potential of their own bodies, [they] acted as if they might define themselves by playing wilfully and casually, almost thoughtlessly, to the camera’. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘Revolution at a Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871’, Yale French Studies, no.101 (2001), 54–78. 66 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 358. 67 Nanor Kebranian, ‘Imprisoned Communities: Punishing Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire’ in Ottoman Armenians: Life, Culture, Society, vol.1, ed. Vahé Tachjian (Berlin: Houshamadyan, 2014), 114–143, at 123–124. 68 Vasbouragan, 250; Hratch Dasnabedian, The History of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutiun (1890–1924), trans. Bryan Fleming and Vahe Habeshian (Milan: Oemme Edizioni,1989), 66. 69 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la Mésopotamie, 269–270. 70 I am indebted to Boris Adjemian for the initial identification of Victor Hugo.

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71 Kathrin Yacavone, ‘“Une corde de plus à l’arc de tout le monde”: l’usage de la photographie chez Balzac et Hugo’ in L’écrivain vu par la photographie: formes, usages, enjeux, ed. David Martens, Jean-Pierre Montier and Anne Reverseau (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), 51–57. 72 A print of this image held by Maison de Victor Hugo – Hauteville House can be seen at http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/fr/maison-de-victor-hugo/oeuvres/victorhugo-18 (accessed 15 November 2019). 73 Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. Andrée Mastikian, ‘Les échanges intellectuels et artistiques entre Arméniens et Français entre 1870 et 1930’, in Arménie, une passion française: le mouvement arménophile en France, 1878–1923, ed. Claire Mouradian (Paris: Magellan, Musée de Montmartre, 2007), 111–113. 74 Archag Tchobanian, ‘Hommage des Arméniens à Victor Hugo’, in Arménie, une passion française: le mouvement arménophile en France, 1878–1923, ed. Claire Mouradian (Paris: Magellan, Musée de Montmartre, 2007), 119. 75 Levon Kazanjian, Veradznunt Van-Vasbouragani: Mshagutayin Vosgetar, 1850–1950 (Boston, MA: Toumayan Yeghpark, 1950), 176–177. Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (London: Routledge, 1990), 126–127. Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 159. 76 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 159. 77 Marc Nichanian, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Reading: Taderon/Gomidas Institute, 2002), 145. 78 Simon Vratzian, ‘The Second World (Untanoor) Congress of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’, The Armenian Review 32, nos 3–127 (1979), 227–266, at 243–249. 79 Florian Riedler, ‘The City as a Stage for Violent Spectacle: The Massacres of Armenians in Istanbul in 1895–96’, in Urban Violence in the Middle East: Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State, ed. Ulrike Freitag, Nelida Fuccaro, Claudia Ghrawi and Nora Lafi (New York, NY & Oxford: Berghahn, 2015). 80 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: A History of the Armenian Genocide (London: Pimlico, 2005), 106. 81 James Bryce, ‘On Armenia and Mount Ararat’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 22, no.3 (1877–78), 169–186, at 171–172. 82 Quoted in Joan George, Merchants in Exile, 79. 83 Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries, 48; Houri Berberian, ‘Armenian Women in Turn-of-the-Century Iran: Education and Activism’, in Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, ed. Rudi Matthee and Beth Baron (Coast Meza, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2000), 70–98. 84 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 164. 85 Foreign Office FO 195/2173 49–50, National Archives, London. 86 Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘Revolution at a Standstill’. 87 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 167. 88 Quoted in Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 113 f264. Miller states that ‘provincial authorities sometimes used the Armenian issue to gain status in the eyes of Istanbul by claiming that there were many Armenian revolutionaries running about’. Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 113.

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89 Selim Deringil, ‘“The Armenian Question Is Finally Closed”’, 349–350. We find an echo of this in William Allen’s statement: ‘For court officials, too, photography was probably preferable to on-site inspection, because photographs could be made to show the Sultan what he wanted to see and could provide confirmation for notions that the ruler had already constructed in his own mind.’ William Allen, ‘Analyses of Abdul-Hamid’s Gift Albums’, 37. 90 For a relevant study, see Stephen Sheehi, ‘Glass Plates and Kodak Cameras: Arab Amateur Photography in the “Era of Film”’, in The Indigenous Lens: Early Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Staci Scheiwiller and MarkusRitter (Berlin, Munich, Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), 257–273. 91 Mentions of Papazian as image-maker constitute rare appearances in histories of the movement of the normally invisible figure of the photographer, and one can only assume that it is because the photographer in this instance was already sanctified as a fedayi. Papazian’s photography becomes an arm of his already established revolutionary heroisms. For example, he is celebrated by Chalabian for his services to the historiography of the movement: ‘If Vahan Papazian had not photographed him, we would not have a picture of him today.’ Antranig Chalabian, General Andranik and the Armenian Revolutionary Movement (Southfield, MI: A. Chalabian, 1988), 100. 92 Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior’, 122 93 Khachig Tololyan, ‘Cultural Narrative and the Motivation of the Terrorist’, Journal of Strategic Studies 10, no.4 (1987), 217–233. 94 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 313. 95 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 287. 96 Yervant Der Mgrdichian, Kantser Vasbouragani, 502. 97 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’, 163–164. 98 Onnig Avedissian, Du gamin d’Istanbul au fédai d’Ourmia: mémoires d’un révolutionnaire arménien (Paris: Thaddée, 2010), 19–20. 99 This is Martina Baleva’s judgment on the photography of ‘Bulgarian national heroes’, that it ‘did not necessarily prompt the observer to take action, but it did prompt many observers to follow suit.’ Martina Baleva, ‘The Heroic Lens’, 230. 100 Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior’, 118. 101 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 66–67. 102 John Mraz, Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments. Testimonies, Icons (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012). 103 AMAA News (Armenian Missionary Association of America) 16, no.2 (April 1981), 12. 104 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 200. That Sheehi writes of a later photograph in which an armed, bandoliered montagnard from Zgharta, Lebanon, addresses the lens, tells us that the wider imperial mode in which some Armenians participated continued to serve diverse populaces until the last days of the empire. 105 Robert Tatoyan, ‘Churches and Monasteries of Van-Dosb’, trans. Simon Beugekian, Houshamadyan. Available online: https://www.houshamadyan.org/ mapottomanempire/vilayet-of-van/kaza-of-van/religion/churches-and-monasteries-3. html (accessed 29 January 2020). 106 Levon Kazanjian, Veradznunt Van-Vasbouragani, 189–190.

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Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Yervant Der Mgrdichian, Kantser Vasbouragani, 406. Hampartzum Yeramian, Hushartzan (Alexandria: Aram Bedrosian, 1929), vol.A, 434. Yervant Der Mgrdichian, Kantser Vasbouragani, 406. Hampartzum Yeramian, Hushartzan, volume A, 434. Levon Kazanjian, Veradznunt Van-Vasbouragani, 189–190. Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 49. Roderic H. Davison, Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1774–1923: The Impact of the West (London: Saqi Books, 1990), 156. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, 67–69. Edhem Eldem, ‘Powerful Images: The Dissemination and Impact of Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1870–1914’, in Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840–1914, ed. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Publications, 2015), 106–153, at 148–149. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–1911 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000). Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2011), 53. Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 74–81. Return became a powerful symbol of reconciliation and new beginnings in the empire. Patriarch Madteos II Izmirlian provides a notable example. Soon after the revolution he returned to Constantinople from Jerusalem, a city to which he had been banished by Abdülhamid in 1896 for protesting against the massacres of that time. Izmirlian returned bearing a wreath given to him by the Jerusalem branch of the CUP, and after a ceremonial procession to the cemetery at Şişli he laid it in memory of the Armenian victims of the massacres. Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 32–35. These events were broadcast further afield by way of the illustrated press, see David Low, ‘The Returning Hero and The Exiled Villain: The Image of the Armenian in Ottoman Society, 1908–1916’, International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies 3, no.1 (2016), 53–71. Oksen Teghtsoonian, From Van to Toronto: A Life in Two Worlds. Harach, no.24 (6 March 1914). Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 93. Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 36. Sami Toubia, Sarrafian Liban 1900–1930 (Mansourieh: Editions Aleph, 2008), 14. For the Stapletons, see Gretchen Rasch, The Storm of Life: A Missionary Marriage from Armenia to Appalachia (London: Gomidas Institute, 2016). Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/ (accessed 30 November 2021). Ship manifest SS Caroline. 16 July 1910, Frames 32–33, Line 4, Passenger ID 101396010186. David Gutman, ‘Armenian Migration to North America, State Power, and Local Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no.1 (2014), 176–190. Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/ (accessed 30 November 2021). Ship manifest SS Chicago. 17 October 1908 (Le Havre)–26 October 1908 (New York), Frames 352–353, Line 6, Passenger ID 101848080143. See also Mark

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23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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Arslan’s Armenian Immigration Project, http://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/ Public-ViewDetail-ArmenianImmigrants-Main.php?submit=View&Staging=&Source Page=Public-ViewSummary-ArmenianImmigrants-Main-ByLastNameStd-All&Select LastNameStd=Tutunjian&argument1=CHGO-26OCT1908-3-4-0006. Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/. Ship manifest SS Chicago. 17 October 1908 (Le Havre)–26 October 1908 (New York), Frames 352–353, Line 16, Passenger ID 101848080143. See also Mark Arslan’s Armenian Immigration Project, http://markarslan.org/ArmenianImmigrants/Public-ViewDetailArmenianImmigrants-Main.php?submit=View&Staging=&SourcePage=PublicViewSummary-ArmenianImmigrants-Main-ByLastNameStd-All&SelectLastNameStd =Tutunjian&argument1=CHGO-26OCT1908-3-4-0006. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, 73–83. This was evident during Mehmed’s 1911 tour of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The ‘Unity of the Elements’ was a central theme of the trip, with demonstrations of inter-ethnic solidarity staged in the most diverse and mixed areas of the empire, and subsequently broadcast further afield through photographs published in the illustrated press. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, 84–94. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 78. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 71. Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 52–57, 292. Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 39. Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky, 47–54. Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky, 39. Annuaire oriental du commerce (1912), 1955. Little is known of about these figures, with the (slight) exception of Karekin Khandjian. See Vigen Galstyan, ‘Garegin Khanjian’. Available online: http://www.lusarvest.org/practitioners/khanjian-garegin (accessed 29 January 2020). Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel: A Life of Arshile Gorky (London: Pimlico, 2001), 50. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Tashjian_Anahid_4–80. Peter Balakian, Vise and Shadow, 164. These ages assume 1911 as the date of the photograph. Biographies provided to the author by Parker Field of the Arshile Gorky Foundation. See also Michael Taylor (ed.), Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2009), 354–69; We tend to find the matter of these absences, if addressed at all, briefly dispensed with, such as with Nouritza Matossian’s statement ‘Shushan took her son to a local photographer, not bothering to include his sisters.’ Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel, 50. Matthew Spender, From a High Place, 28. Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel, 50. Hayden Herrera, Arshile Gorky, 54. Robert Tatoyan, ‘Churches and Monasteries of Van-Dosb’. Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, 69; See also Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution, 170–176. Hans-Lukas Kieser, ‘The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity – and Their (Mis) reading of the Reform Plan’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, no.4 (2013). Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 73; Mark Levene, ‘Creating a Modern “Zone of Genocide”: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12, no.3 (1998), 393–433.

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43 Grigoris Balakian, Hay Koghkotan: Trovakner Hay Mardirosakrutenen, Berlinen tebi Zor, 1914–1920 (Vienna: Mkhitarian Dparan, 1922), 57–58. 44 The Daily Graphic, 12 January 1915, 1. 45 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 75–76. 46 Aspirations et agissements revolutionnaires des comites armeniens avant et apres la proclamation de la constitution ottoman (Constantinople: n.p., 1917). Ermeni Âmâl ve Harekât-ı İhtilâliyyesi Tesâvir ve Vesâik, two volumes [1916] (Ankara: Ankara Matbaacılar Ciltçiler ve Sanatkarlar Odası Eğitim ve Kültür Yayınları, n.d.). 47 Photographs became particularly useful following the Entente declaration of May 1915 that the perpetrators of the massacres would be held to account, and warnings made by Germany, fearful of giving the neutral United States cause to join the Entente, that its Ottoman partner needed to do a better ‘presentational’ job to legitimize its acts. Fuat Dündar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1978–1918) (New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers, 2010), 123–127. British historian Arnold Toynbee’s dismissive response upon seeing ‘what they call an album’ in spring 1916, while engaged in compiling documents for the British parliamentary ‘blue book’ on the unfolding genocide, seems typical of the international response. Arnold Toynbee to William Walter Rockwell, 8 June 1916, Foreign Office 96/205 381–382, National Archives, London. 48 Grigoris Balakian, Hay Koghkotan, 57–58. 49 Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914–1919, trans. Ara Stepan Melkonian (London: Garod Books, 2009), 286. 50 Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity Propaganda and the Nationalization of the Masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912–13)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no.4 (2014); Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, ‘“Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!” “Awakening A Nation” through Propaganda in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913)’, in World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Ötkem and Maurius Reinkowski (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 77–102. 51 Jay Winter, ‘Under Cover of War: the Armenian Genocide in the Context of Total War’, in America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 37–51, at 42. 52 Dikran Kaligian, ‘Anatomy of Denial: Manipulating Sources and Manufacturing a Rebellion’, Genocide Studies International 8, no.2 (2014), 208–223. 53 According to Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘It is difficult to imagine a “shared history” that does not take into consideration the great inequality of agency that existed. A shared history does indeed exist, but it is not a history of equals between the Ottoman imperial state and its Armenian subjects.’ Quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, 378 f18. 54 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 83. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 290. 55 James L. Barton, ‘Turkish Atrocities’: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917 (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 1998), 24. 56 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, 252–253. 57 Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion (Ottoman Empire/Middle East)’, in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, 2018). Available

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online: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/revolutions_and_ rebellions_van_resistance_as_rebellion_ottoman_empiremiddle_east DOI: 10.15463/ ie1418.11268 (accessed 25 January 2022). Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, 256. 58 Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion’. 59 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, 147–162. 60 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 251–254. For an account the deportees, see Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, trans. Ara Stepan Melkonian, in Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian, Teotig: The Biography (London: Gomidas Institute and Tekeyan Cultural Association, 2010), 73–229. 61 Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel, 69. Matthew Spender, From a High Place, 36. 62 Anahide Ter Minassian, ‘Van 1915’, 228. 63 Quoted in Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion’. 64 Ermeni Âmâl ve Harekât-ı İhtilâliyyesi Tesâvir ve Vesâik vol.1, 53. The original source for the photograph and text appears to have been the periodical Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly (the precise edition is not known). The photograph was also printed with the caption ‘Armenians Fighting for their Lives’ in The Literary Digest (9 October 1915). 65 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 9. 66 Sontag continues, ‘Images of dead civilians and smashed houses may serve to quicken hatred of the foe, as did the hourly reruns by Al Jazeera […] the destruction in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Incendiary as the footage was to the many who watch Al Jazeera […], it did not tell them anything about the Israeli army they were not already primed to believe.’ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 9. 67 Grigoris Balakian, Hay Koghkotan, 57–58. 68 Benedetta Guerzoni, ‘Il “nemico armeno” nell’impero ottomano: le immagini’, Storicamente 1, no.6 (2005). Available online: https://storicamente.org/guerzoni (accessed 7 September 2016). 69 Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent (New York, NY; London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 140. 70 Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, 140. 71 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, 132–134. 72 Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion’. 73 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, 128. 74 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), 593. 75 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 293. 76 Nubar Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzeroum, ff.52–55, report by Atelina Mazmanian; Annuaire oriental du commerce (1913), 1539–1541. 77 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 497. 78 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 294. 79 Nubar Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzeroum, report by Atelina Mazmanian, f.54. It should be noted that the Voskertchian family retains a different account of the fates of these men, according to notes from an interview conducted by Kevork Hintlian with Diran Voskertchian, the son of Yervand who was a oneyear-old child at the time of the massacre and one of its few survivors. Diran’s belief

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was that the men died at the same site as many other Erzurumtsis, the Kemah Gorge. See Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskeritchian: Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted September 1996, 13 October 1996. However, witness accounts clearly place the family in the first, southbound convoy. It should also be noted that, utilizing these accounts, Raymond Kévorkian refers to the deaths of ‘Dikran Oskrchian and his sons Yervant and Harutiun’; this appears to be a misreading of the original eyewitness account that lists (in admittedly confusing manner) the brothers’ names followed by the words ‘their children also’. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295; Nubar Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, report by Atelina Mazmanian, f.54. 80 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 497. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295. 81 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘Two Figures on a Bench, in a Park, Tiflis, 1914’. 82 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion, 2006), 8. 83 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213. 84 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 93. 85 A notable exception to the destruction of negatives was the Dildilian archive, the Dildilian family managing to carry away of their studio holdings when they left for Greece in 1922. Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 320–331. 86 James L. Barton, ‘Turkish Atrocities’, 24. 87 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 296–297. 88 James L. Barton, ‘Turkish Atrocities’, 24–25. 89 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 309–310; Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 86–87. 90 Anouche Kunth makes insightful comments about the Syrian desert as part of the mechanism of genocide and its appearance in photographs: ‘there are only a few rare images of these events, taken particularly in concentration camps. What is striking in comparison to the images of Nazi or Soviet camps are the frail installations: simple tents clumsily set up on the sandy soil. There is no material or permanent construction that symbolises oppression in the way that barbed wire did in the totalitarian era. Instead, the photographs give an impression of anarchy, or even amateurism, allowing doubt to be cast on the criminal’s intention: were they really seeking to commit mass murder with such poor means? The cogs of the genocidal machine are therefore unclear, unless we understand that, in part, they are here before our eyes in the infernal desert surroundings.’ Anouche Kunth, ‘Traces, Bones, Desert: The Extermination of The Armenians through the Photographer’s Eye’, Human Remains and Violence 1, no.2 (2015), 71–87, at 78. 91 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295. 92 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989). 93 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, ed. Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce, Uncensored Edition (Princeton, NJ & London: Gomidas Institute, 2005), 299; Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 385. 94 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 386. 95 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53. 96 The confusion over exact family relationships is again a hinderance – in the account published in 1916 in the British Foreign Office ‘blue book’, it is ‘brothers’ from the

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family who are said to have been arrested. James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, ed. Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Uncensored Edition, 299. 97 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387. 98 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387. 99 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53. 100 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387. James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, ed. Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Uncensored Edition, 299. 101 Ermeni Âmâl ve Harekât-ı İhtilâliyyesi Tesâvir ve Vesâik, vol.1, 43. 102 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387. 103 Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, trans. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 108. These photographers included the Dildilians of Marsovan, see Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 187–253. 104 Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman Citizen”: Life and Death in the Region of Harput-Mamüretülaziz (1908–15)’, in World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Ötkem and Maurius Reinkowski (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 210–239, at 231. 105 Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, 147. 106 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 674. 107 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53. 108 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, 79–85. 109 Moushegh Ishkhan, Arti Hay Kraganutiun: Irabashd Shrchan, 1885–1900 (Beirut: Hamaskaïne, 1974), 134. 110 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, 79. 111 For the history of Davis’s photographs, see Susan K. Blair’s introduction to Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, particularly 23–30. 112 Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, 146–147. Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman Citizen”’, 232–233. 113 Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman Citizen”’, 233. 114 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2004). 115 Ruth Rosengarten, ‘Arrested Development: Death in the Family Album’, in Wide Angle: Photography as Participatory Practice, ed. Terry Kurgan and Tracy Murinik (South Africa: Fourthwall Books). Available online: https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/5f311f75c73f5814645750d8/t/5f4e1034047eb84854e20112/1598951477263/Arr ested+development%2C+Wide+Angle%2C+2015.pdf (accessed 25 January 2022). 116 Varujan Vosganian, The Book of Whispers, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018), 111. For the role of photographs in Vosganian’s book, see Dana Bădulescu, ‘Varujan Vosganian’s Novel of Postmemory’, Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 2, no.1 (2012), 107–125. 117 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Soorsoorian_ Maritza/1993. 118 The other two photographs are individual portraits: ‘I found our family picture, also Uncle Leon’s and Brother Vertanes’s in a Turkish officer’s uniform.’ Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127. 119 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127.

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120 Brian Dillon, In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 133. 121 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127. 122 James L. Barton, The Story of Near East Relief, 1915–1930 (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1930), 220–221. 123 Vahram L. Shemmassian, ‘The Exodus of Armenian Remnants from the Interior of Turkey, 1922–1930’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002). 124 Chitjian Foundation Letter Collection, all of which has been made available publicly: https://chitjian.com/introduction-to-the-letter-collection/ (accessed 30 November 2021). 125 Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death. 126 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 88, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros and Mihran Chitjian, 14/15 March 1920. 127 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 134, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros Chitjian, [Between Jan. and 18 May 1921]. 128 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 102, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Mihran Chitjian, 5/18 April 1920. 129 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 164, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Kaspar Chitjian, 14 June 1921. 130 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 240, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros, Mihran and Kaspar Chitjian, 27 April 1922. 131 Vahram L. Shemmassian, ‘The Exodus of Armenian Remnants from the Interior of Turkey’, 394. 132 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929), 408. 133 See for instance Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, ‘Armenian Refugee Women: The Picture Brides, 1920–1930’, Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no.3 (1993), 3–29. 134 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, 48. 135 Marie-Aude Baronian, ‘Image, Displacement, Prosthesis’, 208–209. 136 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 211–244, at 218. 137 Ingrid Fernandez, ‘The Lives of Corpses: Narratives of the Image in American Memorial Photography’, Mortality 16, no.4 (2011), 343–364. 138 A photograph shows Melikian posing in his role as an apprentice in the workshop of Mezre furniture maker Nazaret Aghamalian. Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 668. He emigrated to the USA in 1907 and went into the photography business in Worcester. 139 Melikian is said to have been in contact with a photographer in Harput before the war years, although that photographer is unnamed. The photographs they sent to the USA were the means by which Melikian kept up a ‘connection with the homeland [for] as long as he could’. Mary Christine Melikian, ‘Open Letter of Thanks’, in Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Mary Christine Melikian of Worcester, Massachusetts died at the age of 89 on 22 September 2015’, Armenian News Network/ Groong, 11 October 2015, http://groong.com/orig/ak-20151011.html (accessed 2 October 2018). 140 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 123–147. For the French Légion d’Orient, see Susan Paul Pattie, Armenian Legionnaires: Sacrifice and Betrayal in World War I (London & New York: I.B.Tauris, 2018); Guévork Gotikian, ‘La Légion d’Orient et le mandat

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français en Cilicie (1916–1921)’, La Cilicie (1909–1921), special issue of Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine 3 (1999), 251–324. 141 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 146. 142 Vahan Totovents, Scenes from an Armenian Childhood, 11. 143 Marie-Aude Baronian, ‘Image, Displacement, Prosthesis’, 207. 144 Victor Gardon, Le Vanetsi: Une enfance arménienne (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2008), 31. Le Vanetsi is the collective name under which Gardon’s trilogy of works – Le vert soleil de la vie (1959), Le chevalier à l’émeraude (1961), and L’apocalypse écarlate (1970) – have been reprinted. 145 ‘Gardon’, meanwhile, began life not as a nom de plume but as a nom de guerre, being the name Vahram Gakavian’s adopted while fighting for the French resistance during the Second World War. Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. 146 Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. 147 Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. 148 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 75. 149 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’. 150 Biographies provided by Parker Field of the Arshile Gorky Foundation; See also Matthew Spender (ed.), Arshile Gorky, Goats on the Roof: A Life in Letters and Documents (London: Ridinghouse, 2009), 485–487.

Conclusion 1 Shahan Shanour, Retreat Without Song, trans. Mischa Kudian (London: Mashtots Press, 1982), 15–16. 2 Yervant Odian, Accursed Years, 106. 3 Vasbouragan, 250. 4 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 319. 5 Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 323–331. 6 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Encababian: Kay Encababian Surabian, transcript of interview conducted by Ruth Thomasian 22 November 1988. 7 Shahan Shanour, Retreat Without Song, 16. 8 Edward Said, After the Last Sky, 159. 9 Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 320–331. 10 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 227. 11 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘The Valise – a Family Memoir’, American Literary Review (2011). Available online: https://talinedv.com/2017/05/23/the-valise-a-family-memoir (accessed 28 January 2022).

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INDEX Figure numbers are in italic. Abdülaziz (Sultan) 6, 95 Abdülhamid II (Sultan) 8–10, 11, 28–30, 139, 151–2, 158 Abdülhamid Albums discourse of power 12–17 history of 8–10, 28–33, 79 in historiography 12–13, 17–19 image management 29–31, 139 Erzurum photographs 53–9, 91, 3.1, 3.3 Harput photographs 100–1, 4.5 and modernity 9–10, 12–19, 64–5, 67 school photographs 9–10, 53–9, 62–4, 71, 101, 119, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 3.1, 3.3, 4.5 Trebizond photographs 31–3 Van photographs 128 Abdullah Frères (studio) 5–6, 8, 20, 30, 45–6, 62–3, 71, 1.3, 1.4, 3.7 Abdullah, Hovsep 5 Abdullah, Kevork 5, 19–21, 45 Abdullah, Vichen 5, 20–1, 45 Adoian photograph 36–8, 41, 43, 123–4, 158–61, 182–5, 2.2 Adoian, Satenig 158–60, 184–6 Adoian, Setrag 158–60, 185 Adoian, Shushan 36, 158–61, 182–5, 2.2 Adoian, Vartoosh 158–60, 184–6 Adoian, Vostanig. See Gorky, Arshile Aghazadian, Stepan 151 Aghpiur Serop 142, 144 Akçam, Taner 25, 31 Akcan, Esra 11, 13, 19 Aikesdan 130–2, 136–7, 158–9, 164–6 Aleppo 174, 177, 188, 1.2 Ali Sami 11, 22–3 Allen, William 10, 13, 19, 32 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) educational enterprises 64–7, 99, 102, 118–20, 147, 158, 4.12

Erzurum station 56, 60–2, 155–7, 169–70, 6.3, 6.4 Harput station 99–100, 103–4, 107–8, 118–20, 4.6, 4.12 missionary photography 71–2, 118–20, 175, 4.12 Van station 128, 131, 5.3 Arabian, M. 109 Armenagans 127, 132, 138, 139 Armenia College. See Euphrates College Armenian Genocide (1915–16) effect on historiography 36–44 in Erzurum 163, 167–70 in Harput 170–2 photographs of 38–40 in Van 163–7 Aşiret Mektebi 13–16, 29–30, 1.3, 1.4 Avantz 144–6, 5.9 Avedaghayan, Hovhannes and the Adoian photograph 123–4, 159–61, 183–6, 2.2 life of 128–33, 149, 188 local photography 123–4, 136–7, 144–9, 151, 2.2, 5.1, 5.5, 5.9, 5.10, 5.12 revolutionary photography 132–4, 136, 142–3, 147–8, 164–5, 5.11 Azerumian, Annakh 115–6, 4.10 Azoulay, Ariella 30, 31, 41, 52, 74–5 Baku 46, 48, 128, 188 Balakian, Grigoris 162, 166 Balakian, Peter 36–8, 159 Baleva, Martina 133 Bantkhdoutioun. See Migration Baron, Salo 42, 50 Baronian, Marie-Aude 40–1, 178, 181 Barry, Maximilien-Étienne-Émile 127–8 Barthes, Roland 36–8, 42, 86–7, 105, 182 Bashdban Haireniats 72, 127, 141

Index Batchen, Geoffrey 11, 25, 35, 44–5, 70, 173, 177–8 Bedford, Francis 2, 5 Behdad, Ali 3, 4, 5, 18, 88 Beirut 86–7, 156, 188 Benjamin, Walter: 1, 10, 32, 35, 50, 52, 78, 96, 178 Berberian, Houri 88, 128 Berger, John 44, 112, 122 Bernstein, Michael André 42, 44 Bonfils, Félix 80 Bryson, Norman 10–11 Cacoulis, K.E. 31–5, 44, 49–50, 60, 97, 98, 2.1 Campt, Tina 35, 48 Caracache Frères (studio) 21, 188 Carte de visite portraiture 33–4, 44–5, 48–50, 56–62, 97, 133–4, 184 Çelik, Zeynep 3, 10, 11–12, 23–4 Chantre, Ernest 127–8 Chicago 9, 62, 176 Chitjian, Hampartzoum 105, 176–7 Cole, Royal M. 60–2, 3.4, 3.5 Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) 151–2, 161, 162 Constantinople as focus of histories 11–12, 24–5 as place of transit/departure 90, 128, 187–9 as site of photography 3–6, 12–13, 30, 31–2, 46, 53, 62–3 as site of protest 89, 139 Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie 6, 13, 16, 28, 1.1 Daguerre, Louis 1, 4, 34 Dansereau, J.A. (studio) 115, 4.10 Dashnaktsuthiun (Dashnaks) 127, 128, 132, 135, 136, 139, 142, 144, 159, 164 Davidian, Vazken 38 Davis, Leslie 170–1 Deranian, Azniv and Sarkis 179–80, 6.7 Deranian, Marderos 113–4, 179–80 Deringil, Selim 16, 17, 29, 142 Der Raphaelian, Haroutiun 60, 86, 168 Dickson, Bertram 140–1, 5.7 Dildilian family 23, 188–9

247

Dillon, E.J. 78 Disdéri, André 44, 56, 60, 112, 135, 160 Djerdjian, George 80–83, 86, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13 Education Armenian schools 68–70, 87, 102, 117–18, 120–22, 125–7, 131, 138, 3.8, 3.14, 4.11, 4.13 foreign schools 56, 64–7, 99–100, 102, 118–20, 158, 169, 4.12 and photography 9–10, 62–4, 69–72, 79–85, 116–22 state schools 9–10, 55, 62–4, 67, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 3.1, 3.7, 4.5 Egoyan, Atom 41 Eldem, Edhem 3, 10, 11–12, 23–4 El-Hage Badr 47, 110 Encababian Frères (studio) 188 Enver 152, 161, 162 Ersoy, Ahmet 19 Euphrates College (Armenia College) 99–100, 102, 106, 120, 170, 171, 175 Frith, Francis 2, 80 Gabrielian, A.E., (studio) 108 Gakavian, Aghavni 181–2, 5.6, 6.8 Gakavian family 137–8, 181–2, 5.6, 6.8 Gakavian, Haroutioun 137–8, 152, 182, 5.6, 6.1, 6.8 Gakavian, Vahram. See Gardon, Victor Garabedian, Yessayi 46, 110 Gardon, Victor (Vahram Gakavian) 164, 181–2, 5.6, 6.8 Garo, Armen (Karekin Pasdermadjian) 85–7, 89, 153, 162–3, 165–6, 3.16 Garougian, Varteres 107, 113 Goergizian family 146–8, 5.10 Gladstone, William 30, 139 Goms. See Papazian, Vahan Gorky, Arshile (Vostanig Adoian) 36–8, 41, 43, 158–61, 182–5, 2.2 Gougounian, Sarkis 129, 135 Gürsel, Zeynep 91 Haig, Vahe 96–7, 102, 112, 117, 171 Hamidian massacres (1894–96) 29–30, 72–9, 89, 107–8, 121, 156, 3.9, 3.10

248

Index

Hannoosh, Michèle 57, 134 Harput Kaghak 94–9, 109–10, 118–20, 170–1, 177, 4.2, 4.12 Harris, J. Rendell 107–8 Hartmann, Elke 132, 135, 143 Hekimian, Harry 62–3, 3.6 Hepworth, George 29–30 Hirsch, Marianne 43, 71 Hntchaks 127, 132 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 2, 70, 110, 116 Hugo, Victor 137–9, 152, 181 Hussenig 95, 98, 101–2, 106, 111, 113–14, 116–18, 170–1, 180, 4.2, 4.7, 4.8, 4.11, 6.7 Imperial High School (Erzurum) 53–9, 67, 69, 91, 184, 3.1, 3.3 Imperial High School (Mezre) 101, 102, 4.5 Imperial Medical School (Constantinople) 62–4, 71, 127, 151, 3.7 Ishkhan 135, 164 Jamgochian, Avedis 97–9, 101–2, 4.3 Jerusalem 2, 46, 110, 188 Joaillier, Polycarpe 9 Kargopoulo, Vassilaki 5, 20 Kayl-Vahan 144–5, 5.8 Khandjian, Karekin 159 Khisarji Kevork’s family 123–4, 160, 5.1 Khrimian, Khoren 126–7, 149, 151 Khrimian, Mgrdich 124–7, 133, 134, 139, 141, 146, 149, 151 Koobatian family 111–13, 116, 172–3, 177, 179, 4.8, 6.6 Krikorian, Garabed 110 Krikorian, Krikor 106, 4.7 Lernabar 135, 136, 147, 164 Libaridian, Gerard 141, 143 London 30, 46, 76–7, 162 Lulejian, Donabed 171 Lynch, H.F.B. 68–72, 79, 83, 124, 127, 148–9, 151, 3.8, 5.2 Maghakian, Hagop 159 Mahari, Gurgen 130–1, 135, 143, 164

Makdisi, Ussama 16, 18 Mamikonyants, Hamazasp 88 Manchester 46, 102 Medical photography 62–5 Mehmed V (Sultan) 158 Melikian, K.S. 179–80, 6.7 Melson, Robert 29, 78, 165 Memorial photography 172–4, 177–85 Mezre 94–6, 98, 101–2, 104–5, 109–10, 118, 170–1, 179 Micklewright, Nancy 11, 22–3, 24–5 Migration bantkhdoutioun phenomenon 46–8, 88–91, 96, 99–100, 102–3, 126–7 and photography 96–7, 103–18, 122, 144–6, 171–2, 176–7 Miller, Dickinson Jenkins 46, 187 Müller-Simonis, Paul 128, 131 Musa Bey 30, 77, 127 Nadar 21, 138 Naguib, Nefissa 41–2 Nassar, Issam 46, 110 National Central School (Harput) 102, 120–2, 4.13 New York 90, 94, 157 Niépce, Nicéphore 34 Nichanian, Marc 38, 40 Nochlin, Linda 3, 18 Odian, Yervant 162, 187–8 Orientalism 2–4, 12, 16–18, 114 Oshagan, Vahé 46–7 Özdemir, Hazal 108 Özendes, Engin 6, 22–3 Öztuncay, Bahattin 6, 19–21 Pabuchian, Garabed 21 Papazian, Alexandre 90–1, 116, 155–7, 163, 169–70, 3.17, 3.18, 6.3, 6.4 Papazian, Movses (M.G.) carte de visite portraiture 56–62, 133–4, 184, 3.2, 3.4 life of 60–2, 90, 137, 157, 169 local photography 56–62, 84–5, 137, 181, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 5.6, 6.8 state commissions 53–9, 67–8, 91, 184, 3.1, 3.3

Index Papazian, Vahan (Goms) 127, 142–3 Paris 6, 46, 138, 165, 188 Pasdermadjian family 85–8, 153, 3.16 Pasdermadjian, Karekin. See Garo, Armen Pasdermadjian, Khachig 86–8, 3.16 Phébus (Boghos Tarkulyan) 5, 8 Pinney, Christopher 49, 75–6 Pliny 96, 105 Portukalian, Mgrdich 126–7, 138–9, 146 Pratt, Mary Louise 5, 6 Proshyan, Pertch 88 Quataert, Donald 4, 23, 31 Raad, Khalil 110 Rabach 5, 45 Raffi (Hakob Melik-Hakobian) 134–5 Revolutionary photography 129, 132–6, 139–48, 5.4, 5.7, 5.8, 5.11 Roberts, Mary 6, 8, 22 Robertson, James 2, 3 Root, Marcus Aurelius 47–8 Roqueferrier, Fernand 76–7 Sachtleben, William 73–8, 142, 3.9, 3.10 Said, Edward 2, 3, 17, 188–9 Sakhalin 128–30 Salzmann, Auguste 2, 6 Sanasarian, Mgrdich 69–72, 79, 82–5, 119, 138, 3.8, 3.13 Sanasarian Varzharan (Erzurum) 68–72, 79–87, 121, 144, 3.8, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14 Saroyan family 89–91, 94, 116, 3.17 Saroyan, William 90, 128 Sarpach Khecho 133–4, 5.4 Sarrafian Frères (studio) 156 School photography 9–10, 62–4, 69–72, 79–85, 116–22 Sébah, Pascal 5, 6, 8, 28, 1.1 Sébah, Jean 8–9 Sébah & Joaillier (studio) 8–9, 31, 1.2 Seklemian, Abraham 66, 67, 113 Sekula, Allan 30, 38–9, 42–3 Shanour, Shahan 187–8 Shaw, Wendy 10, 13, 18, 67, 71 Sheehi, Stephen 16, 30, 34, 45, 57, 148 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail 2, 3

249

Sourp Krikor orphanage (Van) 136–7, 160, 184, 5.5 Sourp Varvar church (Hussenig) 116–17, 180, 4.11, 6.7 Soursourian, A. & H. (studio) 110, 114, 116–18, 4.1, 4.9, 4.11, 4.13 Soursourian, Aram 108–9, 158 Soursourian, Askanaz 110, 114, 116–18, 170–1 Soursourian, Haigaz 109 Soursourian, Haroutiun 110, 114, 116–18, 170 Soursourian (Soursouriants), H. & M. (studio) 97–9, 101, 108, 111–13, 118–19, 178, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5. 4.8, 4.12 Soursourian (Soursouriants), Hovhannes 97–101, 110, 118–19 Soursourian (Soursouriants), Mardiros 98, 108–9, 110, 118–19 Spitzer, Leo 43, 71 Srabian, Arzuman 115, 4.10 Srvantsdiants, Karekin 126 Stapleton, Ida 156, 169–70, 6.4 Stepanian, Stepan 155 Suny, Ronald Grigor 21, 38 Surmelian, Leon 45, 50, 51, 70, 83, 126, 174–5, 177, 179, 189 Sykes, Mark 29–30 Tahsin Bey 161, 164–5, 167 Talbot, Henry Fox 34 Tarkulyan, Boghos. See Phébus Tcheraz, Minas 77–8, 127 Tchitenian, Archag 159 Ter-Ghevondyants, Grigor 88 Terzian, Baghdassar 109 Tiflis 46, 48, 70, 87–8, 98–9, 127, 128, 162, 188 Tlgadintsi (Hovhannes Haroutiunian) 102–3, 105, 109, 112–15, 120–2, 170–1, 4.13 Totovents, Vahan 94–6, 102–3, 113, 180 Toutounjian, Mihran 109–10, 157–8, 171 Toutounjian, Nishan 157–8 Trebizond 31–5, 45, 50, 55, 67, 72, 96, 174–5

250 Varakavank (Van) 124–7, 130, 148–9, 151, 161, 167, 5.2, 5.12 Vasilian, Kegham 159 Vaznaian family 93–4, 111, 113, 174, 4.1 Vernacular photography 10–11, 25, 31–4, 35–6, 41–3, 48–9, 177–8 Vosganian, Varujan 174, 179 Voskeritchian, Taline 189 Voskertchian, Dikran 154, 167–8 Voskertchian Frères (studio) 60, 83–7, 153–4, 159, 168, 3.14, 3.16, 6.2 Voskertchian, Haroutiun 154, 167–8 Voskertchian, Yervand 87–8, 153–4, 167–8, 6.2

Index Wegner, Armin 38–40 Winter, Jay 40, 162 Worcester 78, 100, 106, 107, 111, 172, 179, 4.7, 6.6 Yaghdjian, Soghomon 109 Yeghiazarian, K. 33–5, 45, 49–50, 67, 97, 2.1 Yerevan 136, 145, 182, 185, 188 Yeziantz, Garabed 70, 79 Zaza Photo Studio 178–9, 181–3, 0.1 Zharankavorats school (Van) 124–7, 149 Zhoghovaran church (Erzurum) 56, 155–6, 169, 6.3

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