Photography in the Hands of Orientalism: A Reflection of the Ottoman Empire in 19th Century Photography as the Microcosm of The Other

Abstract

Photographs, which radically shaped the relationship between art and science in the Western world, also became a research tool, whereby urban life, historical sites, and colonial and human resources of the East were recorded visually as types and scenes. Being the neighbor of the West for hundreds of years, the Ottoman Empire had turned into the typical sample from the East, meaning that it found itself as the Object of the visual classification process, which was managed by the West as the Subject. Hence, the passion to document and categorize the East that was intensified after the invention of photograph in 1839, despite having already existed in the visual culture of the West since the 16th century, turned the Ottoman Empire and its society into mementos to take home using the visual language of photography. This study, which has a descriptive and qualitative historical literary review design, looks at the problem of reflection of the Ottoman Empire in the aforementioned context, and it analyzes several works of some prominent 19th century photographers, both Ottoman and European, who photographed women, men, cityscapes, and types to demonstrate how the categorization process of the East took place in the photography of that era.