Surface condition: reconfiguring photographic (in)visibility of veiled ottoman women

Abstract

This dissertation is about the notion of photographic (in)visibility. It particularly concerns a bodyimage that was considered “invisible” to the photographic histories because of its prescribed religious outfit, the veil. This photographic Type was named the Turkish Lady, and it was designed in the 19th century to assign a fixed body-image to Turkish/Muslim women. In this dissertation, I seek to open up a space for a new theorization of photographic invisibility to reintroduce the Turkish Lady to the photographic histories. Most importantly, I argue that if we pay attention to the surface itself but not what it hides or reveals, the very nature of what we consider as photographically “invisible” will drastically change. For the Orientalist discourse, the veil has always indicated something other than its materiality. It was a symbolic screen to reflect Western fantasies about the Orient, a duplicitous barrier rendering the “truth” invisible to the scientific gaze. But more than anything, it was a strong reminder of a lack, that there might be nothing underneath the surface. This dominant configuration has been a central theme for the previous, psychoanalytically inflected scholarship on the veil. Yet despite the range of interpretations, in each case the veil was understood to negate women’s existence within the scopic realm. Against this dominant discourse, I argue that the surface is a material configuration and it contains depth. Inspired by Giuliana Bruno’s refashioning of the surface in visual media, the theoretical structure of this thesis goes against the 19th century topology of Western thought which privileged the depth of the truth over the flatness and unreliability of the surface. Shifting the focus from prevailing Western scopic regimes to Ottoman visual culture, I propose an understanding of the veil which does not necessarily render one invisible but complicates the idea of (in)visibility. To develop this theoretical architecture, I look at various Ottoman and European photographic practices to trace the surface tension that occurs when they introduce (in)visible female bodies. The archives that I draw from include Elbise-i Osmaniyye (1873), a state-commissioned photography album of Ottoman costumes, and the Abdul Hamid II collection (1880-1893) which contains 1,851 albumen prints including rare post-surgery photographs of Muslim women. Along with these official archives, I excavate through Orientalist albums amassed by travellers and tourists, and Ottoman domestic photographs from the late 19th century. Reading these images in conversation with the European photographic practices of the time, such as ethnographic portraits, photographs of hysteria patients and spiritual seances, I thus perform series of critical operations on various sartorial, photographic, and dermal surfaces, including studio backdrops, costumes, scars, and photographic paper.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jussi Parikka: orcid.org/0000-0002-2248-6377

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