Art in Translation

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The Visual Making of the Harem

Saadet Özen

To cite this article: Saadet Özen (2017) The Visual Making of the Harem, Art in Translation,
9:sup1, 51-58, DOI: 10.1080/17561310.2015.1088220

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Published online: 07 Apr 2017.

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Art in Translation, 2017
Volume 9, Issue S1, pp. 51–58, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2015.1088220
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

The Visual Making

Saadet Özen
(Boğaziçi Üniversitesi) of the Harem
Abstract

In the nineteenth century, photography rapidly imposed itself as a new

way of capturing real-time visions in many parts of the world. However,
the photographs did not necessarily lead to a replacement or revaluation
of entrenched perceptions of the temporal and spatial context in which
these images were captured. This paper revisits the case of harem women
photographed in the Iranian court in the nineteenth century, and the
current representation of harem women in Turkey where this institution
officially existed until 1926. As a group of graduate students in Turkey,
our encounter with photographs of female residents of the Iranian court
52 Saadet Özen

provoked this questioning. These women apparently did not conform to

our immediate notions of the harem’s physiognomic conventions. In our
complex relation with the Ottoman past, and partly because of lack of
visual research, our visual codes about this institution seem to have been
shaped by the long tradition of Orientalist codes and depictions.

KEYWORDS: Ottoman photography, harem, orientalism, gender stereotypes

The Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative has created

an important opportunity to reposition visual material related to specific
cultural geographic backgrounds, not only through comparative aesthetics
perspectives but also by means of historiographies. The case I will revisit
in the following has led me to a reassessment of the connection between
“Orientalism” and our current visions of the past.
Properly speaking, this proposal and discussion on visual repositories
are inspired by some specific examples of Iranian photography in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, encountered in Istanbul in 2012, in
a course offered through Boğaziçi University’s Connecting Art Histories
initiative. The title of the seminar was “Distant Exposures: Photography
Beyond the West.” As a part of my Ph.D. research I was particularly inter-
ested in photography in the late Ottoman era, but was mostly unaware of
contemporary photography in India—which we were to discover under
the guidance of Christopher Pinney—or the Iranian photography that Ali
Behdad would introduce us to. I was only familiar with a few prominent
figures such as Antoin Sevruguin (1830?–1933), and only through popular
media, so I was far from able to contextualize their work, which I knew
only through limited examples, either historically or culturally.
At first glance, photography seems to have been surprisingly rapid
and successful in imposing itself as a new technology and a new way of
capturing a “vision” in many parts of the world: the Ottoman Empire’s
first encounter with photography is dated to 1842,1 Iran’s to 1844,2 and
India’s to 1840.3 Iranian photography has been particularly informative
and challenging for my research. Ali Behdad introduced us to archival ma-
terial from Iran, which stimulated comparisons and discussions. First and
foremost, the apparent similarities with early Ottoman photography were
striking in the ways in which the new medium was appropriated by the
nineteenth-century Middle Eastern powers. As an example of early appro-
priation of photography, one can name the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid
II, who commissioned albums and presented them as royal gifts to Britain,
the United States, and Japan,4 to represent the modernization process of
the Empire.5 On the Persian side, we see the personal collection of King
Nasîr al-Dîn Shah (1831–1896).
Contextually, however, there were many dissimilarities as well as com-
monalities, as emerged with our encounter with some photographs of
women from Iran (Fig. 1). The seminar participants could hardly identify
these women, and neither their social status nor their cultural allegiances
seemed apparent to us. We finally realized that they were women from
 The Visual Making of the Harem 53

Figure 1
Group of women from the Nasiri
court. Late nineteenth–early twentieth
century. Photo credit: Fahimeh
Rastkar and Sohrab Daryabandari
Collection, http://www.qajarwomen.
org/en/items/1250A23.html.

the harem of Nasîr al-Dîn Shah (1831–1896). Himself a privileged pho-

tographer, the Persian monarch was “allowed” and eager to create photo-
graphic images that we believed were out of the reach of photographers:
his harem par excellence, and the courtiers. The reaction of the class was
surprising in many ways: the residents of the Persian harem, or rather
the photographs of them taken by Nasîr al-Dîn Shah, did not conform to
our notions of the harem’s physiognomic conventions. With their thick
eyebrows, wearing tutus inspired from the ballerinas that the Shah saw in
Europe, and not least because of their serious, direct gaze to the viewer,
these women challenged our immediate visual codes of the harem aesthet-
ically, bodily, and behaviorally (Fig. 2).
The analysis of our reaction was further complicated when I later tried
to define our “established norm” of harem women in their daily life. Our
seemingly spontaneous reaction was based on a visual surrogate drawn
from the European “odalisque” tradition—a blurred group of women
without faces or personality—and we were almost judgmental when con-
fronted with the individual appearances from the Persian court. Although
its mechanism has been deciphered in many ways, Orientalist/male voy­
eurism has clearly succeeded in entrenching archetypal visions in our col-
lective conscience. In plain words, we were unable to describe these wom-
en out of their mode of lasciviousness and inertia; and unable to inscribe
individual traits to them, although we were well informed of and critical
of the hegemonic means that constructed this vision as a whole. But how,
technically, had the “odalisque” invaded the visual space at the expense of
all alternative imagery? In other words, how did a specific iconographic
description of woman became the “canon” for the harem? Considering the
“odalisque” as an epitome of diverse figures that supposedly described the
54 Saadet Özen

Figure 2
Nasîr al-Dîn Shah in his inner quarters.
Inscription: “Zaʻfaran Baji, Aqa [?]
Khvajah.” Photo credit: Institute for
Iranian Contemporary Historical
Studies, http://www.qajarwomen.org/
en/items/1261A58.html.

“Orient” in the nineteenth century, the question could be expanded to re-

vise all archetypal visions of the “Oriental life”—the landscapes, the street
peddlers, and the cityscapes—that haunt our vision. This is a realm that
is not framed in spatial or temporal terms but acknowledged through its
distinctive icons: the crescent, the hookah, the snake charmers, the harem
immersed in an eternal apathy, and the Oriental beauties. Had it become
“mummified […] through the repetitive, fetishistic dissemination of stere-
otypes”?6
The technical expansion of visuality and the mechanical reproduction
that spawned imagery on an unprecedented scale in the nineteenth cen-
tury could partially answer these questions.7 The advent of printing tech-
nologies and distribution channels—regular postal service, steamboats,
albums, tourism, and so forth—created new tools of visual communica-
tion with both photographic and nonphotographic images:the illustrated
press that favored engravings rather than photographs up to the 1890s,8
chromolithography, and postcards. The culmination of these techniques
in around the 1900s led to “the most profound change in their impact
upon the public” and consequently reshaped the existing protocols over
the circulating images.9 From the 1840s onward, these new media allowed
a wide circulation of images of the harem beyond the confines of “Salons”
and museums, and of bourgeois and aristocratic houses. Now a broader
public had access to these so-called harem women: reinforcing what had
been previously written, quoted, transferred, meditated on, and accumu-
lated in common cognitive space. In this nonreciprocal relation between
the consumers and the consumed,

The strange natives are depicted practicing their curious customs

with the sort of repellant fascination of a freakshow. Looking with-
out seeing, these images exude an attraction for what is picturesque
[…], so that the end product is curiously romanticized and distorted,
as in a photograph viewed too close up.10
 The Visual Making of the Harem 55

The production of images was not the sole preserve of European pho-
tographers or painters, however; the Ottomans also contributed to this
visual construction of the harem. Local photographers staged studio pho-
tographs of women for foreign postcard publishers, which ensured their
circulation. The Ottoman archives provide several documents displaying
this commercial practice, in addition to the reaction of the authorities to
it: the famous photographers, the Abdullah brothers: Vicen (1820–1902),
Hovsep (1830–1908), and Kevork (1839–1918), who were court pho-
tographers to Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) and Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–
1909), were punished when they had non-Muslim women pose in their
studio for them as “Orientals” for foreign market sales.11 What disturbed
the authorities was not only the misrepresentation of women but also the
circulation of female representations in public space and the role played
by non-Muslims in this market.
After the Turkish Republic was founded in 1923, a law passed by the
Parliament in 1924 abolished the institution of the caliphate, and at the
same time exiled all members of the Ottoman dynasty. Shortly after, in
1926, the harem as an institution was also abolished. The Republican Era
adopted a dichotomous attitude toward the visual representation of the
harem after its abolishment: an article in an illustrated magazine from the
early Republican Era, dated 1924, displays a point of view similar to that
of the Ottoman authorities. Three women in their harem interiors—lying
on a bed in a seductive manner, wearing low-necked dresses—are accom-
panied by a text in which the writer complains about the wide circulation
in European newspapers of these images, which had been taken some forty
years earlier. Moreover, he asked whether it would not be possible to pre-
vent Sebah, the renowned photographer, from still selling them (Fig. 3)?12
At the same time, however, the distant attitude of the Republican elite
toward the Ottoman past paved the way for a contradictory and much
more lasting tone. The law of 1924 also called for the confiscation of
all the estates previously belonging to the court. In one of them, the Şale
Pavilion of Yıldız Palace, a club was established. The eunuchs of the last
imperial harem had been retained there as servants in embroidered outfits
and fezes.13 Regardless of the fact that they were far removed from their
administrative roles and were dressed in the modernizing fashion of the
late Ottoman period, the Republican elite saw them as convenient props
in a stylized and reinvented Ottoman imperial residence of a bygone era.
The Ottomans, who in the nineteenth century had exercised a borrowed
Orientalism toward the Arabs in their domains, were in turn reconstructed
as an archetypal community, living in a far-flung, exotic empire. “In an age
of Western-dominated modernity, every nation creates its own Orient,”
says Ussamah Maqdisi,14 which is applicable both to the Ottoman and
Republican cases.
The Turkish elite, in their new vision of the Ottoman harem, were not
far from the French postcard sellers who redefined and transformed the
bodies of the harem into an item to be sold on the image market: “In
56 Saadet Özen

Figure 3
“These are photos of Turkish women
often seen in foreign newspapers and
journals. Seeing these pictures makes
us angry toward those who make
this propaganda against us. However
these pictures have been sent to the
newspapers by photographers who
live in our country.” Resimli Ay, April
1924.

contrast to the ordinary photographer, the author of postcards, as soon as

he takes up a theme like that of Algerian women, deals exclusively with
substitutes (the model) and simulacra (the studio and the props disposed
around it).”15 Both the Ottoman eunuchs and Algerian women were to
suffer the burden of an authoritative gaze, which urged them to incarnate
in their bodies their raison d’être as the “other”; to show in the theater
of their bodies the answers to fundamental questions of alterity: What is
Orient? What is woman? What is it to be outside of gender categories?
The Republican Era did very little for a visual redefinition of the
Ottoman world until very recently. Popular culture, up to the 2000s,
perpetuated the old images borrowed from the Western tradition. An
outstanding example is the movie Harem Suare by Ferzan Özpetek (a
 The Visual Making of the Harem 57

Figure 4
Behice Hanoum, from the harem of
Sultan Abdülhamid II with her sisters
and brother, circa 1990. She is the
second on the right. Cengiz Sezen
collection.

Turkish-French-Italian coproduction from 1999), in which all of the

archetypes concerning the harem are reenacted: lasciviousness, nudity,
forbidden love, and mystery.
I had to rethink the harem—and by chance, the very harem of Sul-
tan Abdülhamid II as reenacted by Ferzan Özpetek—when I was invited
in 2014 to join a project about the Yıldız Palace, the imperial Ottoman
residence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A project
to restore and refurnish the harem of the palace as a museum required
detailed research on the daily life of all the residents of the harem: not
only women but also eunuchs and servants, and their connections with
the outer world. Their pictorial depictions—photographs, drawings, or
paintings—had up until then remained scattered and had barely begun to
form a coherent, if limited, corpus (Fig. 4). It should also be added that
the recent years witnessed an increase in the number of illustrated publi-
cations on the nineteenth-century Ottoman world. The invoices from the
“suppliers to the sultan” told much about their taste, habits, and wills. The
documents from the archives inform us about the hierarchies among the
residents of the harem. What we theoretically already knew but apparently
were not as easily able to visualize—namely, the harem being “different”
from the Orientalist conventions—began to take shape in parallel with
the peculiar modernization process of the Ottoman Empire, in which the
West had been both a politico-cultural threat, but also a necessary source
of information and material. The harem of the nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries perpetuated the traditional institutional organization, but
refurnished the daily life with European appearances and manners.
Despite the inconsistencies, uncertainties, and necessary fictions inher-
ent to the historiography, this ongoing reconstruction of the harem will
hopefully give a face at least to some of the women or eunuchs that is
58 Saadet Özen

closer to their own self-perceptions, and reposition them as individuals

living in the particular sociocultural environment of their time.

Notes

 1. Bahattin Öztuncay, James Robertson: Pioneer of Photography in the

Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1992), 8.
 2. Iraj Afshar, “Some Remarks on the Early History of Photography
in Iran,” in Clifford Edmund Bosworth and Carole Hillenbrand,
eds., Qajar Iran: Political, Social and Cultural Change, 1800–1925
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 262.
 3. Judith Mara Gutman, Through the Indian Eyes: Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Century Photography from India (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982), 34.
  4. Banu Kaygusuz, “Poetics and Politics of Photography, The Represen­
tation of Japan in the Photography Collection of Abdulhamid II,”
unpublished master’s thesis submitted to Boğaziçi University, 2009.
 5.  For a general overview, see 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, vol. 12 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
 6. Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, “Introduction,” in Colonialist
Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (London: Routledge, 2002), 7.
  7. On reproduction and copying, see Hillel Schwarz, The Culture of the
Copy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). For an overview of key
perspectives on reproducibility (particulary of Walter Benjamin, Jean
Baudrillard, and Marshall McLuhan), see Ruth Pelzer, “Technical
Reproduction and Its Significance,” in Matthew Rampley, ed.,
Exploring Visual Culture, Definitions, Concepts, Contexts (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 197–214.
 8. Peter Johnson, Front Line Artists (London: Cassell, 1978), 5–6.
 9.  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1968), 217–52.
10. David Prochaska, “The Archive of Algérie Imaginaire,” History and
Anthropology 4 (1990): 374.
11. BOA (Ottoman Archives), D.MKT., 1914/76.
12. Resimli Ay, n.3, Nisan 340 (April 1924).
13. Yıldız Sarayı Şale Kasr-ı Hümâyunu (TBMM Milli Saraylar Daire
Başkanlığı Yayını, 1993), 65.
14. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” in The American Historical
Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002): 768.
15. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad
Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 68.