Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-v5vhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-02T06:51:47.472Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF EARLY ARAB PHOTOGRAPHY OR A PROLEGOMENON TO AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE LEBANESE IMAGO

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2007

Stephen Sheehi
Affiliation:
Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arab Culture in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. 29208, USA; e-mail: sheehi@sc.edu.

Extract

Viewing an exhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon…” Native women should paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted… They can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures…” She concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth, honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and crafts]. This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations, this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.

Type
ARTICLES
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)