Seminar #5

21 January 2025 | 2:00-4:00pm on Zoom &
in Lecture Room 1, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge

Ahmet Ersoy (Boğaziçi University)
The Hamidian Photography Archive (1876-1908): Old New Media and Archival Violence

The talk centers on Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid’s (r. 1876-1909) photographic collection, housed at the Yıldız Palace library, as part of a broad archival complex comprising government correspondence, informers’ reports (jurnal), statistical data, ciphered telegraphic dispatches, printed matter, illustrated journals, and a wildly disparate body of photographic material. Evidencing Abdülhamid’s archival desire to attain a comprehensive knowledge of the empire and the world, the collection exceeded 36,000 photographs by the end of the sultan’s reign. My work approaches the collection as an active archival agent annexed to the central information gathering apparatus at Yıldız. It constitutes a preliminary effort to explore the texture and media logic of the archival domain within which the photographic material was produced, amassed and circulated at the Yıldız Palace. Focusing on the particular archival operations through which photography was processed as evidence by the state, it also explores the biases, predilections, and hierarchies embedded in the Hamidian mechanism of rule.

Ahmet Ersoy is Associate Professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Ersoy works on the history of the Late Ottoman Empire with a special focus on the changing role and status of visual culture in a period of modernizing change. He is the author of Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (2015); and with Vangelis Kechriotis and Maciej Gorny (eds), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775-1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. III (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010). Ersoy’s recent research involves the entwined histories of new media technologies (in particular photography) and print culture. His publications include “Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals,” in History of Photography, 40/3 (September 2016); and with K. Mehmet Kentel, “Burnt Panorama: Forensics, Photography, and the 1870 Pera Fire” in Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, K. Mehmet Kentel, M. Baha Tanman, On the Spot: Panaromic Gaze on Istanbul, a History (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2023).