TRANSLATING RUINS: Photography of Cultural Heritage and the Project of Armenian Cultural Modernity, 1860-1904

Abstract

Perceptions regarding the uptake of photography in the Middle East during the medium’s ascendancy in the second half of the nineteenth century have transformed profoundly since the publication of Nissan Perez’s pioneering 1988 publication Focus East. Scholars working in art history, anthropology, cultural, gender and post-colonial studies have come to acknowledge that the Middle East was a pivotal site and subject for the development of photography’s aesthetics and disciplinary regimes. However, the legacy of the Armenian photographers who played a dominant role in this context, remains one of the more contested and ambivalent aspects of nineteenth-century photographic studies. Focusing on the photography of historical architecture and material heritage by the Abdullah Frères, Ohannes Kurkdjian, Mateos Papazyants and Gabriel Nahapetian, this thesis is the first attempt to view these indigenous photographers within the framework of the Armenian cultural revival of the 1860s-1900s. My research in archives and libraries in Yerevan and Paris has uncovered a wealth of new primary material that demonstrates the significant involvement of these photographer-scholars in the construction of modern idioms of collective selfhood. Based on these findings, this dissertation points to the ideological function of historiographical photography in Armenian scholarly networks as representational tools that negotiated the conflicting demands of the nineteenth-century international photographic market and the agenda of nation-building. Made as documentary evidence of architectural and archaeological patrimony, the photographs in question operate as testing grounds for an iconography of visual self-representation for a dispersed and fragmented ethno-cultural group. As such, the case studies I present here can be considered a novel mode of visual historiography that traverses geo-political, linguistic and cultural divides in order to establish a critically constituted, shared framework for the collective imaginary. Though lacking a centralised rhetoric, this discursive project metabolised through consistent and prominent efforts, which have been left out of analyses pertaining to early Middle-Eastern photography. Following the philological discovery of historical architecture by the local intelligentsia in the early-nineteenth century, Armenian historiographical photography eventually become a device for an empowering restaging of Armenian identity and culture. Drawing on psychoanalytical theory of melancholia, I examine how this process led to the reconstitution of the ‘Armenian’ image as a simultaneously historicised and modern phenomenon. The study of Armenian ‘heritage’ photography provides an understanding of the transcultural aspect of nineteenth-century indigenous photography, which operated outside of the binaries of colonial resistance and self-orientalisation. Amalgamating the aesthetic modalities of European visual culture with traditional iconography drawn from local, medieval traditions, this photographic output enabled a dialectical view of the ‘national’ past as a product of historical and cultural developments. The syncretic, critical nature of such photography ultimately offered its Armenian makers and consumers more fluid and emancipatory avenues of self-representation in the context of emergent, nineteenth-century discourses on national belonging.