OTTOMAN TANZIMAT, ARAB REFORM, AND SECONDARY LITERATURE

In the Ottoman Empire, photography acted forcefully in creating class and national identities because of the scientific nature of the apparatus. If the “fever for reality was running high” in Europe with the invention of photography, the Comptean compulsion for rationality and objectivity was the dominant current of thought among Arab intellectuals during al-nahḍa al-ʿArabiyya (the Arab renaissance).³

Therefore, photography in the Arab world was not plagued by the question of whether it was a bastard child of painting or science, as in Europe. This is not because Arabs lacked a pictorial tradition. Rather, framed by a discourse of scientific knowledge from the outset, photography served, like Barakat's hope for painting, as a resource for social, cultural, economic, and civic progress. The majority of articles on photography in Arabic that appeared in literary–scientific journals focused on technical and scientific components of the craft, thus evincing photography's positivist appeal.⁴ Buffered by the facticity of chemistry and optics, photography assisted in instituting a new process of recognizing the commodity as an intricate signifier of class and individual identity. Studio portraiture, amateur photography, and advertisements combined to make relationships “natural” between the “modern” individuals represented in the photographic image and the things that communicated who they were or wanted to be.

Formally, native-produced photographic portraiture differed little from Western photographs. In her study of women and photography of the Middle East, Sarah Graham-Brown states, “Styles of photography remained largely derivative, taking the norms of composition and styles of portraiture almost entirely from European models.”⁵

It is true that the photographic “patterns” found in early Lebanese and Ottoman photography seem to have been “grafted onto alien cultures,” as Julia Hirsh states in her study of family photography in the West.⁶ In his adept study of photography in India, Christopher Pinney notes the difficulty in distinguishing native- from foreign-produced images, because “early Indian photographic practitioners were part of an elite that mimicked key colonial aesthetic forms.” Therefore, official and personal photography should be juxtaposed, as they were differentiated by “the field of power around the camera rather than cultural practice.”⁷

In contrast, in her study on popular culture in the Ottoman Empire, Suraiya Faroqhi reminds us that “the literary figures and politicians of the Tanzimat isolated themselves from the lower classes by their acceptance of a foreign culture.”⁸

Despite the similarities and often indeterminate content, the sociohistorical and political context of these images compels us to examine the effects of these iconographic “patterns.” The adoption of foreign practices and technologies was not a passive act but a class act to distinguish the new bourgeoisie from the subaltern classes. I argue that the act of “imitation” was an ideological act by which non-Western subjects claimed ownership of modernity along with its intellectual and capital resources and privileges.

The relationship between photography, modernity, and the East appeared almost simultaneously with the apparatus' debut in Europe. Egypt and Palestine were among the first destinations for French-government daguerreotype missions to visually document antiquities.⁹

Character types, landscapes, and tableau vivant genre scenes—particularly useful for postcards and exotic tablature—soon made up a large portion of the output of studios run by expatriate Europeans, such as the renowned French Bonfils family, based in Beirut.¹⁰ In their study of postcards, Malek Alloula and David Proschaska show how photography evinced Orientalist discourse and acted as an apparatus of colonial power.¹¹ The majority of studies on photography in the Middle East have concentrated on “Othering” representations produced by nonindigenous photographers.¹² A few of these studies have also considered native contributions to the early photographic archive. For example, in her groundbreaking Images of Women, Sarah Graham-Brown identifies relevant tropes found in the native and foreign photographic representation of Middle Eastern women, such as domesticity and leisure.¹³

In his compendium of Palestinian photography, Walid Khalidi maps the dominant themes of the photographic archive in Palestine before 1948 as created by foreigners and Arab and Armenian indigenes, including Khalil Rʿad and his partners and in-laws, Garabed and Johannes Krikorian.¹⁴

Subsequently, Annelies Moors, focusing on postcards and National Geographic magazine, examines how biblical motifs, used even by native studios for commercial reasons, robbed Palestinians of agency by freezing local culture as a mirror of Hebrew antiquity.¹⁵ Ethnobiblical representations supplied visual evidence that land and people had been stagnant for millennia, in contrast to the dynamic modernity of Zionist colonialists.¹⁶ What neither Khalidi nor Graham-Brown develops is the latter's passing observation that photography in the Ottoman Empire “was viewed as an embodiment of modern technology, in itself a symbol of progress, which also offered a convenient means of documenting other kinds of ‘progress’ and ‘reform’.”¹⁷ I argue that Arab photography was inspired less by Orientalist imagery than by specific ideological planks of modernity. The representation of marriage, domestic life, and educated elite that Khalidi examines arose out of nahḍa priorities that aimed to establish a normative behavior for “the new age.” Therefore, it should be noted that photography accentuated the potentials and identified the deficiencies of local communities as a necessary programmatic enterprise to respond to British and Zionist ambitions.

Although reform priorities informed photography, few written sources exist regarding indigenous studios, photographers, and the reception of their product. Despite this lacuna, few scholars have studied the Arab–Ottoman context of photographic images. Nancy Micklewright argues that photographs in the Ottoman–Turkish press pushed a nationalist-based agenda of consumerism.¹⁸

Wolf-Deiter Lemke states in his article on Ottoman photography that the use of photography was “an act of technological modernization.” Noting that Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid patronized many photographic projects, he claims that “photography created new possibilities of long-distance control, enabling the center to visualize through images what was actually achieved.”¹⁹ Similarly, Faroqhi comments on ʿAbd al-Hamid's photographilia, noting that the sultan's “many albums were largely devoted to photographs showing innovations of the contemporary period,” including railroad stations, hospitals, schools, and factories. Consequently, the camera acted in its disciplinary capacity as a mechanism to verify that his development projects had been completed.²⁰

AL-NAHḌA AL-ʿARABIYYA, NATIVE INDIVIDUAL, AND THE ROOTS OF LEBANESE PHOTOGRAPHY

A handful of the most famous Ottoman photographers were able to capitalize on the West's desire for landscapes, townscapes, images of ruins, and character types, because these photographic entrepreneurs maintained a prestigious association with the sultan and Ottoman officials. Concurrently, native studios cultivated a growing local market, concerning themselves largely but not exclusively with portraiture. Graham-Brown confirms that, along with the strong presence of expatriate studios, local services were marketed toward a local clientele. In regard to Lebanon, she writes that “it became very fashionable among well-to-do Christian families to have cabinet portraits or photographic cartes de visite made,” but she also specifies that the demand was cross-confessional.²¹

By the 1890s, several native-run ateliers thrived in many of the major cities of Southwest Asia and Egypt.²² However, we know little of Armenian and Arab photographers such as Nasr ʿAoun in Beirut, Suleiman Hakim in Damascus, Lekegian in Cairo, the Krikorians and Rʿad in Palestine, and Kamil al-Qareh, Muhammad al-ʿArabi, and Wadiʿ Nawfal in northern Lebanon.²³ Even the details of the lives of photographers as prominent as Jurji Sabunji [Georges Saboungi] (1840–1927) remain sketchy.

Some sources say that Sabunji opened his studio in Beirut in 1862, only two years after Trancrede Dumas, the first European to do so.²⁴

Jurji was the younger brother of Louis Sabunji (1838–1931), a former priest and activist who was an associate of Wilfred Blunt.²⁵ Louis learned photography during his studies in the seminary in Rome. Phillippe Tarrazi states that he was the first “to introduce the art of photography [al-taṣwīr al-shamsī] to Beirut, which was virtually unknown in the city at that time.”²⁶ Tarrazi claims that Louis invented two photographic apparatuses during his stay in Manchester; one patent was sold to the British “Stereoscopic Co.,” and his “Authomatic [sic] Apparatus” received recognition from the French government.²⁷ An avid photographer, Louis apparently kept a photographic diary, which accompanied Rihalat al-nahla, his travel account of Europe.²⁸ It is assumed that he taught his brother Jurji the craft. Evidence also suggests that his brothers David and the unknown “M. Sabounji” had ateliers in Beirut, Jaffa, and Cairo.²⁹ Due to the lack of a written record, we know more about Louis than Jurji himself. We do know that he was a skilled and accomplished photographer of high repute and wrote at least two technical articles on the craft.³⁰

Sabunji's photographs are classic 19th-century portraiture. It is not coincidental that he photographed leading Ottoman officials and Beirut intellectuals, including Ibrahim al-Yaziji and Butrus al-Bustani. Of the most prominence, he was the official photographer for Midhat Pasha while the famous Ottoman reformer was governor of Syria. Sabunji invented a method and received commendation for printing photographs on silk, reproducing Midhat's image on thirty-six foulards.³¹

His intimate association with the new bourgeoisie, nahḍa intellectuals, and the reform-minded ruling class gave him a central role in popularizing the visual semiotics of nahḍa ideology. His mostly male subjects are often standing relaxed, exuding confidence and ease. Wearing native attire, subjects of studio portraits (Figure 1) project learnedness, control, and culture. They resemble countless portraits of “pioneers of the renaissance,” such as Salim al-Bustani and al-Yaziji, who wear shirwāl, vest, and fez, the latter a sign of the Ottoman reform that began with Sultan Mahmud II (d. 1839).³²

The images are a visual compendium to the new forms of Arabic short and long fiction by writers like Salim al-Bustani.³³ These experiments narrated the cornerstone virtues of bourgeois selfhood, specifically moral propriety, learning, culture, and moderation in the face of modernization excesses. The portrait of al-Shaykh Effendi al-Khuri in fact could be Shakir Khuri—doctor, Protestant convert, and minor player in the reform community of Beirut. Perhaps it is al-Shaykh Khalil al-Khuri, founder of the newspaper Hadiqat al-akhbar and owner of the seminal publishing house al-Matbaʿa al-Suriyya.³⁴ The carpeting, baroque chairs, and heavy molding give the impression of a Victorian room, whereas the choice in dress is clearly a national one. Although the images are a double, they both distinctly relay that each of their models is an individual.

If the traditionally attired subjects project a mastery of knowledge emblematic of al-nahḍa, the image in Figure 2 emanates a sense of mastery of means. Regaled in Western garb, his coat draped over his arm, and relaxed on his walking cane, the subject is clearly confident in his surroundings. Although these images are just a few in Sabunji's large oeuvre, they articulate an orthodox visual iconography of the native subject: young, successful, “progressive,” and male; gazing forward, out of the frame; learned and personally if not also financially secure in the modern age. The iconography became the visual standard for the reform intellectual and modern comprador. Tarrazi's landmark Tarikh al-sahafa al-ʿArabiyya provides portraits of journalists, intellectuals, publishers, and educators, celebrating them as the heroes of al-nahḍa. The biographical encyclopedia is an unambiguous, if not overdetermined, ideological anthology of the modern Arab imago. Many of Sabunji's portraits, in fact, appear in Tarrazi's magnum opus. For example, the portrait of Edgar Mashaqa expresses the same airs as seen in Figure 2. A well-groomed schoolboy with leather shoes, a suit, a bow tie, and meticulously combed hair, the young Mashaqa stands next to a high table with his hand on a large, open book.³⁵

The image anticipates his ownership of al-Ittihad al-Misri, the periodical founded by his father, Raphael, in Alexandria in 1881 and reopened by Edgar in 1910.

Sabunji did not originate the iconography of this portraiture, just as Tarrazi did not codify it. He was a pioneer among others within the larger practice of Ottoman photography. The dissemination of the representation of a confident, worldly, and cultured Ottoman citizen was “relatively inconspicuous but all the more effective as a factor contributing to the process of secularization” as well as modernization and social reform.³⁶

Younger than Sabunji, Iskander (d. 1911) and Joseph (d. circa 1904) Khorshid were similarly high-profile Beiruti photographers who comfortably worked between provincial capitals and the imperial center.³⁷ More prominently known as the Kova Brothers, the two were experienced painters of icons; this is the purported reason why they relocated to Beirut, to paint in the Orthodox Cathedral of Mar Jirjis in the 1860s.³⁸ They were “famed in the craft of photography [fotografia] and skill in painting [taṣwīr],” said al-Muqtataf, explaining that the Kovas won ribbons at the Vienna World's Exhibition in 1873 and the International Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 for their images of Syrian landmarks and costumes.³⁹

The regularity of nahḍa portraiture (Figure 3) is its very strength. Again, each model's clothes are stylized, as are his body language and surroundings. His tarboosh signals his education; his Western clothes relate his success, progress, and/or affluence; and the absence of sectarian markers signifies his nationalism. The composition is hardly distinguishable from Sabunji's portraits. The project of the photographer and photographed—the very veracity of the image—is found within this field of sameness. This repetition forces the viewer to recognize and identify with the model as a representative of a national class. Indeed, the al-Muqtataf article entitled “Syrian Photography” lauds these two photographers as “sons of the nation” and representative of the progress of Syria itself. The subjects of the Kovas' photographic portraiture are represented as bourgeois individuals, exuding the heroic qualities of the modern Syro-Lebanese citizen: progressive, knowledgeable, nationalistic, and secular.

The success of the Beirut-based Kovas resembles the career of the most eminent Ottoman photographers, Vichen (d. 1902), Hovsep (d. 1900), and Kevork (d. 1918) Abdallah, otherwise known as the Abdallah Frères. Trained in miniature painting at the Armenian Catholic seminary in Venice, the brothers bought the business of the German chemist–photographer with whom they had apprenticed around 1860.⁴⁰

In 1862, they became court photographers to Sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and then to ʿAbd al-Hamid II. The latter was an avid collector and patron of photography who commissioned the brothers to produce a visual photographic archive of the empire.⁴¹ Their photographs were presented to such European royalty as Empress Augusta, the Kaiser's wife, and used as the model for the minted royal image. The copyright of their photographs was protected by the sultan's decree, and they were personally commissioned by Sultan ʿAbd al-ʿAziz to take photographs for the Ottoman Pavilion at the 1860s Paris exhibition. The theme was the “Life of Istanbul” and the capital's cityscapes.⁴²

The photographers' relationships to the most powerful echelons of the ruling elite in Istanbul and the empire permitted the Abdallah Frères to diversify their portfolio from portraiture to landscape to character types beyond the scope of most native studios. In Figure 4, entitled “Sufi Musician” by its archivist, the troped image of a dervish is a character type, most probably commissioned by the sultan. Wandering in a faux pastoral, the nomadic dervish has no town, no ethnicity, and no specific territory. The craft (flute player, dervish) is the subject of the image, not his personal or even local identity. Moreover, the figure's eyes do not look out but down, reinforcing the image's stasis, and garments of excessive size displace his very body.

A series of the photographs that the Abdallah Frères shot in Cairo exists. Having taken the portrait of the khedive, they likely opened a branch of their studio in Cairo or at least produced portraits on the side while photographing Egypt for the sultan.⁴³

These Cairene portraits yield an insight into Ottoman photographic portraiture in the Arab provinces, especially when contrasted with “Sufi Musician.” For example, some images (Figure 5) replicate those by Sabunji and the Kovas, presenting a successful and secular native son, hat off, relaxed in a salon, looking into the future. The image is found in bourgeois communities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Pera to Beirut to Cairo. Moreover, the bust (Figure 6) is exactly what “Sufi Musician” is not: a full-headed representation of a local gentleman who masterfully looks directly into the camera. His disembodied shoulders and head express a corporeal and social presence absent in the full body shot of the dervish. This type of headshot was one of agency.

The bust resembles miniatures that were popular with Europe's ascendant bourgeoisie immediately before the dawn of photography. Similar oil paintings and miniatures of figures in grand regalia or military uniform were popular among Ottoman aristocracy and state officials. John Tagg notes that, rather than being killed by “mechanical reproduction,” “the aura of the precious miniature passes over” to photographic portraiture, which was utilized by the state and industry as a disciplinary practice to control and manage citizens, workers, criminals, and the mentally ill.⁴⁴

The observation seems accurate in the Ottoman Empire. Lemke, Faroqhi, and Micklewright note Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid's obsession with the craft and connect his desire to visually document every ethnicity, religious sect, profession, and territory to his control of the empire. However, Istanbul's interest in photography preceded ʿAbd al-Hamid, as we see in the officially patronized Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie, written by Osman Hamdy Bey and illustrated photographically by the well-known photographer Pascal Sébah, said by some to be of Levantine Arab origin.⁴⁵

Despite their minimalism, the Abdallah Frères' images of the Cairene bourgeoisie have an aura of their own, like the Beiruti portraits. The Hellenic columns, plush drapes, baroque chairs, books, and reading tables—ubiquitously found in portraits throughout the empire and in the West—“exude a civilizing and civilized air.”⁴⁶

The props possessed ideological gravity in the context of al-nahḍa al-ʿArabiyya, because they drew from a semiotic register that signified the European renaissance, which served as an inspiration if not ideological justification for al-nahḍa pioneers in their conceptualization of an enlightened Arab individual appropriate for the modern era.⁴⁷ Despite careful deployment of props, the focus of portraits in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the individual sitter, compelling the viewer to find meaning not in national allegory but in individual subjectivity first. This meaning was located in the personal identity of the individual, in the “desiring-self” who finds his identity in economic and social configurations that precede national identity. Lalvani, following the work of Freund, Tagg, and Sekula, refers to this meaning as production, stating that “19th century portraiture, in functioning to bring the body of ordinary experience to visibility and to think it into a normative order, became a disciplinary practice essential to the cultural reproduction of the individual and the family.”⁴⁸

The phenomenon of the rise of the modern individual and family was complicated by the colonial condition. In the case of Lebanon, the 19th-century political economy was transformed from a semifeudal to a capitalist economy that included a redistribution of resources and surplus capital along new class and confessional lines. These changes rearranged spatial and domestic economy as well as the economy of the self. This selfhood could be parochial or national, inclusive or exclusive. Hence, the specifically Lebanese-national subject appeared at the same time the Arab–Ottoman citizen was being formulated. Whereas in the 1850s and 1860s Butrus al-Bustani theorized the centrality of Lebanon in the political and cultural economy of Greater Syria, Bulous Nujaim wrote La Question de Liban in 1908, positing the unique economic, cultural, and geographic characteristics of Greater Lebanon.⁴⁹

These strains of thought generated various versions of “Lebanonism,” all of which shared a belief in the “innate” individualism of the Lebanese subject who is, at heart, a merchant and entrepreneur.⁵⁰ This genesis of the capitalist individual involved more than a realignment of political loyalties, communal loyalties, and economic possibilities. It demanded a drastic reorganization of the economy of the desiring self. However, the birth of the modern consumer in Lebanon had a unique configuration of political and subjective economies. Unlike the master narrative of the development of the bourgeois individual in the West, sectarianism, not secularism, combined with capitalism to define modern Lebanese identity, creating what Firro calls “the Lebanese system.” Within this system, emergent nationalist ideologies naturalized the concept of the eternal Lebanese subject as an “individual” whose inherent desire for commerce, if not commodity consumption, was an outgrowth of its imagined Phoenician heritage.

LEBANON AND THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE IMAGE

Thus far, I have focused on mostly Beirut-based studios to define an iconography and ideology of the photographic portrait that was informed by the intellectual and cultural activities of al-nahḍa. I argue that the later Lebanese self-image was rooted in the 19th-century reform movement. As an outgrowth of the Ottoman tanzimat, al-nahḍa al-ʿArabiyya stressed progress, civilization, and social order, as well as interconfessional unity and good citizenry. All desires and energies should be sublimated into pursuit of these goals—national goals of economic, political, and cultural advancement.

One of the means to achieve these goals included buying domestically produced goods rather than foreign ones. In the process of modernization, the empire had accumulated a crippling debt, resulting in the Capitulations that afforded the Great Powers extraterritorial privileges.⁵¹

These privileges were used to extract resources from the Arab provinces, as well as to cultivate local markets. Calling for a boycott of European products as early as 1870, Salim al-Bustani acknowledged the West's economic imperialism. He criticized the popularity of European goods in Syria and raised the issue of double exploitation, where raw materials were taken out of the East, refined into finished goods, and reimported to undersell local producers. Recognizing Europe's economic superiority, al-Bustani observed the widespread redundancy of cotton and silk mills in Lebanon, the destruction of local commerce, and the creation of the urban and rural poor.⁵²

Carolyn Gates corroborates al-Bustani's theory, showing that Lebanon never developed a manufacturing base, because it could import cheaper finished products from the West. Consequently, the economy's service and consumer sectors flourished in place of manufacturing.⁵³

By al-Bustani's birth, the silk industry—serving mills in France—had altered agricultural production throughout Lebanon. It was the source of cottage and ancillary industries that enriched some rural, mostly Christian, peasants while dispossessing others.⁵⁴ Along with local lending houses, Credit Lyonais opened a branch in Beirut in 1875. Indebted and pushed aside by the French in their move to patronize Christian peasantry and artisans, the traditional feudal and old urban merchant classes began to lose exclusive control of means of production and capital surplus.

Civil disturbances and the rise of sectarianism between 1840 and 1860 expressed changes in the demographic, class, and power structure within and among the Maronite, Orthodox, Sunni, and Druze communities.⁵⁵

By the end of the century, large swaths of the Christian peasantry had immigrated to the United States and South America. There, they worked as laborers and petty merchants, sending home remittances that constituted a large share of rural income.⁵⁶ In Lebanon, much of the peasantry was transformed into labor in the silk and tobacco industries, and new craftsmen, shopkeepers, and petty merchants appeared. By the 1920s, Lebanon had rebounded from the deprivations of the war years, and it began to transform itself into the liberal, laissez-faire economy that nationalist ideologues imagined it had been eternally. Lisa Thompson and Carolyn Gates show how the new middle class found employment in an array of public, private, and government services created by the French Mandate government particularly but not exclusively in Beirut.⁵⁷

This broad historical overview is meant only to give an idea of Beirut's rapid growth in wealth, power, and population. In 1892, a joint Lebanese–French enterprise built Beirut's port as a modern facility, and due to the volume of traffic, the Mandate government expanded it in 1938. This secured a virtual monopoly on the agricultural and commercial imports upon which Lebanon and Syria became dependent. Thompson states that “the Lebanese bourgeoisie profited heavily from the financial and service industries” surrounding the Beirut port, especially firms involved in “import–export … banking, shipping, and tourism,” not to mention the satellite services around this economy.⁵⁸

Consequently, the new workforce observed different social practices: women were educated and married, arranged marriages were becoming less acceptable, and couples bought separate homes from their parents, as the construction of innumerable multifloored apartment buildings in expanding Beirut attested.⁵⁹ May Davie shows this indirectly by studying the growth of the capital's new neighborhoods, whereas Robert Saliba and others provide the architectural morphology of their homes.⁶⁰

Even if the growing urban middle class was demographically small, its consumption patterns and social behavior were conspicuous and influential. Although not unique in the Middle East, Lebanon was a crucible for consumptive practices that served as an ideological statement for embourgeoisement. In the 1920s, Beirut became the city that its earliest theorist divined as “the link in the great chain between East and West and the past and present success.”⁶¹

From al-Jinan's first issue, al-Bustani praised Beirut for its economic ingenuity and ambition and criticized its inhabitants for their destructive consumption of foreign over domestically produced products. Émigré Jurji Zaydan and others wrote articles endorsing the consumption of nationally produced commodities and the dangers of unchecked consumerism of foreign goods.⁶² Attracted by economic opportunity and political stability, Butrus Labaki shows how education in Lebanon's secular and parochial schools facilitated social advancement in a new economic reality.⁶³ Their 19th-century graduates, among others, would be patrons of photographers like Sabunji, the Kovas, and the Abdallahs. Their portraitures represented for decades the social, economic, gender, and political ideals of the emerging bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and the culture they would forge.

THE PUNCTUM'S EVIDENCE

Certainly, the majority of Lebanese were not middle class or bourgeoisie by the 1920s and 1930s—to believe so would fall into the traps of Lebanese nationalist myth. The fifty dynamic years of social and economic transformations were the soil from which a native bourgeois culture sprouted and that it nourished in turn. Photography was keen to evince this culture, which became synonymous with Lebanese modernity and nationalism. Distinguishing between bourgeois portraits and “Sufi Musician” differentiates between active subjects and passive objects of photography but also between bourgeois and subaltern subjects. When we look at portraits of nonbourgeois subjects, the indexical and representational content of the images is often quite different.

Unlike the subject of “Sufi Musician,” we know the names of the 1920s montagnards in Figure 7 (left to right): Jirjis Bou Zeid, Yusuf al-Saqqi, and Elias al-Makari. Their arms, costumes, and stiff frontal postures resemble “criminal” portraiture and images of “rebels” in revolt against the French occupation.⁶⁴

These photographs reproduce the stereotypical representation of a specific typos found in nationalist discourse, that of the mountain clansman. These “highlanders” may reflect the idealized “ruggedness” and independence of the rural Lebanese identity that the Jesuit priest Herni Lammens created, Amin Rihani valorized, and Christian nationalists championed.⁶⁵ Simultaneously, the traits that they represent (tribalism, feudalism, parochialism, and ignorance) are antithetical to the values of modernity and liberal individualism. If nothing else, the portraits convey a sense of the rujūla that Zaydan identified in the hooliganism of his youth.⁶⁶ For him, this popular machismo had little interest in the production of modern knowledge and entrepreneurial capital, let alone social order.

Despite this stereotype, the subaltern subjectivity of the montagnards conveys a “punctum,” as Roland Barthes writes, that maintains a tension with the other images we have seen.⁶⁷

It has been suggested that photography liberalized the economy of visual representation, enabling those previously excluded, like the rural Lebanese peasant, to participate in self-representation. Yet, John Tagg has shown that although photography offered a more “democratic” symbolic order, it also ushered the nonbourgeoisie into a representational system that bound them securely to dominant discourses of class hierarchy and state power.⁶⁸

The colonial condition further complicates the class-state configuration. Representing the peasant family was a matter of signifying tradition and community, not modernity or individualism. In contrast, the photographs of Sabunji, the Kovas, and the Abdallahs assisted in naturalizing and disseminating the ethos of the bourgeois self that purported the importance of individualism and the production of private capital (whether that be intellectual or financial).

Buttressed by histories, journals, and fiction, some of which I have mentioned, the images served a double function for bourgeois individualism, one public and the other private. As in the West, the family in turn of the century Lebanon began to represent itself as self-contained and apart from society, even apart from church/mosque and state.⁶⁹

Such an assertion seems rife with contradictions when considering the hegemony of the confessional system in Lebanon. However, the image is informed by secular indices. For example, many of the photographs of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, Christian and Muslim, are similar in more than displaying unveiled women. The secular image offered a trajectory that was exclusively social, illustrating mobility, modernity, and al-nahḍa-informed social progress.⁷⁰

FAMILY HISTORY

If this secular schema resonates too closely with the photographic history of the bourgeois family in the West, critical differences exist in Lebanon, particularly the triumph of a “culture of sectarianism.”⁷¹

Created in the 19th century and institutionalized during the Mandate, sectarianism, not bourgeois secularism, became a keystone of independent Lebanon. Firro reveals a process of social and political recoding during the Mandate wherein the “coalescence of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ (i.e., the preservation of the traditional patterns within modern socioeconomic structures) created the ‘political field’ of the new state.”⁷² He shows how zaʿīm-client relations were recoded by French colonial policies and ruling-class ideologies. Therefore, the timeless veneer of “traditional” confessionalism had the modern function of perpetuating elites' control of indigenous modes of production and their monopoly on surplus capital.

If religious communalism served the interests of ruling elites by displacing class antagonism, the photograph albums of families such as the Sursocks, Boustroses (Bistris), Pharaons, Eddehs, al-Hosses, Baltajis, al-Solhs, and Salams provided a normative, shared secular image through which the cross-confessional elites perceived and promoted themselves.⁷³

Meir Zamir comments that Mandate Lebanon was not a “corporation of communities” but of “beys,” thereby preventing the consolidation of a unified, secular civitas.⁷⁴ However, the portraiture of this corporation bound the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie within a common representational field. This representational field was secular, educated, publicly decorous, privately moral, and centered around the individual and family. As the defining social unit, the Lebanese family was unable to separate its identity from the representations, commodities, practices, and spaces that signified it as modern.⁷⁷

Critiquing the master narratives of the modern history of the family, Beshara Doumani notes that the subject involves three interlocking “prestige zones” in Middle Eastern studies: gender, Islam, and modernity.⁷⁶

Doumani substantiates that “the family” is historically contingent on intersecting social, cultural, and economic spheres and interdependent issues of religion, gender roles, state power, morality, space, and modes of production. Doumani posits that the family's mobility and fragmentation were not new conditions brought upon by capitalism and modernity but predate them. Moreover, the importance of kinship relations increased during the modern period in order to facilitate the circulation of capital and its social relations.⁷⁷ These conclusions agree with Samih Farsoun's analysis that family networks dominated business and political relations in Lebanon throughout the 20th century. However, they disagree with his notion of an unchanging “kinship organization,” which allegedly “remained fundamentally the same … during the Mandate era.”⁷⁸

Akram Khater challenges Farsoun's static family, showing that “between 1890 and 1920 the Lebanese expatriate community constructed a new set of relations that were neither modern nor traditional, neither Eastern nor Western. Rather, these new identities were peculiar to their individual, familial, and communal historical experiences.”⁷⁹

Indeed, the North American immigrant communities were not removed from social developments in the homeland. The modern family that was proposed to the immigrant was predicated on “a love that develops between a young man and a young woman without interference from their families. The purity of this love (juxtaposed with the oppressive ‘horror’ of arranged marriages) was expected to spawn a new and separate household made up of wife, husband, and children.”⁸⁰ The Lebanese subject, however, did not have to emigrate to discover this paradigm.

The idea of romantic love between individuals with free will was propagated by Lebanese intellectuals for decades, from Salim al-Bustani and Niqula al-Haddad to Gibran and Tawfiq ʿAwad. This ideal relationship was predicated upon an a priori extracommunal individual, a self-contained subject with incumbent rights and personal desires in and of himself or herself. Adib Ishaq (1856–85), Francis Marrash (1836–73), and many of the aforementioned authors contemplated this universal, humanist subject.⁸¹

Therefore, reform literature and thought served a key ideological service that photography animated. I am suggesting that these cultural productions reified the “individual” as the primordial unit of the socius. Even if one had to subordinate personal desires to national interests, the nation was composed of individuals (afrād).⁸² This individualist core of the national subject emerges as a tour de force in nascent exclusionary Lebanese nationalists such as Naʿum Mukarzil, the editor of The Syrian Business Journal, who imagined capitalistic individualism as a national trait.⁸³ The bourgeois, individualist notions of love, marriage, and family that Khater's immigrant encountered in al-mahjar had been introduced through the print media and popularized by photography in Lebanon by the turn of the century.

THE LEBANESE IMAGO

Faroqhi states that by the late Ottoman Empire, Muslim upper-class family portraits “were already a part of everyday life. Women, particularly younger women, of that class, including the Sultan's daughters, liked to be photographed without veils and in European dress … pictured at the grand piano or holding a violin.”⁸⁴

The handful of nontechnical articles on photography in turn of the century journals weave through issues of gender, domesticity, consumption, and visual representation, appearing in columns with such names as “Organizing the Home.” A subsection of one such commentary, “Arrangement of Pictures,” states that photographs should be plentiful in the home, put in albums, and exhibited in the home's salon (ghurfat al-istiqbāl). The pictures “should be gathered in frames which you can make for little expense” from cardboard and dressed in satin, velvet, or some fabric. “You can gather” and arrange these photographs “above one another so you fill the space where you receive guests. You can spread them out on a table and stand them up in a zigzag pattern so that every picture can be seen …”⁸⁵

The fact that the subsection is nestled in between “Education of Children” and “A Cheerful Face Not Expensive Furniture” underscores that photography was seen as a domestic practice, one that would make visible the social aspirations of the family. The deployment of images in the salon advertised the visual hierarchy of the new family to its members and outsiders. An image by an unknown Sabunji brother (M. Saboungi) presents the ideal Lebanese comprador family. Like many Lebanese elites, Michel Fahoum had a thriving business in Cairo and commercial and political interests in Lebanon.⁸⁶

It is very likely that the family, or at least son Jurji, returned to Beirut. He appears there in photographs taken in the 1930s with peers from prominent cross-sectarian families such as the Hoss and Salam families. The Fahoum studio portrait is illustrative of bourgeois family structure, where the father was the productive head of the pyramid and the mother was the reproductive base (Figure 8). The father as productive head makes clear that he was the source of the capital accumulation that made consumption possible. Less an act of mimicry of the West, the consumption of goods from clothes to household items was therefore an ideological statement for the Lebanese family. Its ability to consume—as facilitated by the father's mercantile or bureaucratic work—identified the native family as modern.

In contrast, the middle-class mother as the family's reproductive base differed from the multitasking working and peasant mother. She was responsible for the family's ideological as much as their biological reproduction and her children's moral and social education, which ensured the longevity of a modern society. Her public image represented the family's private space. In this respect, the family portrait animated the internalization of the vision of the earliest proponents for the emancipation and education of Lebanese women as formulated by Lebanese intellectuals across confessions from Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq to the Bustanis to ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Qabbani.⁸⁷

If commentaries and editorials in Arabic journals dictated a normative behavior, the content and deployment of the family portrait animated this behavior. They were public statements of the inner space of the home and its relation to the individuality and identity of its occupants.

This domestic space defined the bourgeois family's immediate identity, setting lines of inclusion and exclusion. In Figure 9, the children of Sʿad al-ʿAlam form a wall behind the family patriarch that demarcates him as central to knowledge, order, reproduction, and capital. Sʿad founded a school in northern Lebanon, al-ʿAlamiyya, where his son, Najib, taught and which he later ran. His sisters flanking him, Najib stands at the center as his father's legacy. The wall of siblings blocks out those who are peripheral to the modern vision of self and family—whether they are the extended family or the lower classes.

This exclusion divulges the bourgeoisie's need to distance itself from “tradition.” The need arose from middle- and ruling-class anxieties about the rural and urban underclass, which Jens Hanssen adeptly draws out.⁸⁸

He shows that the middle class—along with their organic intellectuals, from Butrus al-Bustani to Jurji Zaydan—created a moral and civic code of behavior based on “personal effort” that dissociated them from the tribalism of the populari. Al-ʿAlam's compositional exclusion of those in the image's background has the effect of identifying the insular family. Simultaneously, it distances the family from its archaic nativeness and its correlate ignorance and backwardness. These pejorative terms were used by intellectuals and educators not unlike Sʿad and Najib al-ʿAlam to describe the “old mentality” (al->ʿaql al-qadīm) of peasants, rural poor, and these montagnards [Figure 7], who are from Zghorta, the same village as al-ʿAlam.⁸⁹ The image of the “modern” individual and family was the shared goal to which the bourgeoisie of every confession aspired in order to distinguish themselves from feudalism and “decadence.”

In this historical vein, Graham-Brown warns that “it would be rash to assume that the families in these portraits automatically fit into the mould of the Western bourgeois family.”⁹⁰

She is correct that these images should be examined with critical caution as empirical documentation of emergence of a modern middle class. However, the historical record contradicts her contention that the family portrait “rarely reflected either reality or even expectations” of their models. If nothing else, the photographic image was a concrete discursive phenomenon. In her words, photography represented “the family's self-image and aspirations.”⁹¹ As we will see, the portrait is a gestalt of the individual and family, expressing their expected or perceived experience.

The nuclear family was not the mark of modernity in Lebanon. Rather, the native bourgeois family, whether it was the affluent Fahoums or the educated al-ʿAlams, portended to possess the qualities of capitalist modernity (family unity, decency, success, education, capital). The individuals of the family strove to match the imago of the bourgeois family (the father as productive head and mother as reproductive base) as represented by photography. For Lacan, the imago is the mirror image of the self, reflecting back to the infant a complete ontological presence. Simultaneously, the ego finds itself as the other in the mirror image, forming the “imaginary” basis for the ideal ego and thereby allowing the self-entry into the symbolic social.⁹²

The photographic imago during al-nahḍa was inspiration for and justification of bourgeois subjectivity, its desires, and socioeconomic trajectory. The young Edgar Mishaqa assumed editorship of his father's journal, Najib became the principal of al-ʿAlamiyya, and the teen Fahoum returned to Beirut to associate with the elite families responsible for establishing an independent Lebanon. Therefore, the photographic imago not only expressed what it meant to be a modern family and individual but also defined the role of each member and what he/she should desire to be.

THE KODAK CAMERA AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

Although studio portraiture remained important throughout the 20th century in Beirut, Kodak and Brownie cameras were the choice of many serious amateur photographers in Lebanon, such as Hanna and Najib al-ʿAlam, Marie el-Khazen, and Salim Abu ʿIzz al-din. A technological wonder of the age, Eastman's Kodak was the perfect mechanism to commute seamlessly between private and public spaces. Imported into the Ottoman Empire in 1888 by Onig Diradorian, the Brownie ensured mass access to photography, or at least middle-class access to it. Its accessibility, ease, and mobility tightly fastened the new bourgeois individual to the commodity culture that represented him/her. Along with the image it produced, the Kodak itself was a commodity that reproduced and signified a personal identity and experience that was uniquely modern.

One advertisement makes this correlation between consumerism, personal identity, and photography unequivocal. Along with a picture of the Kodak, the advertisement's headlines read, “Do you remember your first ride in a car? Do you remember the first time you rode a bicycle [darrāja]?”⁹³

Although the illustrated magazine was Egyptian-based and edited by an expatriate Lebanese, it reminds us of less articulate advertisements for cameras in Beirut's numerous magazines. Iskander Makarius, another Lebanese expatriate in Egypt and science commentator for al-Muqtataf, foreshadowed the sentiment of the Kodak advertisement regarding personal experience. Before establishing his own illustrated magazine, al-Lataءif al-musawwara, he wrote a brief history of the photographic negative. In it, he claimed that the Kodak introduced a “new era” for photography, or what he termed “the current era of the film-negative.” The size of a book and easy to use, “tourists who visit Egypt in the winter don't go anywhere without their Kodak. With it, they bind onto the face of the film the images of views [manāẓir], which they enjoy looking at after returning to their country.”⁹⁴ The article lauds the Kodak as a tour de force of modernity. Precise and mobile, its snapshots presented a personal self, a self of experience that was both public and private. Even Kodak's own Arabic-language manual, How to Take Perfect Photos: A Guide to Amateur Photography, disclosed the camera's ability to capture the ubiquity and transparency of this experience, stating, “In the home or outside of it in public, the Kodak will give you photographs more exact than a photograph on polished glass.”⁹⁵

Likewise, the Kodak advertisement related the camera to the automobile, the increased popularity and availability of which coincided with the first decade of the Mandate. The two are experiential prostheses, status symbols, and technological hallmarks of the mechanical age. Images of automobiles abound in the personal and public albums of Lebanese, produced by ordinary middle-class citizens like the al-ʿAlams (Figure 10) as well as elites like the affluent, photophilic Pharaons (Figure 11), who seemed to define style in Mandate Lebanon as much as they enjoyed taking photographs of themselves.⁹⁶

A definitive social and economic statement of their age, these images document that the car owner is distinct from his or her peasant, rural counterpart. It is not coincidental that the automobiles in these images often appear outside the city (Figure 10), in rural environments, in villages, on beaches, or in valleys and mountains (Figure 12). The clusters of individuals within each automobile signify social intersections among the family, its friends, and its outside environs. A recent exhibit entitled The Vehicle confirms what innumerable advertisements for cars in Beiruti magazines demonstrate: that the car detached its owner from peasant origins and community, making him or her mobile, modern subjects of experience as opposed to a subject defined by genealogy, tribe, or sect.⁹⁷ The Kodak was the tool to present a gestalt of the Lebanese individual. She or he is a familial, a class, a confessional, a gendered, and a national subject, but these overlapping subjectivities emanated from the totality of a monadic experiential individual.

THE INDIVIDUAL, COMMODITIES, AND BEYOND

The Kodak represented the family as one, albeit central, defining element in the totality of the individual. Another term particular to the gestalt of the Lebanese individual was a person's relationship to commodity consumption. Lauded by nationalists and decried by romantics like Rihani and Gibran, the proliferation of commodities in Beirut defined it as an entrepôt but also as a capital of consumption. Photography documented this inventory of the things that could not be separated from Lebanese bourgeoisie identity, things that located it within modernity.

The image of Marie el-Khazen's nephew in Beirut (Figure 13) articulates how photography promulgated the signs of modern consumption and its role in social order but also individual and class identity. The image exemplifies the lessons of modern child rearing that regularly appeared in the print media of the day, intended to elevate a new generation of mothers, fathers, and children. For example, Rose Yusuf, born Fatimah Yusuf in Lebanon (1858–1958), who became the consummate middle-class critic, argues in her al-Marءa al-jadida that the negative effects of consumerism on men, women, and particularly children can be counterbalanced through the correct combination of “nationalistic activities, music, sports, and various kinds of beneficial play and leisure.”⁹⁸

We know nothing about the boy in this image other than that he was related to el-Khazen (1899–1983), a rare example of an amateur woman photographer. El-Khazen, the daughter of an aristocratic family that had managed to transform itself into a member of the new capitalist and sectarian elite, was an active socialite. An extremely prolific amateur, her images and the thousands of undeveloped negatives she left upon her death are untitled and undated.⁹⁹ The class identity of this boy is apparent. The parents have surrounded him with the requisite emblems of modernity (piano, drum, ball, toy soldier, rifle, and automobile), urbanely demonstrating the correct way to be a consumer.

El-Khazen's class status comes through clearly in her images and is closely associated with the consumerist compulsion of the 1920s. A comic in al-Musawwar, a journal run by Zaydan's sons Emile and Shakib, illustrates the collapse of the commodity with bourgeois identity as well as the gendered bourgeois body. In the comic, the head and limbs of a woman are drawn as dismembered from her jacket, skirt, and shoes; only together do they make a complete composite picture. The caption reads, “Woman as a woman sees her [the clothes]. Woman as man sees her [the body].”¹⁰⁰

This article negligently overlooks the critical fact that gender was a linchpin between consumerism, photography, and bourgeois self-formation. However, I would like to acknowledge how this linchpin was articulated by el-Khazen's oeuvre and the cartoon's caption. They narrate the collapse of modern female subjectivity with her objectified body and the commodities that delineated it and her “individuality.”

The folding of the commodity into the subject made it constitutive of bourgeois selfhood as much as the family. The consumption of commodities—house, automobile, camera, clothes, mass-produced toys, instruments, and so on—signified that the owner was a modern desiring individual. This took on an added ideological tenor in the Lebanese context as the Mandate government institutionalized the “open economy” of the republic. Nationalist ideologues such as Chiha, Samné, Corm, and Malek helped the French and Lebanese theorize how capitalist commerce and consumption were national traits that distinguished Lebanese from their backward Arab brethren. The photograph condensed commodities with these national, class, and familial elements of the individual self. For example, although residents of the rural North, Najib and his brother, Hanna, a Paris-educated physician, frequented Beirut and represented themselves in their photography as urban, cosmopolitan men. Therefore, by photographing themselves and their family in front of Beirut landmarks such as al-Manara (Figure 10) and el-Rawcheh (Figure 14), they are clearly expressing an ideological position regarding their own personal identities, their social and special mobility, and their representational and class differences from their Zghortawi concitoyen. Therefore, the brothers' album presents a group of educated, well-dressed, “modern” Lebanese siblings, each with shared but individual identities.

El-Khazen's portfolio extends beyond the al-ʿAlams in number and scope. Her endless images document her home, friends, relatives, and travels throughout Lebanon, from Baʿlbek to Maʿamaltain to ʿAkkar. Unmarried, independent, and reminiscent of Gertrude Bell, her photographs of peasants and bedouin display an anthropological impulse. These images are sensitive and anticipate the photographic oeuvre of photophilic bedouin scholars like Jibraءil Jabbur. Despite this, the images have the effect of representing subaltern classes as traditional and communal (Figure 15) in contrast to her own bourgeois individualism. Her ethnographic photographs are compendia to the solitary images of el-Khazen. Always well dressed, she poses alone at the Beirut port, on a rocky harbor, on a beach (Figure 16), on a nameless mountain, or at a peasant's farm. The sartorial signifiers melt into these solitary images to communicate the liberty and independence of Marie in the mode of Gertrude Bell. Like Bell, her photography commutes between classes, confessionals, and provinces without disturbing her own individual identity. If commodity consumption was an ideological statement of national identity in the much-lauded “Switzerland of the East,” the personal experience invoked by al-ʿAlam's and el-Khazen's cameras was as separate from the nation as much as it was a part of it.

Photography in the early decades of the 20th century manifested an original compulsion to first find one's being in the desire for things, not only in the things themselves. It reinforced the myth narrated in contemporaneous Lebanese romantic literature, that the subject could leave the confines of capitalist and national space and time. In this fiction, commodities that illustrate the young lovers' class identity disappear from sites where they fall in love, such as gardens, mountains, streets, or fields. Lovers—usually compradors or enlightened peasants—assert their individuality and establish lives apart from their oppressive parents, evil uncles, wicked aunts, or covetous cousins—not to mention tyrannical oligarchs and repressive tradition.¹⁰¹

The amateur snapshot acted similarly, albeit in a less conspicuous way. Like the image of Khazen fishing on the beach, the photograph disassociated Lebanese bourgeois subjects from necessity itself and even removed them from the very property and commodities that gave them their national and class identity as modern subjects.¹⁰²

The ability to recognize class with minimal visual and material markers signifies that photography created a new priority for identity, that selfhood of the individual is a priori. The body is a self-contained “zone of signification” for individual selfhood that precedes the social relations of communal, class, and national identity.¹⁰³

The photography of al-ʿAlam and el-Khazen interweaves individual experiences with overlapping national, class, and familial identities (children, wives, siblings, and friends, and homes and cars). The individual experience of the bourgeois Lebanese as embodied by their self-representation found its ontology in the things of modernity, in modes of production particular to it, and the places and spaces that are exclusive to consumer culture. At the same time, the bourgeois individual precedes this ontology, existing separately from society, just like Marie on the beach. Amateur photographs such as those displayed by Najib al-ʿAlam's image in the mirror (Figure 17) are literally the imago of the bourgeois self. His photograph is a distilled imago of his selfhood, which supersedes the commodities of his toilette, in the foreground. As in all snapshot representation, he exists as an individual, both part of and apart from his national and class identity.

The photograph animated the disappearance of the commodity into body seamlessly. It is instrumental in an ontological–political mystification, that is, the individual—upon which national, confessional, and class affiliation transpires—rests on the naturalness of a desiring self. Amateur photography, even more than studio photography, shows how the private self—the individual—finds its signifiers in commodities. Upon their naturalization, these commodities could disappear, because the desiring subject itself became a signifier for them. In Lebanon, this gestalt of individual selfhood is codified in its constitution, adopted in 1926. The preamble, Article 8 (personal liberty), Article 13 (expression), and Article 15 (property) protected “liberty of the individual” and ensured “private initiative and the right of private property,” protecting the sanctity of the home, conscience, religious belief, assembly, representation, and education.