A Social History of Early Arab Photogra PDF

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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 39 (2007), 175–206. Printed in the United States of America
DOI: 10.1017.S0020743807070067
Stephen Sheehi
A S O C IA L H IS T O R Y O F E A R L Y A R A B
PH O TO GRAPH Y O R A PRO LEGO M EN O N TO AN
A R C H A E O L O G Y O F T H E L E B A N E S E IM A G O
Viewing anexhibition 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].”1 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.2
O T T O M A N TA N Z IM AT, A R A B R E F O R M , A N D S E C O N D A R Y
L IT E R AT U R E
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-nah.da al-Arabiyya (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
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.
© 2007 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/07 $15.00

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176 Stephen Sheehi
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 pho-
tographs. 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 form 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, Christo-
pher 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 for almost fifty years.10 In their study of postcards, Alloula and 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 Rad and his partners and in-
laws, Garabed and Johannes Krikorian.14 Subsequently, Annelies Moors, focusing on
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A Social History of Early Arab Photography 177
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 nah.da 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 regard-
ing 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 mod-
ernization.” Noting that Sultan Abd 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 Abd al-Hamid’s photographilia, noting that the sultan’s “many albums
were devoted to largely 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
A L -N A H. D A A L - A R A B IY YA , N AT IV E IN D IV ID U A L , A N D T H E R O O T S
O F LEBA N ESE PH OTO G RA PH Y
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, be-
cause 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 be-
came 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 Aoun in Beirut, Suleiman Hakim in Damascus, Lekegian in
Cairo, the Krikorians and Rad in Palestine, and Kamil al-Qareh, Muhammad al-Arabi,
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178 Stephen Sheehi
and Wadi 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. Tarrazi
states that he was the first “to introduce the art of photography [al-tas.wı̄r al-shamsı̄] 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 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 photog-
rapher 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, nah.da intellectuals, and the reform-
minded ruling class gave him a central role in popularizing the visual semiotics of nah.da
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 last 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-Matbaa 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-nah.da, 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;
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FIGURE 1. (Left) Jurjis Sabunji, Shaykh Effendi al-Khuri, n.d., and (right) Jirjis Sabunji, n.d. Reprinted with
permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
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-Arabiyya provides portraits of journalists, intellectuals,
publishers, and educators, celebrating them as the heroes of al-nah.da. 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
FIGURE 2. Jirjis Sabunji, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
180 Stephen Sheehi
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 cod-
ify 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 [tas.wı̄r],” 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 nah.da portraiture (Fig. 3) is its very strength. Again, each model’s
clothes are stylized, as are his body language and surroundings. His tarbush 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 distin-
guishable 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
FIGURE 3. The Kova, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
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FIGURE 4. Abdallah Frères, “Sufi Musician,” n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab
Image.
national class. Indeed, the al-Muqtataf article entitled “Syrian Photography” lauds these
two photographers as “sons of the nation” and therefore 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 Abdallah
(d. 1918), 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 Abd al-Aziz and then to Abd 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 Abd al-Aziz 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’ relations 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.
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182 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 5. Abdallah Frères, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
A series of the photographs 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
FIGURE 6. Abdallah Frères, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
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 reproduc-
tion,” “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 Abd 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. But Istanbul’s
interest in photography preceded Abd 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 as and in the West—“exude a civilizing and civilized air.”46 The props
possessed ideological gravity in the context of al-nah.da al-Arabiyya, because they
drew from a semiotic register that signified the European Renaissance, which served
as an inspiration if not ideological justification for al-nah.da pioneers in their concep-
tualization 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 con-
figurations that precede national identity. Lalvani, following the work of Freund, Tagg,
and Sekula, refers to this meaning 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, Nujaim
wrote La Question de Liban in 1908, positing the unique economic, cultural, and geo-
graphic 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
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184 Stephen Sheehi
capitalist individual involved more than a realignment of political loyalties, communal

loyalties, and economic possibilities. It demanded a drastic reorganization of the econ-
omy 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.
L E B A N O N A N D T H E S O C IA L H IS T O R Y O F T H E IM A G E
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-nah.da. I argue that the later Lebanese self-image was rooted in the
19th-century reform movement. As an outgrowth of the Ottoman tanzimat, al-nah.da al-
Arabiyya 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 accu-
mulated 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 Euro-
pean 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 devel-
oped 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 dispos-
sessing 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,
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
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 commer-
cial 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 Con-
sequently, 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.
T H E P U N C T U M ’S E V ID E N C E
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
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186 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 7. (Left to right) Kamil al-Qareh: Jirjis Bou Zeid, Yusuf al-Saqqi, Elias al-Makari, 1920–30.
Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
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): Elias al-Makari, Yusuf al-Saqqi, and Jirjis Bou Zeid. 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 Simultane-
ously, 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 rujula 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 “punc-
tum,” 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, 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,
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
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-nah.da-
informed social progress.70
FA M ILY H IS T O R Y
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 zaim-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 an-
tagonism, 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, sec-
ular 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.75
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 in-
terdependent 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,
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
188 Stephen Sheehi
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 Awad. 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 photog-
raphy 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 Naum 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 to the print media and popularized by photography in Lebanon by
the turn of the century.
T H E L E B A N E S E IM A G O
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,
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
FIGURE 8. M. Saboungi: Fahoum Family in Cairo (Jirjis, Michel, Rose, Renée, and Aida), 1920. Reprinted
with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
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 (Fig. 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 so-
cial 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 Ah-
mad Faris al-Shidyaq to the Bustanis to Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani.87 If commentaries and
editorials in Arabic journals dictated a normative behavior, the content and deployment
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
190 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 9. Hanna al-Alam: Sad al-Alam with his children (Zeina, Najib, and Wise), 1920. Reprinted with
permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
of the family portrait animated this behavior. They were public statements of the inner
space of 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 Sad al-Alam form a wall behind
the family patriarch that demarcates him as central to knowledge, order, reproduction,
and capital. Sad founded a school in northern Lebanon, al-Alamiyya, at which his son,
Najib, taught and 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-Alam’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 Sad and
Najib al-Alam to describe the “old mentality” (al-aql al-qadı̄m) of peasants, rural
poor, and these montagnards [Figure 7],” who are from Zghorta, the same village as
al-Alam.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
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
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-Alams, por-
tended 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-nah.da was inspiration for and justification of bour-
geois subjectivity, its desires, and socioeconomic trajectory. The young Edgar Mishaqa
assumed editorship of his father’s journal, Najib became the principal of al-Alamiyya,
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.
T H E K O D A K C A M E R A A N D P E R S O N A L E X P E R IE N C E
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-Alam, Marie el-Khazen, and Salim Abu Izz
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-owned
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 sen-
timent of the Kodak advertisement regarding personal experience. Before establishing
his own illustrated magazine, al-Lataif 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 [manāz.ir], 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,
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
192 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 10. Najib al-Alam: Mazraa [view of al-Manar in Ras Beirut], 1927. Reprinted with permission of
the Foundation for the Arab Image.
a self of experience that was both public and private. Even Kodak’s own Arab-world
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-Alams (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
FIGURE 11. Yvette Pharaon, Home in Aley, anon., 1936. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for
the Arab Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
FIGURE 12. Marie el-Khazen, anon., 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab
Image.
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 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.
T H E IN D IV ID U A L , C O M M O D IT IE S , A N D B E Y O N D
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 pho-
tography 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-Mara al-jadida that the negative effects of consumerism on men, women, and
particularly children can be counterbalanced through the correct combination of “na-
tionalistic 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 Khazen
(1899–1983), a rare example of an amateur woman photographer. Khazen, a daughter
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
194 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 13. Marie el-Khazen, anon., 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab
Image.
in 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.
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 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, automo-
bile, 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
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
FIGURE 14. Hanna al-Alam, “Najib, Zeina, and Wise al-Alam” at Rawcheh, 1928. Reprinted with permis-
sion of the Foundation for the Arab Image.
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 indi-
vidual 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 “Sakharat
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.
Khazen’s portfolio extends beyond the al-Alams in number and scope. Her end-
less images document her home, friends, relatives, and travels throughout Lebanon,
from Baalbek to Maamaltain to Akkar. 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 pho-
tophilic bedouin scholars like Jibrail 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 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-Alam’s and Khazen’s cameras was as separate from the nation as much as it was
a part of it.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
196 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 15. Marie Khazen [Rural Men Dabkeh], 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for
the Arab Image.
Photography in the early decades of the 20th century manifested an original compul-
sion 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 bour-
geois 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.
FIGURE 16. Marie el-Khazen, Marie on the beach at Jounieh, 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the
Foundation for the Arab Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
FIGURE 17. Najib al-Alam, self-portrait, 1930. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab
Image.
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 the al-Alams and 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-Alam’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 natu-
ralness 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 lib-
erty), Article 13 (expression), and Article 15 (property) protected “liberty of the in-
dividual” and ensured “private initiative and the right of private property,” protecting
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
198 Stephen Sheehi
the sanctity of the home, conscience, religious belief, assembly, representation, and
education.
C O N C L U S IO N
The 1926 Lebanese Constitution expressed the consolidation of a bourgeois identity,

which begs this article to conclude on another set of images that transmitted to an
individual the subjectivity its framers assumed lay at the foundation of national identity.
Odalisque-like, Lutfiyya’s sensuous photograph (Figure 18) occupies a place among a
large photographic collection taken by her husband, Salim Abu Izz al-din (1873–1943).
If Khazen’s photographs document her life of privilege, individuality, and independence,
then Abu Izz al-din weaves a narrative of earned accomplishment. A Druze born
in Abadieh and educated at the prestigious Brummana High School, Abu Izz al-din
was an official in the Maritime Company in Istanbul, an employee of the British High
Commission in Cairo, an “Officer of the British Empire,” and, finally, Assistant Director-
General of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior. His large collection presents a public and
private gentleman couched in images of a well-dressed and dignified Lutfiyya and his
two children (Aziza and Fuad) as well as their friends, dog, houses, servants, horses,
and gardens in Lebanon and Egypt. The public face puts forth the man in his official
capacity as a state functionaire, dignified and commanding (Figure 19). The private is
a bourgeois individual, relaxed but confident, dapper, and educated (as signaled by the
tarbush; Figure 20). As a male, the two are inevitably connected.
Taken in 1902, the image of a reclining Lutfiyya contrasts with those of her properly
dressed in front of her house, in her parlor, or with her children, sisters, and friends.
It sharply conveys Lutfiyya’s agency, which is not as sexual in nature as much as it
is libidinal. Less an economy of sexual instincts, libidinal energies are projective and
find satisfaction in specific object relations.104 Lutfiyya’s body is washed in light; her
sensual eye contact with the camera held by her husband and her long, flowing hair
are statements of desire. The image announces the desires of her position as a wife,
a mother, a consumer, and as desired object. Not as passive as the manifest content
FIGURE 18. Salim Abu Izz al-din, Lutfiyya, 1902. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab
Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
FIGURE 19. Salim Abu Izz al-din, on a boat to Istanbul from Egypt, ca. 1898. Reprinted with permission of
the Foundation for the Arab Image.
suggests, the activity of her desire is signified by her affectionate and unabashed eye
contact. Lutfiyya’s unrestrained comfort rests on the couch that serves as the backdrop
for the many images of her children and even a dog. The couch that first signifies the
family and then itself as a commodity, therefore, informs the identity of Lutfiyya, who is
visibly a desiring self that presupposes her class, confessional, and/or national identity.
As an amateur photograph, Lutfiyya’s image is rare for its age. However, by the 1920s,
its narrative had become commonplace in bourgeois photography. The constitution
summed up the imago of the self-contained Lebanese as represented in al-Alam’s
FIGURE 20. Abu Izz al-din [Salim in his garden in Egypt], 1902. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation
for the Arab Image.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
200 Stephen Sheehi
FIGURE 21. Marie el-Khazen, Sister Hoda, 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the
Arab Image.
self-portrait in the mirror (Figure 17) or images of individuals in nature, such as Khazen
on the beach (Figure 16). In this way, the photograph of Khazen’s sister is a nexus of
several of the issues previously discussed (Figure 21). A wife of a Lebanese merchant
living in Egypt, her direct eye contact with the camera indicates an activity upon which
we accept her as a subject of leisure. This active agency is the source of object relations
that define her personal identity, her identity as a desiring self. In her ancestral home, her
feet rest on a crate of imported French Vegetalin, her body reclines in a wicker rocker, and
one of the two mirrors that appear in several other images of the Khazen family forms the
background. Living in Egypt, she is a member of the privileged expatriate community
that could maintain residence in Lebanon and abroad. As the wife of a merchant, she
represents commerce along with bourgeois domesticity. These qualities take on a further
nationalistic tenor when realizing that she was a daughter of an aristocrat. The image
sums up the various aforementioned tenets of the liberal constitution that undercut the
normative representational field of the bourgeois individual in Lebanon. That Khazen’s
sister is an émigré to Egypt further calls attention to the Ottoman legacy of Lebanon’s
bourgeoisie and reminds us of the economic and cultural connections between cities like
Cairo and Beirut; Lebanese compradors owned businesses and journals in Egypt and
worked in schools and the government, only later to return to Lebanon and join the new,
landed middle class.
In this less than comprehensive prolegomenon, I have regrettably ignored a nuanced
unpacking of gender’s role in photography, consumerism, and bourgeois subjectivity, nor
have I discussed how representation of peasants, proletarians, lumpen classes, soldiers,
students, and clerics played an active role in identity formation throughout Lebanon.
Rather, this article scratches at how photography in Lebanon served to reify the imago
of a bourgeois individual who was a composite totality of private and public identities.
This article begins to explain how the photographic image naturalized the discourses of
individualist, class, nationalist, and consumer desire that were germinated in the political
economy and the organic intellectual culture both preceding and during the French Man-
date. Indeed, the photographic practices of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean—whether
Arab, Turkish, or Armenian—similarly represented the process of embourgeoisement
under way in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, Haifa, and Istanbul. Similarities aside, the
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
socioeconomic and cultural history of Mandate Lebanon contrasts with this history
of Palestine, Syria, or the more economically diverse, affluent, and powerful Egypt.
Photography assisted in instituting a new process of desiring capitalist production,
accumulation, and consumption in Lebanon, but beyond that, the imago of the native
individual erased the socially constructed nature of such desire.
NOTES
Author’s note: I thank Irene Beirman, Leo Ching, Michelle Hartman, Allan Hibbard, Lareesa Isa, Samir
Khalaf, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Nancy Micklewright, Walid Raad, and Eric Zakim for their generous comments
regarding the content of this article and Akram Zaatari, Zeina Arida, and Tamara Suwaya at the Foundation
for the Arab Image in Beirut for their active support during the research process. Dr. Judith Tucker, Sylvia
Whitman, and the staff at IJMES were extremely helpful in the editing of the text, as well as hammering
out the logistical challenges of publishing an article on visual culture. Likewise, anonymous readers made
invaluable comments to improve this article. Although the images did not make it into this article, the Special
Collections staff at the Getty Research Institute helped me search through the Pierre de Gigord Ottoman
Collection, allowing me to locate early Lebanese–Arab photography in relation to its larger Ottoman context.
My research was supported by grants from the Franklin Center for International Studies at Duke University, a
Mellon Research Grant from the Center for Social and Behavior Studies, and a Faculty Research Grant from
the Provost Office at the American University of Beirut. All images and information in this article are from
the archives of the Foundation for the Arab Image (FAI) in Beirut. I add titles, dates, and/or photographers
when able to approximate that information or if provided by the archives.
1 Lea Barakat, “al-Taswir wa-l-tazwiq,” al-Muqtataf 11 (1886–87): 178–79.
2 Polemics against Arab “civil society” have intensified after 11 September 2001 by ideological hacks such
as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Krauthammer. For an example of similar neoliberal
pedantry written by Arab pundits in English, see Hazim Saghieh, ed., The Predicament of the Individual in
the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2001).
3 Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, 4th ed. (New York: MOMA, 1964), 12. For an ex-
amination of positivist paradigms within Arab subjectivity, see Stephen Sheehi, Foundation of Modern Arab
Identity (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2004).
4 The following are some examples. For how to fix an image on paper, see “al-Taswir al-fotografi” in
“Masa’il wa ajwiba” al-Muqtataf 19 (1895): 303; for Egyptian-based Lebanese photographer Louis Badwar’s
instructions on developing a photograph, see “al-Fotografiyya” in “Bab al-sina’a,” al-Muqtataf 19 (1895):
291–93; for treating paper for different tones, see “Taswid al-suwar al-fotografiyya” in al-Muqtataf 24 (1899):
366.
5 Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East,
1860–1950 (London: Quartet, 1988), 59.

6 For a discussion of these “patterns,” see Julia Hirsh, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 99.

7 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1997), 72, 95–96.

8 Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2000), 251.

9 Noel Paymal Lerebours, Prix-courant des daguerréotypes (n.p., 1843), Excursions daguerriennes: Vues
et monuments les plus remarquables de globe (Paris: n.p., 1842), pl. no. 57.
10 For a study of the Bonfils, see Carney Gavin, The Image of the East: Photographs by Bonfils (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982).

11 See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1986) and David
Prochaska, “Archive of l’Algerie Imaginaire,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 373–420.

12 For some examples, see Paul Chevedden, The Photographic Heritage of the Near East (Malibu: Undena,
1981); Fouad Debbas, Romantic Lebanon: The European View 1700–1900 (London: British Lebanese Associ-
ation, 1986), Our Memory (Beirut: Naufal, 1986); Michel Fani, Liban 1848–1914: L’Atelier photographique
de Ghazir (Paris: Editions de l’Escalier, 1995); Carney Gavin, Legacy of Light: Photographs from the Last
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
202 Stephen Sheehi
Century (Araya, Liban, Impieties Catholique, 1983); Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveler in the Middle
East (London: Ashgate, 2003); and Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885)
(New York: Abrams, 1988).
13 Graham-Brown, Images of Women. For the relationship between anthropology and photography, see
Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920 (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press,
1994).
14 Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876–1948 (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984).

15 Annelies Moors, “Presenting Palestine’s Population Premonitions of the Nakba,” MIT Electronic Journal
of Middle East Studies 1 (May 2001): 1–12, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www.mitejmes.

16 Ibid., 5.
17 Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 56.
18 Nancy Micklewright, “Personal, Public, and Political (Re)Constructions: Photographs and Consump-
tion,” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, Donald Quataert, ed.
(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000), 261–88.
19 Wolf-Deiter Lemke, “Ottoman Photography: Recording and Contributing to Modernity,” in The Empire
in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Wurzburg, 2002),
237–38.
20 Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258–59.
22 The French prohibited Arabs and Berbers in North Africa from many professions, including those in
the visual arts. For the change in this policy toward Lyautey’s “nativist” approach regarding indigenes and
the beaux arts, see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
2003), 200–203.
23 Miller provides important information from Armenian sources about Arab-Armenian photographers.
See Dickenson Jenkins Miller, “The Craftman’s Art: Armenians and the Growth of Photography in the Near
East (1856–1981)” (master’s thesis, American University of Beirut, 1981). Muhsin al-Yamin researches many
unknown Lebanese photographers; see Muhsin al-Yamin, “Yawmiyyat Wadi’ Nawfal 1854–74,” al-Mustaqbal,
27 April 2000. Badr el-Hage provides scattered information regarding Damascus; see Des Photographes a
Damas 1840–1918 (Paris: Marval, 2000).
24 Phillippe Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa al-Arabiyya, vol. III (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Adabiyya, 1913), 214.
For information about Dumas, see Carney Gavin, Legacy of Light: 4.

25 See Leon Zolondek, “Sabunji in England” Middle East Studies 14 (1978): 102–15. For his activity
supporting Egyptian independence, see Wilfred Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt
(London: Unwin, 1907).
26 Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa, 72.
27 Ibid., 72.
28 Engin Cizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Haset Kitabevi A. S., 1987), 116.
29 See Muhsin Yammin, “David kharaj min al-adraj wa Louis khala thawb al-kahnut,” Mulhaq al-nahar,
10 May 1997.
30 See “Amal al-Maraya,” al-Muqtataf 18 (1983-84): 208, and “Talmi al-suwar,” al-Muqtataf 8 (1883–
84): 684–85, for explanations of the processes and techniques for developing and polishing photographs.
31 Engin Cizgen, 116–17.
32 See Salim’s portrait on the cover of Salim al-Bustani, ed. Michel Juha (London: Riad al-Rayyes, 1989).
Zaydan remarked how Ibrahim al-Yaziji always wore shirwāl and a fez. Jurji Zaydan, Mudhakkirat Jurji
Zaydan (Beirut: Dar al-kitab al-jadid, 1968), 40. Jirousek comments on how the fez and shirwāl were the
uniform for a reformed bureaucracy. Charlotte Jirousek, “The Transition of Mass Fashion System Dress
in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Consumption Studies, 224. Brummett shows how fashion was a dynamic
site of ideological contention where traditional clothes symbolized both nationalism and backwardness, just
as European dress signified progress and immorality. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the
Ottoman Revolutionary Press 1908–1911 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000), 221–
58.
33 For examples, see Salim al-Bustani’s romantic novel al-Huyam fi jinan al-sham in al-Jinan, vol. 1 (1870),
and Niqula Bistrus’ short story, “Riwayat Fuad” in al-Muqtataf 12 (1887): 127–28. For a discussion of the
Salim al-Bustani and romance novels, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 76–106.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

34 For his memories about the emerging bourgeoisie of Beirut, see Shakir al-Khuri, Majma al-Masarrat
(Beirut: Dar al-Ittihad, 1908). Khalil al-Khuri wrote Asr al-jadid (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Suriyya, 1863) and
al-Nashaid al-fuadiyya (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Suriyya, n.d).
35 Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa, vol. III, 61.
36 Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258. Faroqhi asserts that visual culture in the Balkans and Asia Minor
was linked to the development of secularism in Turkey.

37 For some of their works, see Gilbert Beauge and Engin Cizgen, Images d’empire: Aux origins de la
photographie en Turquie: Collection of Pierre de Gigord (Istanbul: Institut d’etudes francaises d’Istanbul,
[1993?]). The Gigord Collection is housed at Getty Research Institute. Numbering more than 6,000 images, it
contains albums of photographs by the Abdallah Frères, Pascal Sebah, Legekian, and European photographers,
many patronized by the sultan.
38 Muhsin al-Yamin, “Thalatha imtahanou al-shughal bi-l-shamas wa zhalaliha,” Mulhaq al-nahar, 30
August 1999, 14–15.

39 “Al-Fotografiyya al-suriyya,” al-Muqtataf 1 (1876–77): 685.
40 Miller, “The Craftman’s Art,” 15. Perez, Focus East, 124.
41 Miller, “The Craftman’s Art,” 18. Özendes’ biography in Turkish reproduces many of Abdallah’s pho-
tographs; see Engin Özendes, Abdullah Frères: Osmanli Sarayinin Fotografcilari (Istanbul: YKY, 1998).
42 Cizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 94.
43 Doubtful that they relocated, the nominal converts were court employees, far from Hamidian massacres
of the Armenians between 1894 and 1896. The Cairene photographs probably originate from their tours for
the Sultan’s albums.
44 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on the Photographies and Histories (Amherst, Mass.:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 37.

45 A catalogue of the dress of the Ottoman people was presented at the Universal Exposition at Vienna;
see Osman Hamdy Bey, Les Costume Populaires de La Turquie en 1873 (Constantinople: Levant Times &
Shipping Gazette, 1873). Pascal Sébah was one of the most prominent Ottoman photographers, with strong
ties to the ruling elite and nascent bourgeoisie. He traveled throughout the Levant and Egypt and maintained
a prolific studio in Istanbul’s Pera district and in Cairo. His son, Jean, continued the studio’s great success
after his father’s death, which seems to have been between 1886 and 1890. Like the Kovas, Pascal Sébah won
several awards in exhibitions in Europe, including a medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. Despite the
prominence of his oeuvre, his life remains enigmatic, and the few studies on him fail to provide significant
source material for their assertions. See Perez, Focus East, 222, and Engin Özendes, From Sébah & Jouillier
to Foto Sébah (Istanbul: YKY, 2000).
46 Tagg,Burden of Representation, 68.
47 Hirsh, Family Photographs, 85.
48 Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany, N.Y.: State University
of New York Press, 1996), 59. For additional discussions on photography’s role in the representation of the
body and capitalist forms of social discipline, see Gisele Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: David
Godine, 1980); Alan Sekula, “The Body and Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 343–89.
49 Al-Bustani states that Lebanon is “the link in the great global chain” connecting East and West. Butrus
al-Bustani, Nafir suriyya (Beirut: Dar Fikr li-l-Abhath wa-l-Nashr, 1990), ix, 50–51.
50 I borrow the term “Lebanonism” from Asad AbuKhalil and his blog http://www.angryarab.blogspot.com.
Nujaim’s book influenced many schools of Libanism; see Bulous Nujaim, La Question du Liban (Jounieh:
Biban, 1961 [1908]). See also Kais Firro, “Lebanese Nationalism vs. Arabism: From Bulum Nujaym to Michel
Chiha,” Middle East Studies 40:5 (Sept. 2004):1–27. Stressing mercantile “Phoenician” identity, Michel Chiha
was the ideologue for Lebanon’s “special role” in the Arab world. Unlike exclusionist Charles Corm, George
Samnah, and Emile Eddeh, he saw Lebanon as minorities united by interdependence and “willing interaction.”
See Michelle Hartman and Alessandro Olsaretti, “ ‘The First Boat and the First Oar’: Inventions of Lebanon in
the Writing of Michel Chiha,” Radical History Review 86 (Spring 2003): 37–65. For a critique of Nujaim, see
Ahmed Beydoun, Identitéconfessionelle et temps social chez les historiens libanais contemporains (Beirut:
UniversitéLibanaise, 1984).
51 For an overview of various aspects of economic history of the empire, see Donald Quataert et al.,
An Economic History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. II 1600–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994). In addition, for a social history of the bourgeoisie in the empire, see Muge Gocek, Rise of the
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
204 Stephen Sheehi
Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).
52 Salim al-Bustani, “al-Sinaah,” in al-Jinan, vol. I, 1870, 49–51. For one discussion of the changing
practices in consumption, see Elizabeth B. Frierson’s “Cheap and Easy: The Creation of Consumer Culture in
Late Ottoman Society,” in Consumption Studies, 243–87.
53 Gates, The Merchant Republic, 28–29.
54 See Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon 1870–1920
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). For 19th-century economic history of Lebanon, see
Dominique Chevallier, La Societédu Mont Liban a l’époque de la Revolution Industrielle en Europe (Paris:
Paul Geunther, 1971), and Butrus Labaki, Introduction a l’histoire économique du Liban: soie et commerce
extérieur en fin de période ottomane (1840–1914) (Beirut: UniversitéLibanaise, 1984).
55 See Leila Fawaz’s Merchants and Migration in 19th-Century Beirut (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983); also see Fawaz’s An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994).
56 See Khater, Inventing Home; Moise Berenstein, The Levant under French Mandate and Problems of the
Emigration and Immigration (Geneva: International Labor Review, 1936), and Nadim Shehadi and Albert
Hourani, ed., Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993).
57 Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 62. Carolyn
Gates, The Merchant Republic: The Rise of an Open Economy (London: Tauris and Centre for Lebanese
Studies, 1998).
58 Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 80.
59 Ibid., 36–37.
60 See May Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs (Beirut: CERMOC, 1997) and Beyrouth 1825–1975 (Beirut:
Ordre de Ingeniuere Architects, 2001); Robert Saliba, Beirut 1920–1940: Domestic Architecture between
Tradition and Modernity (Beirut: Order of Engineers and Architects, 1998). Anne Mollenhauer, “The Central
Hall House: Regional Commonalities and Local Specificities,” in The Empire in the City.
61 See Butrus al-Bustani, “Fi madinat Beirut,” in Amal al-jamiyya al-ilmiyya al-suriyya li-l-funun wa-
l-ulum 1868–1879, compiled by Yusuf Qizma Khuri (Beirut: Dar al-Hamra, 1990), 167–73; and Salim
al-Bustani, “Asbab taqaddum Bayrut wa numuha al-sari” (Reasons for the progress of Beirut and its rapid
growth), al-Jinan 60 (1884): 449–51.
62 Zaydan compares true progress to its superficial trappings, where debt and social ills (promiscuity, gam-
bling, drinking, consumerism) stopped advancement and caused “the foreign intervention into the country’s
administration” (“al-Nahda al-Masriyya al-akhira,” in al-Hilal 1 (1892), 124. Prominent in the 1870s, one
short story narrates the marriage of the protagonist, who is bankrupted by the ostentatious wedding. Salim
al-Bustani, “Zifaf Farid,” in al-Jinan II (1871), 447–53.
63 See Butrus Labaki, Education et mobilitésociale dan la sociétémulticommunautaire du Liban (Frankfurt:
Deutsche Institute, 1988).

64 Photographs depicting the apprehension of “criminal leaders” and their “gangs,” such as Milham Qasim
by French Mandate authorities appear 1924–1925; see al-Marid 1921–1932 (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2001), for
example those dating from July through August 1925, p. 20. Note similar images, such as those of Druze leader
Fawzi al-Qawaqji (January–March 1927, p. 20) and a bandoleer-festooned woman named Rashida al-Zaybaq
(September–October 1926, p. 20). In the original publication, see “several pictures in the courtroom in the
Justice Ministry during the trial of Mahmoud al-Rifa‘ah and his gang,” al-Marid, 21 Tashrin I, 1923, no.
251:1). Contrast the portraits of dignitaries, intellectuals, and politicians to those photographs of the leaders
of “bandits” (i.e., warriors revolting against the French occupation) in al-Suwaida and Mount Lebanon that
were published throughout the 1927 edition of al-Asrar al-musawwara (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002).
65 Rihani states that “the freedom of the individual is still the supreme end with the Oriental.” Ameen
(Amin) Rihani, The Path of Vision: Pocket Essays of East and West (New York: White & Co., 1921), 173,
158. Sawda argued for the Maronite origins of the “Marada.” Yusuf Sawdah, Fi sabil Lubnan (Beirut: Dar
al-Arz, 1921). For a historiographic critique of Lammens’ “mountain refuge,” see Kamal Salibi, A House
of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,
1988), 130–50.
66 Zaydan, Mudhakkirat, 12. Makdisi discusses how the Ottoman center constructed the ahal Jabal Lubnan
as “pre-modern” savages antithetical to the civilization of the empire. Ussama Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman
Imperialism: Modernity, Violence, and the Cultural Logic of Ottoman Reform,” in The Empire in the City.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

67 The “punctum” is the “accident” of the photograph that divulges the image’s alternative history. Roland
Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Want, 1981), 27. For an example
of the punctum’s “alternative histories,” see Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology,
and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 101.
68 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 1–2. For a critique of Tagg, see
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1997), 7, and “Photography, Power, and Representation,” in Afterimage 16 no. 4 (1988): 7–9.
70 Ibid., 36.
71 For a meticulous examination of the development of the “culture of sectarianism” during the 19th century
and how it cannot be separated from modernity in Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi’s rigorous The Culture of
Sectarianism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000). For a broader sociological study, see
Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
72 See Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London: I. B. Tauris,
2003), 98.
73 Images of these families abound in the magazines, memoirs, and personal histories of the Mandate. For
example, see the unscholarly local history of Ras Beirut by itsmukhtar Kamal Rebeiz, Rizq Allahahidik
al-ayam . . . Ya Ras Beirut (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Musawwara, 1986).
74 Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood 1926–1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 245.
75 For an article expressing the social dangers arising from new consumptive social practices, see “Shabban
al-yawm,” in al-Hilal 5:3 39.

76 Beshara Doumani, ed., Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany,
N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003), 2. For a gendered approach, see Suad Joseph, ed., Intimate
Selving in Arab Families (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
77 Ibid., 5. See Philippe Fargues, “Family and Household in Mid-19th Century Cairo,” in Family History,
23–50, and Mary Ann Fay, “From Warrior-Grandees to Domesticated Bourgeoisie,” in Family History, 77–97.
78 Samih Farsoun, “Family Structure and Society in Modern Lebanon,” in Peoples and Cultures of the
Middle East, vol. II, Louise Sweet, ed. (New York: Natural History Press, 1970), 257–307.
79 Akram Khater, “‘Queen of the House?’ Making Immigrant Lebanese Families in the Mahjar,” in Family
History, 293.
80 Ibid., 287.
81 Marrash and Ishaq translated into Arabic the Enlightenment concepts of individual rights and the
fraternity of “man.” See Adib Ishaq, al-Darar (Alexandria: Matba’at al-Mahrusa, 1886), and Francis Marrash,
Ghabat al-haqq (London: Riad al-Rayyes, 1989 [1865]). Niqula al-Haddad’s novels also posited the centrality
of personal desires and freedom to the individual. See Thawrat al-awatif ([Alexandria?]: n.p., n.d.).
82 Al-Bustani called upon the Syro-Lebanese citizen to put aside personal desires for national unity and
concord. Al-Bustani, Nafir suriyya. See Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 55–57.
83 Firro, Inventing Lebanon, 18.
84 Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258.
85 “Tadbir al-manzil,” al-Muqtataf 14 (1889-90): 484–85.
86 See Thomas Philipp,The Syrians in Egypt 1725–1975 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985).
87 Decades before Qassim Amin, women’s emancipation was a centerpiece of reform in Lebanon, as
expressed in editorials in al-Jinan, al-Muqtataf, Lisan al-hal, and Thamarat al-funun. As early as the 1850s,
Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and al-Bustani championed women’s education and their increased role in society.
See Maqallat wa khutub fi-l-tarbiyya: Asr al-nahda al-haditha (Beirut: Dar al-Hamra, 1990).
88 Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siècle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).

89 Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 15–45.
91 Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 95 (my italics), 97.
92 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative in the Function of the I,” in Ecrits (New York: Norton,
1977), 2–3.
93 Misr al-haditha al-musawwara, March 1928 (no. 6), inside front cover.
94 Iskander Makarius, “al-Film aw al-ruqq,” al-Muqtataf 30 (1905): 224–25.
95 Kifiyyat al-husul ala suwar mutaqina: Dalil li-hiwayat al-taswir al-shamsi (Cairo: Kodak Co. 1927), 6.
xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19
206 Stephen Sheehi

96 The Pharaons were a wealthy family, intermarried with President Beshara al-Khuri and Michel Chiha,
ideological architect of the Lebanese state and co-owner of the Chiha-Pharaon Bank.
97 Akram Zaatari, ed., The Vehicle (Beirut: Foundation for the Arab Image, 1999). Iskander Marakius’
journal highlights how class, gender, and consumption were intertwined with photography, representing
bourgeois, personal experience. A Studebaker advertisement states, “Winter has come upon you and the
best automobile will protect your health from sickness and cold and the harshness of wind and guarantee
your comfort is Studebaker . . . protect you from the tortuous elements of winter leaving you in comfort.” The
driver, a woman, is driving away from a sketchy image of men pushing a mining car. Al-Lataif al-musawwara,
1923, 2.
98 Rose Yusuf, al-Mara al-jadida, 1926, 107.
99 Histoires intimes (Beirut: Actes Sud, n.d.), 3.
100 Comic in al-Musawwir 1, no. 5 (1925): 11 (my parentheses).
101 The individual self, love, and spirit apart from materialism were the basis for the romantic novel, starting
with Gibran’s al-Ajnihat al-mutakassirah (New York: Mira’at al-Gharb, 1912). For the relationship between
the romance novel and national subjectivity in the 19th-century Arab world, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern
Arab Identity, 76–106. For a noncritical discussion of the romantic aesthetic, see Joseph Abou-Rizk, Regards
sur la peinture au liban (Beirut: Dar al-Funoon, 1956), and Muhammad Abu-Zariq, Min al-tasis ila al-
hadatha f-il-fann al-tashkili al-Arab al-muasir (Beirut: al-Mu’assah al-Arabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashar,
2000).
103 For an example taken from columns on personal style, health, and hygiene advising how to care for
one’s body, see “How to Extend Your Life,” al-Musawwir 1, no. 1 (1924):15. For the body as a “zone of
significance,” see Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production, 66.
104 Libidinal desire finds its expression in the availability or prohibition of objects. Simultaneously, the
act of desiring is an act of individuation. For an extended definition of libido theory, see Sigmund Freud,
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, James Starkey, trans. (New York: Norton, 1989), 118–38, and
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 60–63.

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xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

© 2007 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/07 $15.00

176 Stephen Sheehi

literary–scientific journals focused on technical and scientific components of the craft,

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capitalist individual involved more than a realignment of political loyalties, communal

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The 1926 Lebanese Constitution expressed the consolidation of a bourgeois identity,

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1860–1950 (London: Quartet, 1988), 59.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 99.

Chicago Press, 1997), 72, 95–96.

Tauris, 2000), 251.

University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Prochaska, “Archive of l’Algerie Imaginaire,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 373–420.

202 Stephen Sheehi

ington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984).

of Middle East Studies 1 (May 2001): 1–12, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www.mitejmes.

For information about Dumas, see Carney Gavin, Legacy of Light: 4.

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 203

was linked to the development of secularism in Turkey.

August 1999, 14–15.

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 37.

204 Stephen Sheehi

Deutsche Institute, 1988).

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 205

al-yawm,” in al-Hilal 5:3 39.

University Press, 2005).

206 Stephen Sheehi

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