Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Recent decades have seen the expansion of Armenian Studies from insular history
to a broader, more interactive field within an inter-regional and global context.
This series, Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World, responds to this
growth by promoting innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to Armenian
history, politics, and culture in the period between 1500–2000. Focusing on the
geographies of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Contemporary Russia [Eastern
Armenia], it directs specific attention to imperial and post-imperial frameworks:
from the Ottoman Empire to Modern Turkey/Arab Middle East; the Safavid/Qajar
Empires to Iran; and the Russian Empire to Soviet Union/Post-Soviet territories.
Series Editor
Bedross Der Matossian, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
Advisory Board
Levon Abrahamian, Yerevan State University, Armenia
Sylvie Alajaji, Franklin & Marshal College, USA
Sebouh Aslanian, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Stephan Astourian, University of California, Berkley, USA
Houri Berberian, University of California, Irvine, USA
Talar Chahinian, University of California, Irvine, USA
Rachel Goshgarian, Lafayette College, USA
Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, USA
Sossie Kasbarian, University of Stirling, UK
Christina Maranci, Tufts University, USA
Tsolin Nalbantian, Leiden University, the Netherlands
Anna Ohanyan, Stonehill College, USA
Hratch Tchilingirian, University of Oxford, UK
Published and Forthcoming Titles
The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language, History and ‘Medz
Yeghern’, Vartan Matiossian
Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzerum, Harput, Van
and Beyond, David Low
PICTURING THE OTTOMAN ARMENIAN
WORLD
David Low
I.B. TAURIS
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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responsibility for any such changes.
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For the Hagopians and the Bilazarians
vi
CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
Acknowledgementsxiii
Note on Names and Transliteration xiv
Prelude: The Unfixed World xv
Chapter 1
ESCAPING CONSTANTINOPLE, OR A LITTLE HISTORY OF
PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE 1
Chapter 2
APPROACHING THE PROVINCES, VIA TREBIZOND 27
Chapter 3
BEGINNING IN ERZURUM 53
Chapter 4
LEAVING HARPUT 93
Chapter 5
RETURNING TO VAN 123
Chapter 6
LOOKING FORWARD, LOOKING BACK 151
Notes190
Bibliography228
Index246
LIST OF FIGURES
0.1 Zaza Photo Studio. Unknown Kharpertsi family, no date. Collection
of the author xv
1.1 Pascal Sébah. ‘Erzeroum’, Plate XX from Les Costumes populaires de
la Turquie, 1873. Library of Congress, Washington, DC 7
1.2 (Credited to) Sébah & Joaillier, Students, High School, Aleppo,
early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC 8
1.3 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892.
Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 14
1.4 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892.
Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC 15
2.1 K.E. Cacoulis. K. Yeghiazarian, Trebizond, 1890. Collection of
the author 33
2.2 Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, Van, c.1911.
Courtesy of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation 37
3.1 Uncredited photographer. Students, Imperial High School,
Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC 54
3.2 Uncredited photographer. Student, Erzurum, 1880s. Collection of
the author 58
3.3 Uncredited photographer. (Altered version of) Students, Imperial
High School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection,
Library of Congress, Washington, DC 59
3.4 M.G. Papazian. Laz man, Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The
Zoryan Institute, Toronto 61
3.5 M.G. Papazian. View from the north-east of Erzurum, 1880s. Cole
Collection, The Zoryan Institute, Toronto 63
3.6 M.G. Papazian. Harry Hekimian with an unidentified Greek doctor
and Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, Erzurum, 1890s. Garin
Compatriotic Union Records (Collection 284). Department of
Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA 64
3.7 Abdullah Frères. A group photograph of the students and the
teachers of the Mekteb-l Tıbbiye-yi Mülkiye (Civil Medical School),
Constantinople, 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC 65
List of figures ix
their restlessness might have threatened the freezing of the moment and that an
inducement from the photographer was required to keep them still, the bestowed
treat held in hand for later, the feel of it and the thought of it sedating them. In this
way, the photograph was made; some blurring indicates that the children could
not be calmed entirely, but the photographer was largely successful in holding the
world still for just long enough to capture its forms. The world, however, cannot
be held still forever, it keeps moving. At some point there has been a further
intervention, an endeavour to remove a section at the left of the frame. We can
still make out the edges of an eviscerated figure – a sleeve, a foot – almost as if that
person squirms, resisting the impulses of the later mark-maker in much the same
way as the children refused to wholly bend to the desires of the first photographer.
It is a suggestion that there is no guarantee of permanence in photography. Such
a thing, if it exists at all, is beyond the power of the photographer. That figure is
reliant always on what happens next, for their products to survive, for people to
keep them, look at them and think about them.
Chapter 1
E S C A P I N G C O N STA N T I N O P L E , O R A L I T T L E H I S T O RY
O F P HO T O G R A P H Y I N T H E O T T OM A N E M P I R E
Excursions Daguerriennes, to use the term Lerebours gave to his landmark 1841
publication.3 A wide, lucrative market was created, and via numerous means –
prints, books, the illustrated press and the great universal exhibitions of the
nineteenth century – photography became a primary way by which largely urban
mass audiences in the West gained visual access to ‘the Orient’ and the wider
world, thus coming to ‘know’ it.4 Oliver Wendell Holmes described photography’s
distillation of the world into image-objects – an extraction of ‘form from
matter’ – that allowed viewers to see distant corners, indeed seemingly to tread
in those parts themselves and form an intimate connection to them: ‘I pass, in a
moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and leave my
outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I am looking down
upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.’5 Photographs retained this element
of magic, but the knowledge that they offered was essentially predicated on an
understanding of them as pieces of incontestable objective truth. These were held
to be, in the words of Auguste Salzmann who was awarded a gold medal at the
Paris Exposition Universelle in 1855 for his recent depictions of Jerusalem, ‘not
narratives, but facts endowed with a conclusive brutality’.6 Salzmann belonged to
the generation that followed in the wake of the earliest pioneers, a generation that
included Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, Francis Bedford, James Robertson and
Felice Beato, ‘avatars of art, science, adventure, and opportunism’, entangled in a
variety of discourses and enterprises.7 Yet it was art that won out as these figures
were inducted into aesthetic and connoisseurial histories of photography over the
course of the twentieth century. Abigail Solomon-Godeau can be found lamenting
an art history of the medium that had set about removing photographs from their
original orbits. ‘The tendency to lump together willy-nilly under the unifying
rubric of art’ a multitude of diverse photographic practitioners, she declares,
‘has resulted in the neglect, if not obfuscation, of important questions of intent,
context, and production.’8 It was a tendency that only further domesticated and
naturalized their narratives, for, contrary to Salzmann, narratives are precisely
what photographs present. The constructed nature of photography’s visions
of the East passed largely without notice or comment for most of the camera’s
history, until Edward Said, emphasizing ‘representations as representations, not as
“natural” depictions of the Orient’, asserted that the image of the East consumed
in the West was one specifically produced by the West, and produced as part of its
wider political consumption of the region.9 Just as such representations should not
be thought of as natural, so too should they not be considered politically neutral
but rather implicitly linked to the imperial circumstances in which they were
created, bound up in those power relations and implicated in the establishment
and maintenance of Western dominance.
Orientalism was both born of and helped to construct a vision premised
on the East being ‘other’: an inferior, degraded version of the Western ‘self ’.
Photographically, it comprised a complex set of representational strategies propped
up by the medium’s rhetoric of truth. In particular, we might draw attention to
social-scientific visual practices, frequently in the form of ‘types’, consistent and
rigid frontal views of figures displaying the particular physical characteristics and
1. Escaping Constantinople 3
cultural traits thought to define a given group, inspecting the body for material signs
of difference.10 The proposition presented by such images was one of non-Western
cultures existing at earlier stages of human development.11 While studio practice
saw, in this way, indigenous people turned into signs of ‘otherness’, depictions
of the world beyond the studio frequently witnessed their disappearance. The
picturing of landscapes, monuments and colonial encampments, by ‘showing so
much of the world to be empty, was unconsciously assimilated to the justifications
for an expanding empire’ suggests Solomon-Godeau.12 Ali Behdad writes of this as
‘photographic unpeopling’, the elimination of local people from views that attests
to a concern not for living, contemporary cultures but for an idea of the ‘faded
glory’ of the East. It is an operation at work in the metropolis as well, as Behdad
demonstrates with a James Robertson view of Hagia Sophia, set within a largely
empty Constantinople city space.13 Photographs like Robertson’s conjured a city of
romantic fantasy that impressed itself on Western travellers long before they saw
the place with their own eyes, and when they did finally arrive in the city it was not
through their own eyes that they saw it but through such images.
Orientalist photography was a form of visual appropriation that cannot be
divorced from colonial acquisitiveness. Photographs constituted instances of
imperial rhetoric that allowed for the possession of the East in imagination and
in fact, playing a role in the enactment of authority over colonized people and
places, its powers and its politics all the while masquerading as ‘brute fact’. Such
works, according to Linda Nochlin, ‘cannot be confronted without a critical
analysis of the particular power structure in which [they] came into being’.14 In
her assessment, there lies the suggestion of the cloak of invisibility under which
power has historically been allowed to operate, working away quietly amidst the
supposed objectivity of photographs, not addressed critically, not confronted. The
historiographical turn in the wake of Said revealed the blind spots of previous
writing on photography, its failure to acknowledge the perspective and positions
from which pictures are made. It had itself embraced something akin to the Western
Orientalist viewpoint, an embrace that had allowed historians to understand for
so long constructed visions as natural emanations or as aesthetic renderings. This
serves as a crucial lesson in the way historians’ viewpoints can merge with those
of their subjects; it is not simply photographs that we need examine with a critical
eye but histories, paying heed to the perspectives from which they themselves are
constructed.
The study of Orientalism, however, has changed with age, the brazen young
firebrand giving way to the dully respectable elder statesman. Orientalist practice
has become so widely accepted as an aspect of photographic production in the
Middle East that it has become, in many quarters, the central and indeed only
aspect of that history. According to Michelle Woodward, the Orientalist approach
is so prevalent that it verges on cliché,15 while it is the ‘elephant in the room’ for
Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem, a norm that goes unquestioned.16 It has morphed
since the days of Said, Nochlin and Solomon-Godeau, from a vital, radical
rethinking of images and their role in knowledge production to something trite
and formulaic that prefers the application of overarching theory to close scrutiny
4 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
gravitated towards the area; it served as the empire’s foremost contact zone and
space of transculturation (employing Mary Louise Pratt’s terms to indicate a site
of encounter and exchange between people from different cultures).25 In time, the
district became photography’s permanent home, with studios established along,
or in close proximity to, its chief boulevard, the Grande Rue de Péra, run first by
Europeans and subsequently by Ottoman subjects once they started taking to the
medium in the 1850s. We see, for example, the emergence in the field of the famed
Abdullah Frères, brothers Vichen, Hovsep and Kevork who worked initially for a
German chemist named Rabach before, in the space of a few short years, going from
apprentices to masters, taking over the studio in 1858.26 Hailing from an Ottoman
Armenian family that had been in Constantinople since their migration from the
Ottoman city of Kayseri in the early seventeenth century, the Abdullahs were part
of a preponderance of Ottoman Christians, particularly Armenians, populating
photography at this time; other notable practitioners include Pascal Sébah, born
in Constantinople to a Syrian Catholic father and an Armenian mother;27 Vassilaki
Kargopoulo, an Ottoman Greek;28 and Boghos Tarkulyan, the Ottoman Armenian
known professionally as Phébus.29 The question of why Christians should have
been an over-represented in this way has not been answered to any satisfying
degree. Religion is frequently cited as the reason, and certainly there are accounts
of orthodox Islamic pronouncements against photography’s depiction of human
likenesses. However, these appear to be little more than individual episodes; there
is nothing to suggest a broader cultural rejection of the medium.30
The new Ottoman practitioners were responsible for a wide output, serving
patrons both domestic and foreign. They were photographers to the Ottoman
court while being involved also in the production of photographs today branded
Orientalist. Their photographs litter the albums residing in the Getty collections
and, indeed, studios themselves were tourist attractions, as Ali Behdad observes,
with Murray’s handbook advising its readers that they would find in an Abdullah
Frères photograph ‘one of the most valuable curiosities that can be carried away
from the capital of Turkey.’31 Tourists would purchase views and sit for portraits,
evidence for the lure of the latter being provided by Albert Edward, the Prince of
Wales (later Edward VII), who, despite being accompanied on his 1862 tour of the
region by his own photographer in the person of Francis Bedford, sat for portraits
at the Abdullah Frères studio.32 The resultant photographs represented souvenirs
twice over, the name of the studio, embossed upon the front and reverse of the
photographic mount, seemingly as important as the image. And so it is today,
for studio names have retained their power. The Abdullah Frères et al. dominate
narratives of the medium; they are the ever-present signposts by which we chart a
course through the history of photography or, put otherwise, the ‘usual suspects’.33
These are the photographers that allow Constantinople to be depicted as a
‘colorful center of the art of photography’.34 That very phrase ‘the art of photography’,
in regular use, and the insistence on narrating the medium hagiographically
through certain practitioners, are the first clues that indicate a history framed in
art-historical terms. Photographers become noteworthy for their ‘technical skill
and aesthetic sensitivity’, loose descriptors that are not given adequate definition.35
6 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
The claims staked in an art history of photography can become tenuous in the
extreme, such as when Engin Özendes reports that Pablo Picasso owned prints
by the Abdullah Frères, adding, on the thinnest of visual evidences, that one of
the photographs acted as source material for a 1914 sketch by the Spaniard.36
This is subsequently repeated elsewhere to argue for the Abdullahs’ place within
a Western representational tradition, a strange argument that approaches history
backwards and neglects Picasso’s interest in non-Western image-making.37 It is
highly reminiscent of history’s treatment of Auguste Salzmann, removed from the
context of archaeology in which he operated and reborn as a proto-Modernist
artist.38 At the same time, signs emerge of histories mimicking their object of
study, with Mary Roberts noting the parallels between Bahattin Öztuncay’s book
The Photographers of Constantinople and the Ottoman installation at the 1867
Exposition Universelle.39
Figure 1.1 Pascal Sébah. ‘Erzeroum’, Plate XX from Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie,
1873. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
8 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
The engagement with and selective adaptation of Western modes reached its
apogee with the albums commissioned by Sultan Abdülhamid II in the early 1890s
(Figure 1.2). It is these albums above all that have become a primary focus of the
history of Ottoman photography, and even, according to Mary Roberts, ‘central
to creating a definition of Ottoman photography’.42 A number of the famous
studios were involved in the commission, including the Abdullah Frères, Phébus
and Sébah & Joaillier (the Sébah studio being run after Pascal’s death by his son
Figure 1.2 (Credited to) Sébah & Joaillier, Students, High School, Aleppo, early 1890s.
Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
1. Escaping Constantinople 9
Jean in partnership with Frenchman Polycarpe Joaillier); involved too were the
first Ottoman Muslim photographers, then emerging from the military schools.
The result was fifty-one massive, luxuriously bound albums, containing over
1,800 photographs, which were sent to the USA for exhibition at the 1893 World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an act whereby Abdülhamid demonstrated
how he had inherited from his predecessor an understanding of the camera as a
diplomatic instrument. Aiming yet further, towards a more permanent form of
public edification, the albums were, after their Chicago presentation, sent as gifts
to the US Library of Congress, Washington DC, while a similar set was presented
to the British Museum in London, as if acknowledging the particular accumulation
of knowledge that marked the modern state and photography’s role as ‘the agent
par excellence for listing, knowing, and possessing, as it were, the things of the
world’ during this ‘great period of taxonomies, inventories, and physiologies’.43
Yet once again we are dealing with an auto-ethnography, the image offered for
scrutiny being one of Ottoman devising. As an Ottoman depiction of the Ottoman
realm, the albums have been dubbed an ‘imperial self-portrait’.44
The central idea of the albums as presenting a radically different image of the
Ottoman Empire was distinctly stated at the time by none other than Abdülhamid
in what has become a famous pronouncement in the history of Ottoman
photography: ‘Most of the photographs taken [by European photographers] for
sale in Europe vilify and mock Our Well-Protected Domains. It is imperative
that the photographs to be taken in this instance do not insult Islamic peoples
by showing them in a vulgar and demeaning light.’45 They are words that have
been a gift to historians, a nascent critique of Western Orientalist practices
from the mouth of the sultan himself.46 Meanwhile, the image that the sultan
intended to insert in its place was best described by Sir Philip Currie, the British
ambassador to Constantinople, upon taking receipt of the albums in 1894. In
communicating the news to the British Foreign Office, he stated that the albums
set out to demonstrate ‘what progress has been made in literature and science
in Turkey since his Majesty came to the throne, and to show how greatly he
is interested in the advancement of learning and education in his Empire’.47
Education certainly stands at the fore of the sultan’s image of ‘progress’, the
albums containing hundreds of photographs of uniformed schoolchildren and
new school buildings, relating to state institutions at various levels, both military
and civilian. A new society, modernized and regularized, is suggested by these
subjects and their manner of depiction. Above all, it is evident in the students,
always presented in pairs, the stance of each one mirroring that of their colleague
within the frame, and the arrangement of each frame mirroring that of countless
others in the collection, the motif replicating itself endlessly (interrupted only
for certain small subsets that focus on female education, a school for the deaf
and the dumb, a tribal school). These full-length, frontal depictions echo each
other while also conjuring another echo, that of the Western anthropological
‘type’ and the Ottoman state’s own 1873 rerendering of that format. Echoes
are conjured for the express purpose of being banished, the albums’ ordered
vision challenging the Western colonialist enterprise and its associated imagery,
10 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
from that point is burdened by the weight of the capital. The book finds it difficult
to escape Constantinople and the central problem of the field that it itself expertly
diagnoses, how the city’s ‘crushing presence […] dwarfs our perception of
photography in the provinces of the empire’.60
Adherence to established concerns obscure other modes of photography, that
much is clear. Moreover, it pushes out the material that histories are ostensibly
intent on studying. The field that has arisen as a necessary counterbalance to the
Orientalist approach has come to resemble, to no small degree, some of those
very studies of Orientalism by replicating their problematic elements. That is to
say, the examination of ‘Ottoman modernity’ has become just as narrow a line
of enquiry, itself adopting a form of tunnel vision. The distortion that we have
already identified as being at work in Orientalist critiques, caused by over-reliance
on certain collections, is duplicated in the study of Ottoman state photography, the
Abdülhamid albums becoming, in very real terms, the counterpoints of the Pierre
de Gigord Collection and the Ken and Jenny Jacobson Collection. The attention
lavished on these albums is itself an act of cherry-picking that distorts our
understanding of photography in the empire. Meanwhile, even our understanding
of those albums is subject to distortion, with pre-determined theory privileged
and visual evidence selected accordingly. The modernist argument, very much the
accepted wisdom on the albums, does not tally with a great deal of the material
found in the albums once they are examined carefully. Indeed, the remarkable
thing is how very unremarkable many album photographs are, how similar
they are to what can be found in Western collections. Constantinople, as it is in
tourist collections, is a city of mosques, palaces, fountains – a place romantic,
exotic, timeless, awash with the vestiges of the past, exuding those characteristics
and tropes long foisted upon it by the Orientalist imagination. Photographs in
the Abdülhamid albums that do not readily lend themselves to the prevailing
argument are downplayed or discounted entirely. Wolf-Dieter Lemke, for example,
seems keen to wish them away, interfering as they do with his discussion of
Ottoman photography and modernity, when he suggests that the makers of the
albums sometimes ‘accidentally chose motifs which … served the thirst for the
exotic and the picturesque’.61 In this way of thinking, the picturing of the modern
is a conscious decision but the picturesque, or anything resembling the Western
vision of the East, can only have occurred by chance. It is a prime example of
the way in which commentaries that emphasize Ottoman agency also frequently
give that agency strict limits. It is abundantly evident that such images were not
accidents but constructed just as consciously as others within these albums. The
presentation of palaces, mosques and monuments, while sitting at odds with the
modernist argument, is perfectly in keeping with the era of Hamidian rule that
embraced the political potential of history and mined the past for legitimating
symbols.62 It was not simply modern development that it presented as evidence of
its equal standing along with other nations, for the albums looked back as much
as they looked forward, evoking a glorious past and attempting to reify that glory
in the present day.
1. Escaping Constantinople 13
The sultan’s albums share with tourist albums common sources, the famed
studios of the capital, and at times deal in comparable city subjects. Indeed, they
utilize some of the very same images from those studios, images which, numbered as
they are, indicate their origins in the studios’ public catalogues, a communal pool of
images from which all could choose and make their own.63 A single image could thus
perform a variety of roles, and yet, just how divergent are these rival renderings of the
capital? In the setting of his albums, the sultan’s images clearly lack the melancholia
associated with Orientalist imagery but share certain other qualities. Esra Akcan
notes the construction of a ‘peaceful, beautiful, contemplative image’ of the city in
the sultan’s albums, with a sense of order and calm pervading the works of the state,
one that verges on the dream-like, bringing the sultan’s city into line with the city of
Orientalist fantasy.64 We thus begin to see a space of overlap, the common ground
between modes of photography supposedly diametrically opposed. The sultan’s
vision, as much as the tourist’s, hinged on the promotion of the city as a timeless
space and demanded carefully framed views as a consequence. By neglecting this
aspect of the albums, commentators pass up on opportunities to consider what has
been removed from view, a notable exception coming from Akcan’s statement that
the photographs ‘predictably seldom portrayed the frequent fires, minority revolts,
or other evident signs of tension within the Ottoman Empire’.65 And so we find
once again the stirring of a sense of absence, of unwanted things pushed out of state
imagery. Akcan’s observation carries more strength and clarity than Allen’s, and yet
like Allen’s it flares into view only briefly. As the essay returns our gaze back to the
ostensible subject of the Bosporus, there appears an unwillingness to pursue the
implications of the statement, even a sense of exclusion being laid on exclusion.66
Evidently, an element of Wendy Shaw’s assertion, that ‘[i]nstead of portraying
the empire as a romantic, historic, ethnographically different place, the
Abdülhamid Albums controlled the gaze by using the modern medium to focus
upon aspects of the empire that displayed modernity’, is erroneous, for it is clear
that the albums do, in part, present the empire as a place of the romantic and
historic. Yet the other part of Shaw’s claim – that the empire is not defined as an
‘ethnographically different place’ – is correct. We arrive here at the most neglected
– and problematic – aspect of the albums. If we look back at the anthropology of the
1873 album Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, we find its intermingled ‘types’
standing side by side in depictions of the various regions of the empire, suggesting
an imperial conglomeration and a diverse yet unified state.67 By contrast, the
Abdülhamid albums reduce the display to just one Ottoman ‘type’, maintaining the
anthropological format to produce full-length portraits of near-identical uniformed
students enrolled in state schools across the empire, a new ‘type’ that stands as
the embodiment of a new homogenous Ottoman identity. Only a few deviations
occur, notably in a subset of images of students in tribal attire enrolled at the Aşiret
Mektebi in Constantinople, the so-called ‘School for Tribes’. The photographs
become meaningful in a before-and-after sequence featuring a Kurdish student,
with clothing acting as a discursive marker that first opens (through tribal garb)
and then closes (through uniform) a space of difference (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). Apt
visual expression is in this way given to a social engineering project that aimed to
14 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 1.3 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul
Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
1. Escaping Constantinople 15
Figure 1.4 Abdullah Frères. Student, Aşiret School, Constantinople, 1892. Abdul Hamid II
Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
16 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
turn ‘tribesmen into Ottomans’, educating the children of the notables of Kurdish
and Arab tribes in order to spread the values of the modern state and bring groups
considered alienated into the central sphere of influence.68
The photographs are legible because they appropriate recognized Western
colonial tropes, not simply in the form of the anthropological mode but more
specifically through its temporal discourse that saw tradition and ‘backwardness’
as the inverse of modernity and progress.69 The before-and-after format is the
clearest manifestation of that discourse, one put to use in numerous colonial
environments, such as at the ‘Indian schools’ of the USA.70 The appearance –
and disappearance – of tribespeople in the Abdülhamid albums becomes part
of the performance of the empire’s modernity, a modernity that was felt to be,
along the perceived lines of the Western model, intrinsically wrapped up in a
colonial outlook (colonialism, as Selim Deringil writes, was ‘seen as a modern
way of being’).71 After all, this was precisely the variety of message on display
at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the hosts mounting a display
of white settler cultural superiority that placed ‘savage’ Native Americans and
‘civilized’ Celts and Teutons on opposite ends of a scale of values.72 The Ottoman
Empire participated in this discourse even in the process of challenging it.
Drawing on Ussama Makdisi’s concept of Ottoman Orientalism, we might see
the albums as exhibiting ‘explicit resistance to, but also implicit acceptance
of, Western representations of the indolent Ottoman East’.73 The before-and-
after double image stands as a double rejection, with modern imperial identity
defined not only against the Western conception of the East as ‘other’, as is
commonly asserted, but also against the empire’s own, internally conceived
‘other’. In this way, the photographs actively redeploy Western Orientalism, and
it is difficult to avoid concluding that by doing so they participate in their own
power project.
What disappears with the tribal body is the very idea of difference. The before-
and-after sequence is the clearest manifestation of a discourse of power emanating
from Constantinople, a discourse that once understood can be recognized
in other album photographs. Exterior views of school buildings perform a
similar operation, standing as the architectural equivalent of the photographed
students. Frames are dominated by the clean lines of standardized governmental
architecture, itself suggestive of the imposition of order upon ‘wild’ regions and
the controlling presence of the state.74 Nothing further is visible, the photographs
cropped so closely that the land itself disappears from view, along with any other
visual information from the locale. As suggested by Stephen Sheehi, a flattening
process is at work as the photographs ‘vacate’ their own localities, removing any
suggestion of the particularities of different spaces and those that inhabit them,
instead making Ottoman central control the primary subject matter.75 That these
places should be named and identified as geographically diverse parts of the
empire is of vital importance to the albums’ power claims; just as important is that
they should be barely indistinguishable from one another. While the photographs,
unlike those of the previous project Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie, were
actually produced in the provinces they claim to represent, those provinces
1. Escaping Constantinople 17
disappear in the process of being pictured, thus making the Abdülhamid albums
seem just as bound by the capital as their predecessor. Every image of a provincial
city, every portrait of its students, becomes at heart a portrait of Constantinople,
the centre of power. Everywhere is Constantinople and Constantinople is
everywhere.
Edward Said’s omission of Ottoman rule, among other imperialisms, from
his discussion of Orientalism was not meant to imply that rule to be ‘either
benign […] or any less imperialist’, only that it did not possess the refined clarity
and coherence of the British, French and American imperial experiences.76
The inconsistencies of the Ottoman project were in part a result of its being
developed late in the empire’s history and assembled from and with a selection
of philosophies, rationales and tools imported from abroad, making it, in Selim
Deringil’s eyes, a ‘borrowed colonialism’.77 My aim here is not to put a name
to the power nor to define it. It is enough to state that what we are looking at
bears distinct relation to the colonial imagery of the West; we can surely, on
the evidence of the Abdülhamid albums, include photographic practice among
Ottoman borrowings. Certainly, the state employs the language of colonial
image-making and does so with the overt intent of participating in a discourse
of power.
Just as clear as the workings of power in the albums is the rejection of any such
notion by many of those who write about them. This appears an odd proposition
for a subfield that emerged in response to Orientalism, thus evolving in part
from post-colonialism’s recognition of the image as political construction. Yet the
political aspect is, in many cases, accepted only to a certain degree and on a certain
basis. Power becomes a limited and shifting concept in analyses, exercised beyond
and between imperial borders. That it should exist within Ottoman borders is
rarely taken into consideration, and seldom are the photographic products of the
Ottoman state themselves recognized as ideological acts. Regularly positioned as a
critical response to power, the albums are not thought of as an expression of power
in themselves; or rather, they are positioned as a benign – heroic even – form of
power, power that only exists as response to Western dominance and only manifests
itself as the assertion of the right to self-representation. True, Abdülhamid is
described as autocratic, and his use of photography has been described in terms
of surveillance and ‘panoptic effect’, but these concepts, in the absence of proper
consideration of the internal composition and workings of the empire, stand as
somewhat abstract notions.78 Once again, writing on the history of photography
history follows a wider trend. Responses to the ‘Eastern question school’ have
addressed the clear failing in the manner in which the empire is represented and in
response have asserted a sense of Ottoman agency. Yet they themselves can prove
curiously denuding of agency, recognizing the Ottoman state’s power in resisting
Western incursions while granting it little power in other areas, neglecting its role
in events and processes within the empire’s borders.79
18 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
There are vast gaps in existing accounts – the absence of certain people and
places from images finding echo in their corresponding absence from our histories,
largely present only in the form of oblique references and observations made in
passing, those faint whispers that we have heard from Allen and Akcan. Ahmet
Ersoy, by contrast, makes a clearer statement, giving a name to what is missing
from state photography and indicating the identity politics behind the erasures.
Examining the 1886 Hamidian photographic project that documented Söğüt, the
birthplace of the Ottoman state, he observes the way in which images were shaped
‘by the ruling elite’s unwillingness to modify the essentially Sunni Muslim (and
increasingly Turkish) character of official imperial identity’. Importantly, he makes
note of the project’s deliberate ellipses, the way in which the ‘sizeable non-Muslim
populations native to the region (most notably the Greeks and Armenians),
which had also been critical actors in the unfolding of early Ottoman history, are
consistently left outside the camera’s frame’.84 The Abdülhamid albums are this,
writ large. Commissioned just a few years after the Söğüt project, they apply the
same logic to the entire empire, forming the strongest visual enactment of the
exclusionary tones of the era. While they subject Ottoman Muslim groups, such
as Kurds and Arabs, to a form of colonial photography that remakes them in the
image of the central state, Ottoman Christians are erased via another colonial
mode, that of ‘photographic unpeopling’. Put another way, the former are forced
into the image while the latter are forced out, the ‘modern Self ’ embracing and
‘reforming’ certain subjects while disavowing others.
Ersoy’s is a rare statement of absence, that rarity giving some indication that
what is missing from state photographs is also missing from commentaries. State
imagery, as Ersoy suggests, was shaped by the identity politics at work in the late
Ottoman Empire, ideologies broadly rendered invisible as writers take on, to one
degree or another, the perspective of the state and accept the ‘naturalness’ of its
vision.85 State albums serve not only as a persistent central focus of the history of
Ottoman photography but also as a model, dictating the mode of and perspective
on that history; in short, historians themselves, in an echo of nineteenth-century
photographic practice, leave non-Muslims ‘outside the camera’s frame’. An
examination of the manner in which Armenian photographers are depicted in the
historiography shows the myriad ways in which they have been silenced as actors
and the extent to which their historical presence has been obscured, diminished
and distorted.
home, and expressed joy at their recent victory. It is an incident that resulted in
the Abdullah Frères losing their status as photographers to the Ottoman court,
and yet this is a minor detail in Öztuncay’s narrative, but an aspect of a wider sea
change in the relationship between Armenians and the state. He makes reference
to the Armenian community’s loss of their previously held position as the ‘loyal
millet’; not stated, but instead heavily implied, is the new role Armenians occupy,
for the period marked the decisive juncture at which they came to be viewed
as a dubious entity within the empire, increasingly linked with foreign power
and characterized as treacherous. Blame is placed on Armenians (Öztuncay
loudly citing an Armenian historian to underscore the ‘fairness’ of the claim) for
sending their own delegation to the post-war Conference of Berlin, an action that
‘contributed to this poisoning of relations’.86 Kevork’s disloyalty is but part of a
wider Armenian betrayal of the Ottoman state. Öztuncay, perhaps unconsciously,
gives some clues to the tectonic shifts underway in the empire, particularly
how defeat and decline led to a reimagining of the empire and the identities
of its constituent groups. The Ottoman state was increasingly understood not
as a multi-ethnic plurality but in terms of the dominant group, as a Muslim
space and, increasingly, a Turkish national space. This was the lens through
which the empire saw itself and presented itself to others, and the influence on
the photographic projects of the late era, with their strategies of inclusion and
exclusion, seems clear. However, it is not something generally remarked upon,
owing to the fact that the lens remains – it is the lens through which imperial
history was and continues to be written, producing narratives that tend towards
the privileging and elevation of figures of Ottoman Turkish/Muslim identity,
while diminishing and vilifying Armenians. In essence, Öztuncay tells the origin
story of his own historiographical discourse.
At the very outset of The Photographers of Constantinople, Öztuncay states his
desire to ‘restore’ to history Vichen Abdullah and Vassilaki Kargopoulo, both of
whom are presented as court photographers who converted to Islam and who have
been subsequently neglected by history for this reason. Here we witness the first
stirrings of an unsavoury alignment between identity and historical worth, further
brought out as Öztuncay pairs hagiography with obloquy, employing Armenians
as a dialectical foil. The central contrast he establishes is between Vichen Abdullah,
‘arguably the greatest of all Ottoman-period photographers’,87 and brother Kevork,
who, ‘if truth be told, was more passionate about Armenian nationalism than
about photography’.88 But again, we are not restricted to individuals here, for
Vichen and Kevork are but avatars. ‘One consequence of [Vichen Abdullah’s]
conversion’, Öztuncay writes, ‘was that he was almost completely ostracized by his
former community, with the result that in many 20th century publications about
Abdullah Frères, Vichen Abdullah is glossed over if not completely ignored.’89 It is
a claim of great historiographical injustice based, despite the reference to ‘many’
publications, on just two cited sources – a biography and a short encyclopaedia
entry, both expressly on the subject of Kevork – and a number of leaps of the
imagination. It is one leap to argue that examining Kevork is in itself an act of
obscuring Vichen, another to suggest that the alleged obscurement of Vichen is a
1. Escaping Constantinople 21
calculated response to a religious conversion, and one further still to suggest the
two cited sources to be expressions of those writers’ (presumed) identities and
indicative of the (presumed) will of a wider community. Worse is to come, for
Öztuncay speaks of this assumed collective position in terms of extreme political
ideology, the supposed neglect of Vichen being ‘distressing evidence that the
bigotry and fanaticism advocated by Kevork is still alive and thriving even today’.90
It is an astonishing comment, one that can only lead us to conclude that his is a
history written along ethno-religious lines.
It is difficult, in these circumstances, not to read some of his portraits of other
Armenian photographers as a stream of micro-aggressions. While none reaches
the depths of infamy reserved for Kevork Abdullah, numerous lesser-known
Armenian photographers receive distinctly unflattering portraits, portrayed
as dubious and duplicitous personages. They include Garabed Pabuchian who
‘stands out particularly because of his penchant for pretending to be more than
he was’, scolded by Öztuncay for supposedly making inflated claims about his
achievements and for assuming the moniker Nadir, with both the name and
the signature logo by which it was presented owing a clear debt to the Parisian
photographer Nadar (an admonishment that ironically ignores the fact that Nadar
himself was a master of this form of self-invention and self-promotion).91 There is
also a notable appearance by the Caracache Frères, whom are inexplicably referred
to by the more Armenian-sounding ‘Karakaşyan brothers’ and are said to have
had ‘at least one somewhat shady side’ to their business, with ‘bootlegged copies’
of photographs by the major studios being found amongst their works.92 From
out of Öztuncay’s portraits often steps the photographer of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century popular perception: dishonest, opportunistic and pretentious,
an image related in no small way to the social stereotypes surrounding those who
populated the profession.93 The fundamental figure of mistrust is thus not so much
the photographer as it is the Armenian. What we are faced with are variations on
a theme, for the photographer who presents the work of others as his own and the
photographer who supports nationalist causes exist on a continuum, representing
varying degrees of Armenian duplicity.94
There is a tendency, as Ronald Grigor Suny has shown, for Ottoman history to
be narrated ‘almost exclusively from the point of view of the dominant people in
the empire’.95 It is often a teleological form of history that looks back on empire
through the lens of the modern nation state. It is a tunnel history, in other words,
that demarcates its arena of action – implicitly or explicitly – in accordance with
notions of identity that took root in the late empire and which informed the
establishment of the Turkish Republic, presenting Ottoman history as unfolding
in a distinctly, and even exclusively, Turkish space.96 This is commonly termed a
Turkish nationalist historiography, but it is important to note the wider traction
and pervasiveness of this approach. In short, there exists something of a standard
position that distances non-Turks from Ottoman history.
22 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Time and time again, we find Armenians being awarded some mark of
‘foreignness’.97 Never framed as Western when the focus of the history of
photography lay purely on Western image-makers, they now find themselves
becoming so once the attention comes to lie on domestic production. Armenians,
it seems, lack authenticity; they are not Ottoman enough, or even not Ottoman at
all. Meanwhile, Muslim Turks belong fully to Ottoman history, a position made
most evident in the generally accepted interchangeability of the terms ‘Ottoman’
and ‘Turkish’.98 Micklewright’s depiction of Ali Sami and his milieu provides
an excellent example. Ali Sami is ‘one of the best-known of the early Ottoman
photographers’, despite the fact that his photographic career began in the 1890s.99
Continuing in this vein, Micklewright describes how ‘the Ottomans themselves
began taking pictures’ during this era, how ‘a military education and employment
by the court was initially the route by which Ottomans learned the new art’, and the
even more loaded proposition that ‘Ali Sami and other Ottoman photographers
took control of the camera’.100 The birth of photography among Ottomans thus
becomes clearly situated in the particular historical juncture of the Hamidian
period when the first Muslim photographers emerged from the Imperial School of
Engineers. Micklewright also tells us, in a stock formula we find repeated in other
studies: ‘Local photographers had been at first primarily Greek or Armenian, but
Muslims also began learning how to take pictures.’101 Within the succinct space
of a single sentence we are given a condensed narrative of the tunnel history of
Ottoman photography, an elliptical statements that brushes – and indeed rushes
– past Greek and Armenian practitioners, emphasizing their temporariness and
their peripherality to the central narrative via a process of linguistic erasure.
The emphasis placed on the ‘emergence’ of Ottoman photography from the
military schools might lead us back once again to Abdülhamid’s order, made
famous by the history of photography. It appears even more as a ‘From today
painting is dead’ utterance, becoming a rhetorical staging of an inaugural moment
designed to delimit its subject. With the sultan’s proclamation, the birth of Ottoman
photography is marked: ‘From today Ottoman photography is alive.’ A recognition
of this reinforces Roberts’s assertion that the albums are ‘central to creating a
definition of Ottoman photography’ and furthermore helps us to understand what
exactly is being defined, for it is nothing short of the empire itself that is given
form. It is a conceptualization predicated upon pushing Ottoman Christians, most
notably Armenians, into the background and bringing Ottoman Turks to the fore
as the ‘true’ agents of Ottoman photography and indeed the ‘true’ Ottomans: ‘From
today Ottoman Turkish photography is alive.’
This serves as the thrust of histories of Ottoman photography, even those
that attempt to foreground the empire’s non-Muslim population. There is even a
wistfulness and a nostalgia for a lost cosmopolitanism to Engin Özendes’s work as
she looks at Christian photographers and describes wider Armenian – and also
Greek and Jewish – contributions to the Ottoman Empire. However, these actors
take part in a history that is not their own. By limiting the geography of her study
to modern Turkish borders while expanding the temporal bounds beyond 1923
into the Republican era, Özendes blurs the lines between empire and republic and
1. Escaping Constantinople 23
have impaired and skewed our understanding of Ottoman photography.107 Yet this
assertion of what is missing is itself missing – missing from the main body of the
text. It lies excluded in the quiet spaces of chapter endnotes, an oblique reference
declared to be of secondary concern. Buried and fleeting though it is, the statement
does hint at a reason why our gaze is constantly fixed on Constantinople, for it
indirectly suggests that we return to the city not simply because it was a place of
significant production but also because it was not, relatively speaking, a place of
significant destruction. The unstated, and quite possibly unintended, implication
is that even were we not to rely on institutional collections we would still be dealing
with an officially sanctioned archive, the archive of what state violence has allowed
to survive.
Destruction, while immense, was not complete. Material has survived,
survived to find itself targeted in other ways, not physically but semantically
and intellectually through misrepresentation. While we have seen a number of
ways in which Armenian photographers have been erased and diminished, more
accentuated still is the treatment of Armenian subjects, who have proved far easier
than photographers to excise the history of Ottoman photography. Where they
appear, they do so as part of cleansed histories and they do so not as Armenians. In
one instance, we find Nancy Micklewright suggesting, quite rightly, that we must
understand the particularities of the Ottoman context. A wedding photograph
from Mersin is used to illustrate this point:
The couple wears contemporary western dress, but other, less visible, aspects of
their marriage, as well as their larger social realities, would have been completely
different than the circumstances of a couple photographed at the same time in
London. Without access to this kind of information, generally only provided by
a relative or written documentation accompanying an image, understanding the
social relationships pictured in a photograph is extremely difficult.108
No mention is made of the specific history behind the photograph and the only
clue to the sitters’ identities as Armenians lies in their names (which, in another
instance of exclusion from the main text, are found in the image caption alone).
More problematic still is the suggestion, chiefly but not solely through the words
‘[w]ithout access to this kind of information’, of a lost history, one that cannot be
known. Thus a photograph dating from 1920 is gazed upon as if it were a cave
painting, the mysterious product of long distant, anonymous people who have left
behind them few indications as to the nature of their existence, few clues as to how
their works should be interpreted. Yet the story is there for anyone wanting to tell
it, it being a simple matter to trace the photograph back to its source (a source
openly declared by Micklewright and yet selectively employed).109 While the image
has been transferred, its history has been jettisoned, a history, it must be noted, that
touches upon family experiences in the massacres perpetrated against Armenians
before, during and after the First World War. Micklewright’s account excludes a
history of violence in favour of its own form of historiographical violence. The
photograph becomes an empty shell, its subjects visible yet invisible; appearances
1. Escaping Constantinople 25
A P P R OAC H I N G T H E P R OV I N C E S , V IA T R E B I Z O N D
How might we begin to craft another history, one that sees the return of the
excluded and the disappeared?
Such a history might take 1839 as not simply the year of Daguerre, Arago and
Takvim-i Vekayi but also of the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane, a decree that was the first
plank in the era of Ottoman reform known as the Tanzimat. Photography, from
this perspective, arrived in a changing Ottoman world, shaped by new political
and social formulations. The Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane and its successor, the 1856
Hatt-i Humayun, which largely acted as a recapitulation of the earlier decree,
declared an end to the theocratic order and ostensibly put in its place a system of
inter-religious equality in which the diverse array of imperial subjects would be
bound together by a collective identity known as Ottomanism. They were reforms
made at times of crisis and in the wake of conflicts that laid bare the empire’s
systemic failings – the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), the Russo-Turkish
War (1828–29), the conquest of Syria and a portion of Anatolia by the Egyptian
Khedive Mehmet Ali Paşa (1831–32), and later the Crimean War (1853–56). As
Donald Bloxham notes, the decrees carried the distinct feel of public relations
exercises, the improvement of the lot of Christian subjects an effort to appease
the Great Powers of Europe and garner the support needed to prop up the ailing
empire, particularly in the face of aggressive Russian expansionism.1 The fact that
decrees acted more as statements of equality than as implementations helps in
part to explain the failure of the reforms they promised. The very restatement of
aims in 1856 served as a tacit admission of failure but without there being any
accompanying acknowledgement of the reasons behind that failure. The era
brought about some material improvement in Ottoman Christian lives, although
with regard to Armenians it can be argued that much reform was precipitated from
within, the cultural, economic and political flowering of the Armenian renaissance
bringing about changes in community governance.2 The state reform movement,
however, did not bring about the wholesale change to which it aspired and even,
in some senses, made matters worse. It broke down the structures under which
Ottoman subjects had co-existed in circumstances that, while essentially unequal,
were sustainable and marked by a degree of tolerance. At the same time, it failed
28 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
given the disintegration of empire due to minority activities, and given the
location of the Armenians on the border with Russia, their contacts with
the European powers, and above all their renaissance at a time of trouble for
the Ottoman Empire, the ground or context against which they had once been
perceived shifted, and what had once been seen as a loyal and useful minority
came to be seen as insurrectionary and provocative.9
Amidst the substantial departure from the ethos of the Hatt-i Sherif of Gulhane and
Hatt-i Humayun, an element of those decrees did survive, for Abdülhamid came to
be heavily invested in ideas of public relations – what Selim Deringil describes as
his project of damage control and image management.10 His photographic albums
played a part in this, and it becomes absurd to position them as solely a rebuttal
of Western Orientalism; this they no doubt were, but to see them purely in those
somewhat abstract terms is to dull the historical specificity of their statements.
Echoes of the photographs can be found in accounts of the era, helping us to
locate them at a particular juncture and recognize their purpose. We find their
traces in the American journalist and preacher George Hepworth’s account of
a conversation with an Ottoman official in which the state of education in the
empire is detailed, with particular attention paid to the Aşiret Mektebi, as well
as schools for girls, and for the deaf and dumb;11 we find them too in the tour
arranged by the sultan for the British writer and Conservative politician Mark
Sykes, in which the Aşiret Mektebi was one of the ‘interesting sights’.12 The parallels
between these accounts and the Abdülhamid albums are significant and these
30 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
episodes are, above all, rendered meaningful by their contexts, with Hepworth’s
conversation occurring during his investigations into the Armenian massacres
of the mid-1890s and Sykes’s tour taking place in 1903 at a time of violence and
unrest in Ottoman Macedonia. Viewed in this light, the Hamidian photographs
belong to a concerted project to shape Western opinion during times of imperial
crisis and international attention. With this understood we might conjecture that
in part the albums were formulated as a response to the news stories circulating at
the time of their commission, such as that of the abduction of a young Armenian
girl from her village on the plain of Mush, north-east of Diyarbekir, by the Kurdish
chief Musa Bey, an event that proved a great cause célèbre in the West and a
watershed moment in the ‘Armenian question’.13 Its notoriety owed much to the
involvement of former (and future) British Prime Minister William Gladstone,
whose account of the abduction was presented in lectures and widely published,
including on the reverse of a photograph of the Armenian girl that was printed in
London.14 Meanwhile, also in circulation were corresponding portraits of Musa
Bey that the Kurdish chief had happily posed for in the Abdullah Frères studio
in Constantinople, with one of their telling manifestations being in the pages of
the British illustrated journal The Graphic above the caption ‘The Condition of
Armenia’ (these photographs, unsurprisingly, are not to be found in studies of that
studio).15
This is the history displaced by the Abdülhamid albums and their vision of
order. However, it is also a history that is obliquely present, offering the possibility
that it might be salvaged from the margins to which it has been pushed. The Aşiret
Mektebi and the Hamidiye regiments were part of the same state project that
sought to deal with ‘troublesome’ populations and reclaim the eastern provinces,
with the concrete link between the two being that the Kurdish students attending
the former were the children of chiefs leading the latter. Depictions of students
brought into the Ottoman fold at the Aşiret Mektebi thus have their counterpoint
in the unpictured suppression of Armenians in the border region. The photographs
become placeholders, to use Ariella Azoulay’s term, substituting for images that
were not made, and perhaps could not be made, thus providing a presence for an
absent element of history.16
Locating Armenians in the history of Ottoman photography requires such
shifts in method and perspective, here a reading of the archive ‘from below’, in
the words of Allan Sekula, ‘from a position of solidarity with those displaced,
deformed, silenced or made invisible’.17 Put otherwise, it is to the margins of the
image that we must look; it is by searching for what has been excluded from the
frame that we might uncover histories of exclusion and dispossession. Probing
state photography for what has been refused and veiled and making connections
between the seen and the unseen – relating what lies within the photographic
frame ‘to other facts, to material realities’ – provides an opportunity to renegotiate
what is represented according to Stephen Sheehi, a rethinking of the means of
knowledge production through which we can emancipate images and, with them,
the histories they have displaced.18 We might even recognize the way in which this
is encouraged on some level by the products of the state themselves; after all, the
2. Approaching the Provinces 31
In Trebizond
to know the lives of people who, we might say, will never consent to be wholly
absorbed into the anonymizing project of the state.
Lying embedded in the official record are clues to the vernacular, faint, gossamer
strands of reality that could lead us out of the labyrinth. Let us follow them to
Cacoulis’s studio and see what manner of image he produced when not employed
by the state. A carte de visite portrait by him carries the date 17 March 1890, thus
announcing itself as a contemporary of the Abdülhamid albums (Figure 2.1); yet
there the similarities end, for as a single print pasted onto board, small enough
(10 × 6.3 cm) to fit in the hand, it is dwarfed on numerous scales by the hundreds
of Hamidian photographs in leather-bound albums, of a size requiring a table to
support them (each one around 48 × 63 cm). It is here, in this seemingly smaller
photographic world, that Cacoulis commands the stage, his name and the words
‘Photographic Studio, The Black Sea, in Trebizond’ appearing on the face and the
reverse of the card in French and Greek. Over Cacoulis’s proclamations on the
reverse side, his sitter, signing his name K. Yeghiazarian, has added in Armenian
his own mark and inscription: ‘To my all-loving mother.’ Another hand has added
a second inscription at some later date, telling us that Yeghiazarian was born on 17
February 1857 in Garin, giving the Armenian name for the city of Erzurum, lying
to the south-east of Trebizond. The portrait is an unassuming object, seemingly
innocuous and commonplace, the product of a provincial studio overlaid with
Figure 2.1 K.E. Cacoulis. K. Yeghiazarian, Trebizond, 1890. Collection of the author.
34 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Our focus has come to settle on a fragmented and dispersed array of photographs,
largely to be found in the hands of private individuals, families and community
institutions, thus examples par excellence of the vernacular, defined by Geoffrey
Batchen as those photographs that occupy ‘the home and the heart but rarely the
museum or the academy’.32 Their preservation stems from an insistence common
in vernacular photography, the commonly held desire of communities to preserve
36 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
the vestiges of their past.33 Yet this insistence takes on a particular form when it
comes to people who have to grapple with dispossession and disappearance. As
bell hooks writes of the place of photographs in African American communities:
‘[w]hen the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire
histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation may become an obsession’.34
Collections contain materials that have survived the deadly assault upon
the communities and the culture that produced them, the communities and the
culture for which they now speak, operating beyond the bounds of dominant
narratives.35
Only on rare occasion do such photographs break out into the open. One
isolated example is a photograph made in the city of Van around 1911/12, a
portrait of mother and son Shushan and Vostanig Adoian (Figure 2.2). Its
existence in the public realm is due to its later use by Vostanig, by that time an
artist in the USA working under the name Arshile Gorky. The family portrait
served as source material for two canvases – monumental pieces that he worked
on over a period of decades – and for a great number of drawings, works
that served as studies for the two canvases while also existing in their own
right as navigations of and negotiations with the boyhood photograph.36 The
photograph has gained prominence through its relation to these works, being
published in almost every monograph and exhibition catalogue devoted to the
artist (providing a variant on the induction of the photograph into a discourse
of art). It has become messily intwined with the artist’s oeuvre, Gorky’s repeated
recreations of the photograph making him almost the author of his boyhood
photograph. We find, for instance, Peter Balakian stating that in Gorky’s life
‘the photograph offers an unambiguous autobiographical source’.37 And if the
photograph cannot be seen without recalling its painted counterparts, then it
is also difficult to extract it from the perceived mood of those works, a mood
of profound personal grief on one level, persistent community trauma on
another. One of Gorky’s biographers, Matthew Spender, has said: ‘Armenians
of the Diaspora recognize in these works degrees of suffering about which
those who are not Armenian know nothing.’38 So emblematic have these works
become of the Armenian experience that their character seems to rebound
back into the photograph, returning to the source and setting up home there
with the full weight of its trauma.39 Heavy indeed are its accumulations, and
beneath the thick layers of accrued historical impasto the photograph itself
seems to lie obscured.
Positioning the photograph as an ‘autobiographical source’ at least serves to
anchor it in a context and a concrete history, ‘in a time and place’; however, for
Balakian it is ‘in relation to the catastrophic event that would shape Gorky’s life’
that the photograph sits.40 The evocation of future events calls to mind Roland
Barthes, for whom the mood of photographs is inevitable loss. As he memorably
pronounces while examining a photograph of Lewis Payne made on the eve of
his execution, finding there the image of a living man infused with the spectre
of his death: ‘I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe
with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake.’41 While not exactly
2. Approaching the Provinces 37
Figure 2.2 Uncredited photographer. Shushan and Vostanig Adoian, Van, c.1911. Courtesy
of Dr Bruce Berberian and The Arshile Gorky Foundation.
the heroic embodiment of courage and moral outrage’.51 It should perhaps come
as no surprise to find accounts of Wegner’s exploits conforming to this archetype,
for his own self-mythologizing paved the way. In the script of his magic lantern
lecture, for example, he is found declaring:
Each time I talk about the terrible pictures of the tragedy of this people, the
horror of which has perhaps made your eyes at times turn away from the screen,
I see myself again among the starving and dying in the refugee camp, feel their
imploring hands in mine, summoning me to plead for them once I was back in
Europe.52
In the last few days I have taken numerous photographs. They tell me that Jemal
Pasha, the hangman of Syria, has forbidden the photographing of the refugee camps
on the pain of death. I carry these images that horrify and indict hidden under my
cummerbund. In the camps of Meskene and Aleppo I collected many petitions,
which I have hidden in my knapsack, in order to bring them to the American
Embassy in Constantinople, since the postal service will not deliver them. I do
not doubt for a moment that I am thereby committing an act of high treason, and
yet the knowledge of having helped these most wretched people at least in a slight
respect fills me with a feeling of greater fortune than could any other deed.55
It is a perfectly condensed rendition of the heroic Wegner persona, the man who at
great risk to himself breaks unjust laws for a just cause, striving to bring a hidden
truth to light. Importantly, the passage also acts in the realm of attribution and
provenance, situating photographs in the specific time, place and circumstances of
production, precisely the sort of grounding that is felt necessary for them to become
evidence and assume the role of truth-conferring documents.56 Indeed, in ‘images
that horrify and indict’, we have the central rhetorical staging of this particular
field, a regularly repeated phrase that tells us what it is that commentators want
photographs to be: clear, unambivalent documents of ethical and even legal fact.57
40 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
It is a phrase that places Wegner’s photographs in the realm of the ‘secular icons’
of the Holocaust addressed by Cornelia Brink, photographs to be understood ‘as
straightforward and unambiguous reality, not as a specific photographic rendering
of that reality open to analysis’, and deemed to ‘make a moral claim to be accepted
without questioning’.58
The comparison is not without its relevance, for it is precisely in relation
to the Holocaust and Holocaust imagery that photographs depicting the
Armenian Genocide tend to be positioned. ‘While documentation can support
the evidentiary burden of the genocide claim,’ Leshu Torchin writes, ‘it is the
deployment of the Holocaust imaginary that renders the Armenian atrocities
culturally legible as genocide.’59 The invocation, both implicit and explicit, of the
Holocaust speaks of a desire to situate Armenian Genocide images in the realm of
collective imagination and understanding that allows the events rendered through
them to be recognized as genocide and, moreover, for those photographs to be
assigned the historical currency of Holocaust ‘icons’, accepted as ‘ethical reference
points’.60 Thus we find Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian beginning their
study by recalling ‘the image of the Jewish boy with his arms raised in the Warsaw
ghetto’,61 while Sybil Milton declares that the ‘best of [Armin Wegner’s] images are
comparable in quality to Margaret Bourke-White’s Buchenwald photographs’.62
A memory of photographs from Vietnam is also stirred, and it is particularly
interesting to see Geoffrey Robertson reversing the equation, asking us to view
those images through the lens of Wegner’s words and images rather than vice
versa: ‘Photo-journalism can encapsulate a crime against humanity – the iconic
examples from Vietnam, of a young Vietcong suspect having his brains blown
out and a naked girl fleeing from her napalmed village, are in Armin Wegner’s
phrase “images that horrify and indict”’.63 Despite the inversion, the desired effect
remains the same, that Wegner’s images take their place in the world’s visual
memory banks.
More recent studies of Wegner have started to acknowledge the ambiguities of
his work. Emmanuel Alloa writes of his embellishment of the visual record (along
with his accounts of his wartime experiences), Wegner co-opting copious images
from a variety of sources, many pre-dating 1915, in actions that might suggest his
own doubts that photographs could provide what was desired of them. Lacking
the material to show what he wanted to show, he engaged in forms of creative
construction.64 Jay Winter, meanwhile, describes Wegner as being ‘intensely
aware that what he showed were the traces of the aftermath of the suffering’. ‘We
therefore have no choice but to draw inferences from these terrifying photos
as to what happened before’, Winter writes, ‘[a]nd it is there, not in what the
photograph shows but in what it does not show that the deepest horror may lie.’65
We begin to be alerted to what might be considered an essential predicament of
reading photographs related to the Armenian Genocide, that in circumstances
characterized by denial, lack and absence, readings hinge on extrapolations and
importations.
Building on Nichanian’s theories, Marie-Aude Baronian describes how the ‘non-
event’ of the Armenian Genocide has also become ‘a kind of “non-document”’. With
2. Approaching the Provinces 41
destruction and denial, visual representations of the genocide either do not exist
or do not circulate, producing a blank space where a public visual repository might
otherwise have existed and, furthermore, complicating Armenians’ own access to
the catastrophic past. ‘This explains the rather complex relation Armenians have
towards images in general’, she writes, continuing:
there is, in a way, a constant desire to reconstruct and legitimate the past by
any ‘visible’ means available, precisely because the Armenian Catastrophe is
characterized by the way it remains unrecorded and unrepresented. Armenians
are thus caught in an inextricable archival paradox: they have to produce (visual)
evidence precisely because the evidence has been destroyed and negated.66
Armenians, according to Baronian, have come to rely upon the oblique means
of private images to connect with and to communicate this most traumatic
chapter of their past. This is the image as ‘prosthesis’, operating in place of and
as substitute for the missing ‘direct’ image (and clearly chiming with Azoulay’s
concept of ‘placeholders’). Baronian analyses the work of particular visual artists,
including Atom Egoyan’s A Portrait of Arshile, a short film about inherited memory
formulated as an address to Egoyan’s son, named Arshile after the painter. The
story of Arshile Gorky’s life is delivered in voice-over to home movie images of the
young boy, with the Adoian photograph forming a central plank in that life story,
an image that is overtaken by catastrophic events (‘You are named after a man who
seven years after the photograph was taken would hold his mother in his arms
as she died of starvation’) and around which memory coagulates, Gorky’s own
memory and, by implication, a wider collective memory inherited by and circulated
among Armenians. Just as Gorky’s story shifts locus in the film, becoming part of
wider Armenian experience and narrative, so too might we understand the way
the artistic practice in which Egoyan is immersed itself balloons outwards. The
process described, of recreation and redeployment, of ‘displaced images that wish
to grasp a displaced history, that wish to place this tragic history into a memory-
space’, can be seen as part of wider Armenian interactions with photographs in a
space of slippage between public and private.
This can be read in Nefissa Naguib’s case study of private Armenian family
albums, showing how individual and family narratives come to nestle within
wider collective narratives, invariably coloured by the genocide. Such nestling
can be quite literal, with private family photographs kept alongside published
images, the ‘distressing photographs of human pain’, an interspersal that aids
and signifies the diminishment of boundaries between the two.67 It can be taken
as another example of the image as a ‘prosthesis’, betraying the desire for visual
representation, public images becoming stand-in depictions of the family’s own
experiences as well as aspects of a wider commonly remembered past. More
interesting still is the adoption of the private photographs of others, with a portrait
of an Armenian merchant family, to whom the owner is not related, coming to
hold significance for her and the neighbours with whom she views it. It is ‘[a]t
a mundane level […] an image folded up to everyday worlds’, while on another
42 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
a new meaning on the past, and therefore to obscure or mutate all earlier senses
of the object’.73 It might be instructive here to bring in debates on the ethics of
viewing images of violence. Such debates have played little role in discussions
of Armenian Genocide imagery, for with their underlying proposition, either
stated or unstated, of lack, commentaries become concerned with another
proposition, the problem of not looking or not being able to look. However, an
acknowledgement that vernacular images have become prostheses, placeholders
and ersatz depictions of violence necessitates that the field takes on some of these
considerations and problematizes the dominant mode of viewing. In this light,
we need to consider whether narratives of violence are a form of perpetration.
There is surely an accusation to be made against these traumatic stand-ins similar
to that raised by Andrea Liss in relation to the ‘abject documentary photographs’
of the Holocaust, that ‘such photographs do not always bring the viewer to look,
to really see, nor can they be counted on to create empathetic bonds between the
contemporary subject and the person from the unimaginable past’.74 Photographs
threaten to become not the sites of engagement with the past but barriers to it.
What is shared by the two approaches to photographs – one in which the
Armenian past is erased, the other in which it forcefully returns – is a tendency to
divorce them from their milieus. After all, the origins of the Adoian photograph
are as neglected as those of the Hamidian photographs. The questions asked by
Hrag Vartanian about who might have made it and what it tells us about the wider
Armenian tradition of studio photography constitute a rare enquiry;75 otherwise,
its self-evident ‘truth’ as a product of the forces of Armenian history or their
embodiment in the person of Gorky himself have resulted in its own qualities
becoming obscured. Thus we find ourselves once again faced with the issue of the
loss of context, and it can be argued that there are photographs held in Armenian
circles that are just as in need of being re-established within their own histories as
the much-studied products of the state. The maker of the Adoian portrait might
be grouped with the photographers who contributed to the Abdülhamid albums,
placed among the ranks of neglected and invisible provincial practitioners, thus
offering another opportunity for photographs, when studied carefully, to act as
entry points into the world that produced them and in which they circulated.
It is a process that requires us to attend to photographs. And as we turn towards
photographs so might we also turn away from the future, for just as there is a
virtue in looking so too might there be one in blindness. In order to contemplate
properly the people and the photographs of the past, we should close our eyes
to what we know about the future.76 If the future does play a role, then it is not
the future as we know it to have transpired, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s
concept of ‘liquid temporality’ providing a much-needed antidote to retrospection
that helps us to consider how photographs ‘show us not only the past in which
they were taken but the present and the futures contained in that past, futures that
their diverse subjects may have been envisioning’.77 Thus it is their own futures
that subjects look towards, those they imagined, anticipated, hoped for, and, yes,
feared, but even the feared futures bore no resemblance to what we now recognize
as the past, its extremes having been unimaginable for all but a few in the years
before 1915. To think about imagined futures and to put the unknown future to
44 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
one side is not to dismiss or diminish the Armenian Genocide, nor is it to shy away
from it as an occurrence. Rather it is, as with Michael André Bernstein’s concept
of sideshadowing (which similarly muses on other possible futures), to face that
history, to confront its ‘human cost […] by reminding us of all that its coming-
into-existence made impossible’.78 Above all, however, that human cost is to be
addressed by keeping in mind the present moment of photographs and the living
world of their making and their circulation. This is to ponder their ‘earlier senses’
before they were reborn as artefacts, to think of their own purposes, qualities and
textures, their evidentiary and affective power. They were never meant to be the
remnants of the dead and the destroyed, and are not by nature memento mori; they
are vestiges, certainly, but vestiges of a different order. As John Berger puts it, ‘the
photograph is a memento from a life being lived’.79
Cacoulis’s mount may have invoked the spirit of the early amateurs and their
painstaking ‘art’, but the format he employed had utterly changed the medium,
turning it into a professional practice of mass-production. Introduced by André
Disdéri in the 1850s, the carte de visite was an industrialized format that produced
multiple portraits from a single camera exposure.80 Its streamlined system
predicated on the formulaic repetition of set poses, props and conventions brought
down prices and made photographic portraits accessible to a greater number,
producing an explosion of images with the same formal make-up, each one
interchangeable with myriad others. This standardization, Deborah Poole explains,
made the carte of particular use in long distance communication, helping ‘to shape
feelings of community or sameness among metropolitan bourgeoisies, aspiring
provincial merchants, and upper- and middle-class colonials scattered around
the globe’.81 Sitters surrendered themselves to the levelling patterns of modernity
and the production of the generic, uniformly clad and uniformly pictured
bourgeois body, the ‘new man’ of the carte de visite.82 In spite of being subjected to
generalities, sitters did not see themselves as reduced in stature; quite the reverse,
in fact, for photographs served as a status symbol and certificates of subjecthood,
the means by which an increasing number could claim a place in the social and
political order. Cartes transferred to the mass market the aesthetic conventions
of painted portraiture, notably the full-length pose, and allowed photographed
individuals to play with identity and slip among the noted figures of the day, such
as those royal, political, military and cultural figures who formed the visual hall of
honour Disdéri published in regular instalments, his Galerie des contemporains.83
That Galerie shows the way in which, by translating appearances into objects that
could be passed from hand to hand, collected and held privately, Disdéri’s format
transformed people ‘into portable objects of private devotion’, thus creating ‘a new
form of cultism’.84 Geoffrey Batchen is keen to emphasize its ‘sentimental’ aspect,
the ‘amazement that can be induced by even the most ordinary and predictable of
2. Approaching the Provinces 45
brothers’ study of photographic techniques in Paris.89 And the story of the Abdullah
Frères flows directly into that of Yessayi Garabedian, a man who would become the
Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem and founder of that city’s first photographic studio
and school. In 1859, while still a priest at the St James Monastery in Jerusalem,
Garabedian spent six months in Constantinople, learning photographic techniques
from the Abdullahs (and also quizzing the Austrian ambassador on the new
collodion process).90 This begins to tell us something about the Armenian networks
of mobility and belonging that played a vital role in their progress as photographers
and the spread of the medium in their communities. The Kayseri-born Garabedian
was able to establish himself in Jerusalem and to travel to Constantinople because
they were cities to which any Ottoman Armenian could belong. Under the millet
system, to belong in a place one needed only to belong to one of its communities,
meaning that, as Issam Nassar shows, ‘an Armenian who was not born in Jerusalem
would have felt at home in the city simply because there was already an Armenian
community that would have welcomed him as one of its members’.91 This was not
particular to Constantinople and Jerusalem but true across the empire. To be an
Ottoman Armenian was to be able to traverse the vast terrain of empire.
Constantinople and Jerusalem were major centres of Armenian life and places
that Dickinson Jenkins Miller, in his early, pioneering study of Armenians in
photography (scholarship that is only now being added to), identifies as being crucial
to the passage of photography to the Armenian communities of the eastern provinces
of the Ottoman Empire.92 He also mentions a third source, the Russian Empire,
showing that to be an Armenian was to be part of wider networks still. Armenians
were spread across the region, their historic homelands straddling imperial and
national borders, while a merchant history stretching back centuries meant that
they were to be found further afield still in diasporic communities. Armenians, in
short, had cemented themselves in a long chain of cities and Armenian life had
many ‘centres’; in addition to the Ottoman trading ports of Constantinople and
Smyrna (Izmir today), we can point to Tiflis (Tbilisi today) and Baku in the Russian
Empire, as well as places of Armenian existence in Europe – notably Venice and,
increasingly as the nineteenth century progressed, Paris, London and Manchester.
The latter three were all visited by Garabedian in 1863, journeys that allowed him
to develop his photographic knowledge further, journeys that were possible in large
part because of the existence in those places of Armenian communities.93 He would
not have belonged to those places as he might be said to have belonged to Jerusalem
via the millet system, but a similar principle of access applied, diasporic connections
giving him points of entry into those cities.
Carving out a role as agents between cultures, Armenians forged a strong
diasporan presence in the sites of contact and nodes of exchange, the urban,
cosmopolitan settings of large commercial centres that acted as stations along
long-established trade networks.94 In addition to the existence of diasporan
communities, the absence of a national centre, in political terms at least, led, in
Vahé Oshagan’s reading, to the development among Armenians of a ‘xenophilia’,
a proclivity towards the adoption of Western modes.95 They thus became points
of reception and onward transmission, interlocutors facilitating the passage
2. Approaching the Provinces 47
This was the world of Armenian lives onto which photography mapped itself, with
first the carte de visite and later its successor formats. Even with the carte’s departure,
the sense of repetitious formula remained as studio photography continued to
be built on reiterations and restagings, employing certain consistent tropes and
compositions. This is the variety of vernacular we find among Armenians, largely
far removed from the inventive, distinctive vernacular that has been traced in other
geographical contexts.102 In place of idiosyncrasy, the repetitions of studio portraiture
provide familiar rhythms, essentially, as Tina Campt recognizes in mid-twentieth-
century archives of the African diaspora, the structure of a collective language.103 It
is a vernacular of certain set modes which, understood and accepted by those who
use them, form the basis of a communal system; within this structure, however, the
capacity exists for individual actors to present their autonomous performances, for
personal tales to be told. This became especially so as the later, larger photographic
formats – such as the cabinet card (approximately 16.5 × 10.75 cm) – created more
room inside the frame. This amounted to more leeway for photographers and sitters
to break with convention, more space for their own narrations, thus extending
photography’s subjunctive and sentimental potential. The photograph, now a stage
for the individual to assert themselves more forcefully, also pulled in the other
direction, for with its extended space it was of a sufficient size to include multiple
actors, and so performed both networking and individuating operations. Families,
friends, church groups, professional associations, school classes, political parties
2. Approaching the Provinces 49
and others can all be found using the photograph as a forum for the expression and
enactment of group bonds.
As the scope of the photographic frame broadened, so did the scope of the
studio. In the late nineteenth century, as might be imagined by the brief history
outlined, photography in Armenian circles started to escape its origins, becoming
more pluralistic. Studio patrons were no longer confined to the Europeanized
trading or fabrica-owning strata of society, while women came to play a greater
role, especially as migration emptied the photographic stage of its men. The
photographic studio thus becomes a place to consider the variety of Armenian
lives, of vital importance if our aim is inclusion. Were we to write a history only
of the heavily bourgeois carte de visite in Armenian communities, we might risk
producing another exclusionary history and risk, furthermore, reproducing the
prevalent anti-Armenian stereotype of the advancing merchant, middleman
and comprador, a figure who might have existed in some form but certainly
did not represent any great majority of Armenians.104 At the same time, there is
a danger that the broadening scope of photography – along with the very fact
that we write against exclusionary histories – fools us into believing that ours is
indeed an inclusive history. We must contend with the fact that the camera was
partial; it could never fully divorce itself from its roots and retained its preference
for the monied and the male – ‘the portrait of the gentleman’ had cemented
itself, as Christopher Pinney writes, as the ‘default setting of nineteenth-century
photographic apparatus’.105 Despite the doors of the studio opening ever wider, there
were always those locked out. Therefore, while we might speak of a subjunctive
potential, photographs remain to a certain extent reflective of an existing social
hierarchy, being in this way ‘sociograms’, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term.106
Geography was always a factor shaping Armenian lives and it becomes necessary
to be attuned to the particularities of place (especially given the flattening effect of
the Abdülhamid albums) and to anchor photographs in those particularities. The
character of places, their daily concerns and activities, had a great bearing on the
nature of their photographic production. As we examine Erzurum, Harput and
Van, there emerge specific concerns relating to, respectively, education, migration
and politics. The places in question are not unique in these concerns and stand
instead as accentuated instances of what can be found informing photography
across the Ottoman Armenian world; indeed, they can be found at work, to one
degree of another, in each of the regions of this study and above all it is migration
that comes to dominate – or mobility – human movement feeding, informing and
propelling photographs. It is a mobility that ensures that, while we address three
specific sites of photography, we also address the many places with which they
communicated. Our subject becomes a complex and diverse sphere of photographs
in circulation within and between places of Armenian habitation, in the historic
homelands and far removed from them, and at work in specific circumstances,
the photograph everywhere an act, an image and an object that gathered people
together and held them fast to one another.
Mobility thus pertains as much to photographs as to people, the two mirroring
one another. There lies a suggestion of this in Cacoulis’s carte de visite as its
50 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
violence.111 For them, violence was not a discrete aberration that flared briefly
between periods of peace but instead increasingly an aspect of the everyday –
experienced amidst and as part of the ‘ordinary flow of life’.112 Yet few Armenian-
made photographs actually attempt to depict violence directly. We might speak, as
Stuart Hall does in the context of black settlement in Britain in the 1950s, of there
being a deceptive aspect to the ordered appearances of photographic portraits.
Something has been ‘constructed out’, a history that lies ‘beyond the frame’. ‘Every
photograph’, he writes, ‘is a structure of “presences” (what is represented, in a
definite way) and “absences” (what is unsaid, or unsayable, against which what
is there “represents”).’113 Thus the project of contextualization does, to a certain
extent, require the acknowledgement of histories that photographs themselves did
not acknowledge. This is not to contradict the central stipulation that genocidal
violence be excluded from our readings; it is the unknowns of the future that
ought to be held in abeyance, not what is known in the present day of the
photograph but goes unrepresented. As it was with the Abdülhamid albums, we
find ourselves needing to look to the margins, to take into account those events
and forces outside the frame that were a reality for those inside the frame. Such
interventions must remain on the level of the appropriate, bringing to bear on the
photograph only what would have been part of the knowledge and experience of
those involved, what they themselves would have understood of the world they
lived in. We also at times witness the way in which violence, although it might not
have been a consideration in the making of a photograph, creeps in, intruding
upon it as surely as it intrudes upon lives, supposedly ‘ordinary’ objects becoming
suffused with calamity for those that look upon them. We find this in Surmelian’s
account, his thoughts moving swiftly in a stream of consciousness from the dress
of his grandfather in the image to the death of his grandfather in a massacre, and
then on further to the appropriation of the family fabrica.114 There might again
be the risk of contradiction, for at work here, with Surmelian projecting onto
the portrait the later death of its sitter, is a form of the retrospective gaze whose
employment I argue against. Yet here it is the retrospective gaze of an Ottoman
Armenian, one that existed in the moment and in the context of the pre-genocide
Ottoman Armenian world he inhabited (Surmelian writes in the guise of, and
with the outlook of, the young boy that he was).
Nevertheless, the passage does highlight the semantic mobility that is just
as much a feature of photographs as physical mobility, with new contexts and
circumstances of viewing giving rise to new readings.115 It intimates, further, at the
way in which photographs will shift in the aftermath of the genocide. To pursue
the ‘earlier senses’ of photographs is not to deny this aspect of photographs or its
particular importance in Armenian circles; rather, it is to accept that photographs
had existences before the world changed and to believe that by understanding
those existences we might take a step towards understanding that pre-genocide
world. That said, the admittance of the genocide into our considerations can only
be deferred, not put off entirely. It must in due course be arrived at as we follow our
histories through and learn what became of photographers and the communities
that they pictured, and what the events meant for people’s relationships to and
52 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
B E G I N N I N G I N E R Z U RUM
Figure 3.1 Uncredited photographer. Students, Imperial High School, Erzurum, early
1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
the very image of uniformity. The composite photograph now provides, in quite a
literal way, an indication of the Abdülhamid albums as a construction, the work of
many practitioners, brought together and ordered by a central organizing impetus
to project the desired image of empire. It contains, at the same time, a note of the
unique, for that lingering central seam draws our eye to the particularities of the
scene, suggesting itself as a loose thread that might be pulled upon and followed
back to a provincial studio to learn what lies behind the careful image of order.
Arriving in Erzurum
Many of those travelling to Erzurum would have done so via the 200 miles of
road that wound their way from the port of Trebizond.1 An ancient trade route,
it had started to experience a significant revival in the 1830s thanks largely to a
British desire to develop a shorter route to Iran and the advent of the steamship
service between Trebizond and Constantinople.2 The road would have been shared
with pack animals laden with raw materials from Tebriz or commercial goods
from Europe, the main users of this important stretch of commercial highway.3
Passing through the towns of Gumushane and Baiburt, it finally led to Erzurum,
a city disparaged by many travellers upon their arrival, such as Sir Robert Graves,
the British consul there in the 1890s, who declared that ‘[w]ild and picturesque
though the surrounding scenery may be, the city itself, from whatever point one
views it, is sombre and unattractive’.4 Graves arrived via the Erzinjan Gate, one of
four main gates in the new ramparted outer walls of the city built in the period
of peace between 1855 and 1877. Erzurum, no longer a small walled city and
citadel contained by Byzantine walls, had embraced its extramural suburbs as well
as vacant surrounding sites in order to create a modern incorporated city space.5
Here in the western part of the city, between the Erzinjan Gate and the Harput Gate
in the south-western section of the wall, the military high school was to be found,
part of a great expansion in military education first prompted by the conflict in
the Balkans and later hastened in the wake of defeat to the Russians in 1878.6 The
school exterior was photographed in the early 1890s for the Abdülhamid albums.
Student portraits were created too, but it cannot be said whether these were the
result of the commissioned photographer bringing his props and backdrop to
the school or of the high school students travelling to his studio; either way, the
making of the photographs necessitated journeys across the city.
The Armenian quarters lay on the northern side of town, what had previously
been suburbs, first established during times when Christians were forbidden from
dwelling within city walls.7 They were now, with the expansion of urban space,
within the city walls and part of Erzurum proper, lying in proximity to the Olti
Gate and its road to the newly Russian province of Kars, along which thousands
of Armenians had joined the retreating Russian army in 1878. Here in these
quarters was to be found the Armenian church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, and the
marketplaces and schools of the community. Notwithstanding its forays to other
parts of the city, it was this north-eastern section of Erzurum that acted as the
56 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
central tropes. In the military high school photograph, they accompany the figure
on the left; the figure on the right would, of course, have been pictured with books
as well, as suggested by the section of plinth still just about visible by his foot, only
the widest portion of its base surviving the photographic stitching process. The fact
that in the final photograph the students share the books suggests those props as the
generic feature that they are. They share the books – and other props – with each
other and indeed with myriad others photographed by the same photographer in
the same studio space (the book that the Armenian student places his hand upon
is likely one of the very same seen in the Hamidian photographs). Books, although
presented as particularizing, characterizing features, are in fact particular to no
one and serve in the end only to characterize the form of photography at work.13
Restored to individual status, the state photographs can be clearly identified
as belonging to the carte de visite tradition, their modern vision thus having a
clear, demonstrable basis in studio practice. Our comparison supports Sheehi’s
assertion that the Hamidian project echoes the homogenizing gaze of the carte
de visite, the ‘genetic patterns of military officials, cadets, schoolchildren, clerics,
and government officials […] repetitiously produced’.14 What the albums utilized
was not simply the photographic modes of the Western world but those of local
and regional Ottoman studios, which had domesticated those modes and made
them a part of their daily practices. Indeed, the visual vocabulary in use in the
Abdülhamid albums might have been new to the state but it can be seen to have
been in use, at least in this particular studio in Erzurum, for a number of years
before the photographer applied it in his work for that official commission.
And with regards that photographer, our comparison confirms how closely he
adhered, even when working on a unique photographic project for the state, to
his standardized, repetitious studio practice; indeed, that adherence to formula
lies at the very heart of the carte de visite, its generalized modes finding perpetual
employment regardless of the particulars of the task in hand and the specificities
of the subjects standing before the lens.
Writing of the Mediterranean context at this time, Michèle Hannoosh describes
carte de visite photography as ‘a homogenising art, the studio a mixed space’
through which diverse sitters passed, all to be treated and pictured in the same
manner; ‘props said little, or even nothing, about the identity of the sitter, but
this weak meaning meant precisely that they became shared and exchangeable
objects, ones which interacted with, and thus linked, the various people who
were photographed with them, and who became “interchangeable” themselves’.15
However, in Erzurum this is only true to a limited degree. Military students are
proposed as being interchangeable with each other within their state-sponsored
milieu; this interchangeability does not extend to the other subjects depicted by
the photographer within the same conventions. An equivalence with such people
was neither intended nor desired by a project that professed a new rigidity and
centrality of state identity. Similarly, there are limits to photography’s provision of
‘a common, shared experience to people of different backgrounds and milieux’.16
That the products of these experiences shared a visual language does not equate to
the studio experience itself being common to all.
58 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 3.3 Uncredited photographer. (Altered version of) Students, Imperial High
School, Erzurum, early 1890s. Abdul Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress,
Washington, DC.
60 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
For all the talk of the flattening effect of the carte de visite, it is perhaps not his
subjects but the photographer himself who stands most at risk of disappearing
into anonymity. His presence can be felt in the carte of the Armenian student, for
while André Disdéri’s carte de visite format promised regularity and inaugurated
the era of industrialized photography, as practised here it still carries signs of the
handmade, with small peculiarities and imperfections in evidence. The print has
been cut by hand, its gently undulating edges lying in contrast to the ruled lines
adorning the card’s margin; and straight though those ruled lines may be, they have
clearly been applied by hand also, the ink running first thick and then thin, pooling
in the corners where they meet and sometimes overrun one another. Beyond
these small vestigial signs of his activity, however, there is little trace of the image-
maker, the mounts of his early portraits being devoid of any identifying stamps or
markings. The backdrop similarly fails to provide clues or lend character, for in
the early days of the studio’s existence a plain cloth is in use. It takes a number of
years before we see the appearance of the painted features, and these seem to arrive
incrementally – a portrait of a Laz man, for example, with familiar props and pose
on display, shows the cloth now adorned but adorned with balustrade only, its
other key distinguishing feature of the gnarled tree absent (Figure 3.4). In time,
too, text emerges on the mounts, and turning over this print we find the discrete
inked stamp with which the photographer announces himself simply with the
words: PHOTOGRAPHER M. G. PAPAZIAN ERZEROUM. A profession, a name, a
city; Papazian, on present evidence, certainly belongs among those photographers
who have left scant trace. And yet even in the space of a few words we find certain
intimations of a life, for it is striking to find in the typically multilingual territory
of the photographer’s mount (as witnessed already in Cacoulis’s work, with its
pronouncements in Greek and French) Papazian presenting himself in only one
language, and for that one language to be not of the region but instead English. The
image itself, a photographic ‘type’ of the sort popular among visitors, and the fact
that this print is to be found in the archive of ABCFM missionary Royal M. Cole,
contribute to a sense of a photographer who, at the very least, was comfortable
operating among Erzurum’s foreign contingent.
That said, it does seem to be something of a truism to say that photographers in
the city worked amongst the foreign residents and visitors. Papazian was one of the
earliest, but others followed, playing a similar role, such as the Voskertchian Frères
who had a studio on Fenerji Street in the vicinity of Gumruk and near the French
consulate and French lycée. They likewise are said to have had their clientele
amongst the foreign traders, consular officials and missionaries, those people
who brought with them a readymade cultural propensity to have photographs
made and the capital to do so.17 But a domestic clientele was also important to the
city’s photographers. The ‘well-known painter and photographer’ Haroutiun Der
Raphaelian is said to have been a recipient of commissions from military and state
officials.18 As a military centre, Erzurum was one of the few places in the Ottoman
East where the extraction of taxes by central government was accompanied by
local expenditure; the boost to the local economy provided by the presence of the
Fourth Army was no doubt felt in part by the photographers of the city.19 And
3. Beginning in Erzurum 61
Figure 3.4 M.G. Papazian. Laz man, Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection, The Zoryan
Institute, Toronto.
then there was the emerging middle class of professionals, artisans and merchants,
many of whom, like the wealthier people of property in the city, were Armenian.
This, however, risks a reductive approach to identity, one in which we ourselves
compartmentalize people into distinct groups in the manner of photographic
‘types’. The very essence of these small Péras, and the small Péra of Erzurum
was no different, was that they existed as more nuanced and fluid zones of
identity. They were not simply where people from different backgrounds met
and became involved in processes of exchange, but where identities themselves
mingled, merged and took on new complexions. Royal M. Cole’s purchase –
perhaps even commission – of the image of the Laz indicates an acceptance of
the essential premise of this form of image-making, as does his own annotations
in pencil on the reverse: ‘Dress of the Lazes found in the mts [mountains] near
Trebizond. They are very good gardeners + sometimes robbers.’ Yet the clear
delineations of identity it proposes run counter to aspects of his own life, with
Owen Miller proposing missionaries as ‘American-Ottomans’ rather than colonial
outsiders, with some being born in the empire, others acculturated over decades
in residence.20 Cole was stationed in Erzurum for thirty years (between 1868 and
1898 and thereafter in Bitlis) and was delivering sermons in Armenian after only a
few months there.21 And of course, his very business in this part of the world was
62 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
to bring about changes in identity. Other portraits by Papazian in the Cole archive
appear to show Armenian converts to Protestantism with some level of continuing
involvement with the mission. Could something similar be said of Papazian? Can
he, too, be placed among these transcultural figures? His English-language mount
and the photographs of his that we can trace suggest at the very least a firm level
of contact with English-speaking Erzurum, if not something more complicated.
Indeed, in time, family connections to the American mission and Protestant
church do emerge, but perhaps all we can do at present is to place Papazian –
Movses Papazian as we learn his name to be – in close physical rather than cultural
proximity, as attested to when he photographs the city from the roof of one of the
taller buildings in this part of town, looking southwards towards the citadel and
the mountains beyond (Figure 3.5).
Out of sight below are the streets through which Papazian’s clients would
have travelled, including Garnetsi Harry Hekimian, a local doctor with a medical
practice in the Gol Bashi neighbourhood, adjacent to the Gümrüğün Yedeve
district whose foreign consulates and schools kept him supplied with patients.22
His portrait, as he poses with two colleagues, an unidentified Greek doctor and
a Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, forms a strong advertisement for the
cosmopolitan nature of this section of Erzurum and the studio as a ‘mixed space’
(Figure 3.6). It is also a portrait that shows the transition of the carte de visite
formula as the picture plane expands. The carte, tight in composition and simple
in design, most often presenting a single individual, gives way to larger scenes that
both replicate and complicate its language.
Hekimian would surely have been weighed down as he ventured through those
Erzurum streets, for the medical array on display is almost certainly his own.
Unlike the generic books in other photographs by Papazian, props that perpetually
resided in the studio and were called upon for visual effect alone, the skeletal
exhibit here, on the very same plinth employed for the literary displays, carries far
more specificity and speaks of origins beyond the studio. It endeavours thus to say
something particular about its sitters. Yet photographs adhere to formats even as
they stray from them. Poses are now duplicated inside the frame, the seated figures
echoing one another, each man on the left with his right arm extended, seemingly
caught in the act of writing on the board that he has propped on his right leg. In
this and in the display, personalized although it is, we can readily associate the
picture with the wider portraiture of the professional classes, divided into subsets
and subgenres, including medical portraiture, with their own tropes. Indeed, for
a related display we need look no further than the Hamidian albums. Hekimian’s
array shares its essence with the display in the Abdullah Frères photograph of the
Imperial Civil Medical School in Constantinople and works towards the same
ends, advertising its sitters as men of learning, of modern scientific knowledge
(Figure 3.7). Helpfully, the Constantinople class portrait announces itself as
operating within a particular photographic mode and its own traditions and
routines. The pictures on the wall behind are previous class portraits, brought
outside for the occasion, which can be recognized as adhering to the same format
of rows of students with a table display at the front. Thus the scene being pictured
3. Beginning in Erzurum 63
Figure 3.5 M.G. Papazian. View from the north-east of Erzurum, 1880s. Cole Collection,
The Zoryan Institute, Toronto.
that day is not a unique occurrence staged specifically for the albums but rather
a regular event, annual perhaps, with the resultant photograph being destined for
a life inside the walls it pictures. Like the pre-existing views of Constantinople
co-opted into the albums, school photographs too – at least those like this one,
showing classes rather than pairs of students – were dragged from their typical
habitats and inserted into the sultan’s catalogue of empire.
The linking of these two photographs becomes more pertinent still when we learn
that the School of Medicine is Hekimian’s alma mater.23 Considering the regularity
of photography at the school, he would have almost certainly taken part in such a
class picture. It raises the prospect that sitters, as well as photographers, replicate
photographic conventions; those in Papazian’s photograph, or Hekimian at the very
least, were very likely acting in accordance with their own experience, operating
and cooperating within the realms of known and understood photographic tropes
and formats. There is also, of course, the possibility that Hekimian had not simply
posed for a picture like that which appears in the Hamidian albums but had been
64 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 3.6 M.G. Papazian. Harry Hekimian with an unidentified Greek doctor and
Professor O’Fair visiting from Chicago, Erzurum, 1890s. Garin Compatriotic Union Records
(Collection 284). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library,
UCLA.
part of that very scene. For most of the school’s existence, the bulk of the student
and faculty bodies had been made up of non-Muslims, and it remained a place of
subjects from diverse imperial backgrounds.24 It might therefore still be possible to
locate in some of the Hamidian photographs an older idea of empire, one that still
existed even if, like the corpse laid out before the class at the School of Medicine,
it was in the process of being dismembered.
Under Observation
Thinking of these medical professionals and the resonances between their pictures,
a striking irony presents itself: that the Abdülhamid albums, with their desire to put
a modernizing face on the empire, to communicate ‘what progress has been made
in literature and science’, should cut out a section of society that perhaps lay closest
to modernizing processes. But therein lay the problem, for theirs was held to be a
3. Beginning in Erzurum 65
Figure 3.7 Abdullah Frères. A group photograph of the students and the teachers of the
Mekteb-l Tıbbiye-yi Mülkiye (Civil Medical School), Constantinople, 1890s. Abdul Hamid
II Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
form of modernity too closely imbricated with external forces, not an ‘Ottoman
modernity’ at all (indeed, ‘Ottoman modernity’ in part responded to and targeted
the social and economic advancement of non-Muslims). This association accounts,
too, for the way foreign schools became a great focus and concern for the state.
They represented the foothold that rival powers had established in the empire,
a peculiar form of colonial intrusion that was perceived as having a deleterious
effect on students from the Ottoman millets. On one level, the schools were seen
as the sites of unfair advantage, but another means by which Ottoman Christians,
with the aid of foreign backers, advanced ahead of their Muslim counterparts. On
another, they were active sources of nationalist sentiment and sedition. Missionary
schools, not simply in the Ottoman East but across the empire, were viewed ‘to be
ubiquitous, well financed, intent on undermining the authority of the state and
the allegiance of its subjects, and, worst of all, successful’.25 There is an element
of truth to this, for the missionary presence, the American presence above all,
was certainly responsible in part for the cultivation of national awareness among
Armenians. It was one of the nodes by which Western ideas were entering the
empire, giving rise to a sense of identity among Armenians that hinged not on
religion but on an understanding of a wider shared culture and a revived interest
66 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
in the Armenian past; equally, there was a sense of connection with people beyond
their homelands and outside their diasporic networks, a growing feeling of affinity
with the Western world. Yet the American missionaries, by and large, tried not
to involve themselves in what they deemed to be Ottoman internal affairs, and as
they steered clear of politics they encouraged their students to do the same. What
might be said is that the very fact of them being the products of a democratic
republican society made it inevitable that theirs would be a disruptive presence.26
Armenians came under scrutiny during this era, above all those involved in
education and those in contact with foreigners, with there of course being frequent
confluence between the two. One case involves the detention in April 1888 of
Abraham Seklemian, the principal of Erzurum’s American Protestant High School
for Boys, the Masyats Varzharan. Accused of being involved in a conspiracy against
the sultan’s ‘fatherly’ government, Seklemian was arrested one morning while
teaching his class at the school and taken to the central prison. His description of
the cell in which he was held gives us a good impression of recent events around
Erzurum and the mood in the city at the time. Looking at the Kurds with whom
he shares the space, he wonders if they are the ones responsible for recent attacks
on Armenians, notably the murder of thirteen boys two months previously. They
are attacks that he believes will go unpunished, for whatever charges his fellow
inmates have been detained on, he is certain that they do not relate to assaults
on Armenians. Meanwhile, he dwells on a photograph of his fiancée Magdaline,
living at that time in Adapazar, near to Constantinople in the Marmara region of
the empire. It is a photograph that begins to suggest the material lives of studio
photographs such as those made by Papazian, the way in which they could be
brought to life through the daily actions of those who held them close.
That the portrait should have been with him during a typical day’s teaching tells
us something of its role in Seklemian’s life, regularly kept close to him in his pocket,
carefully wrapped in paper to keep it safe. It is evidently a private devotional object,
both a proxy for and an extension of his betrothed. The sense that the photograph
is imbued with the very life of his fiancée seems to become only more intense in
the difficult surroundings of the prison, with Seklemian recalling in his memoirs:
‘If Magdaline only knew into what a place I was carrying her, who knows how
many tears she would shed!’27 When it is broken in half by warders, the damage is
taken by Seklemian to be an ill omen, carrying a dark foreboding of his fate and a
sign of what he pictures to be Magdaline’s deep sadness at his imprisonment. And
yet his response is as splintered as the photograph itself. Even in its broken state, it
remains an image of his beloved and carries a connection to her and to another life,
allowing him to look towards a different future; just as he imagines her weeping,
he also pictures her happy, ‘joyfully dreaming beautiful dreams’ and planning their
future lives together. In its ‘liquid temporality’, the photograph binds the couple
together in the present moment while looking ahead, expressing a sense of hope
for the world to come. Portraits of betrotheds, and the wedding portraits that they
propel themselves towards, are among the sites par excellence for such forward-
looking glances, as are another form of portrait, one with which Seklemian would
have been familiar – the school photograph.
3. Beginning in Erzurum 67
The new military high school in Erzurum and its sister institutions established that
same year, 1881, in other key cities of the region, including Erzinjan and Trebizond,
and indeed across the empire, were designed to contend with the empire’s
military woes. They formed part, furthermore, of an expanding educational
network that sought to effect wider changes in the Ottoman populace in an era
of internal political opposition and perceived subversion. The Hamidian school
system, at military and civilian levels, was developed as a response to perceived
Western encroachment enacted via schools like Seklemian’s, the new state schools
intended as counterweights to and bulwarks against the foreign presence. The
system’s ‘conflicted task’ was to reinvigorate state education through selectively
appropriating Western systems and methods for its own ends, namely instilling
the values of the central state.28 The parallels are clear; the political use of the
camera was but part of a wider pattern, photography one more mode adopted and
adapted for Ottoman purposes.
The schools that came under scrutiny at this time included the state’s own,
brought about by a magnification of Abdülhamid’s autocratic tendencies. The
central object of loyalty in the patterns of allegiance inculcated by these schools
morphed from the state to the sultan himself. At the same time, students became
the focus of increased surveillance.29 In these circumstances, it is difficult not
to imagine photography as part of the inspection process. Indeed, returning to
the already mentioned ‘panoptic effect’, Wendy Shaw suggests that ‘those in the
photographs and those in charge of the spaces and events they document knew
that the eye of the sultan, as represented by the camera, was evaluating their work
as well as their participation in the empire-wide project of modernization’. Viewed
thus, photography becomes entwined with other surveillance systems; Shaw sees a
direct link between it and the network of spies in operation throughout the empire,
for like them ‘the camera served as the roving eye of the sultan’.30 This, then, is one
means by which we start to understand differences in photographic experiences.
It might seem on the surface, considering the close visual resonances between
their portraits, that a student from the military high school might have had the
same experience in the studio as a student from an Armenian school (see Figs 3.2
and 3.3). After all, they were similarly posed in the same studio space, the same
props surrounding them; and yet one apparently saw Sultan Abdülhamid before
them, the other Movses Papazian. At the same time, perhaps even the assumption
that one saw Papazian is erroneous. After all, the Armenian student might have
similarly imagined upon him the scrutinizing gaze of his photograph’s eventual
intended viewer, thus conjuring his own spectre in the studio; his mother, perhaps,
as it was for Yeghiazarian in Trebizond, and who is to say that that is a figure any
less powerful than the sultan?
Once again, the photographer seems to recede into anonymity, becoming
a blank space in his own studio. Outside in the city, however, it might have
been quite a different matter. A telling account of April 1893, residing in the
Ottoman archives, suggests the way in which photographers came to stand out,
especially in sites considered sensitive. Dating from approximately the same
period during which Papazian would have been working on the Abdülhamid
68 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
At the Sanasarian
Official concerns about photography did not solely relate to the activities of
Ottoman Christians. Shortly after the unnamed photographer was given his police
escort at the Chifte Minare, the British traveller H.F.B. Lynch, involved in the
production of his huge Armenian survey project, encountered similar problems at
the very same site (he had likewise met with resistance on his approach to Erzurum
via the Tebriz road, taking interest in an abandoned fortress ‘which, nevertheless, I
was forbidden to photograph’).33 Yet, once again, as it is in the studio, photographic
experiences differ from person to person. It might be inferred that these incidents
were unusual interruptions for the European photographer, his mention of
3. Beginning in Erzurum 69
them suggesting he was either typically able to go about his photographic work
unfettered or else retained the expectation that this should be the case.
Lynch subsequently spent the winter of 1893/94 in Erzurum, during which time
he paid a visit to the Sanasarian Varzharan and photographed a class in its grounds
(Figure 3.8). Armenian community schools had been growing in number and
stature during the latter part of the century, particularly in the wake of the conflicts
of the 1870s. Educational advances materialized in relation to both great need,
with schools recognized as a vital means of ameliorating conditions in the eastern
provinces, and, almost paradoxically, great optimism, with the reform promised in
Berlin offering, despite the reality of present conditions, hope for the future. The
Sanasarian Varzharan, the most famous of these new schools in the city, and among
the most famous anywhere, was established in 1881 (the same year as the military
high school, helping us to picture state and millet schools as counterparts to one
another and Erzurum as a city that contained parallel worlds). It was founded in
the city’s Armenian quarters, opposite the church of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, but
had essentially been forged in the Armenian networks of the Russian Empire.34
Its founder Mgrdich Sanasarian, whose portrait sits at the centre of Lynch’s
Figure 3.8 H.F.B. Lynch. Class at the Sanasarian Varzharan (caption: ‘Armenian Youths’),
Erzurum, 1893/94. H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1901).
70 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
photograph, was born in Tiflis to a Vanetsi family and spent most of his life in
St Petersburg. He had benefitted from the great expansion in education that had
taken place among Armenians after the Russian annexations of the 1820s had made
them Tsarist subjects, studying at the renowned Nersesian College in Tiflis while
Garabed Yeziantz, his friend and colleague in the Sanasarian enterprise, attended
the Lazarian Academy in Moscow.35 Later, in the 1870s, as the two prepared for the
opening of the school, it was the Nersessian, along with the Gevorkian Academy
in Echmiadzin, that provided schooling for the Sanasarian College’s first teachers.
Those teachers also travelled to Europe to receive further training, benefitting in
particular from the Germanic connections of Russian Armenian education.36 For
example, before he became one of the founding principals at the school, Kevork
Apulian’s training had taken him through Tiflis, Zurich, Jena, Tubingen, Berlin and
Cambridge.37 The Sanasarian thus proved another outlet for modern, foreign ideas
in Erzurum, but there, crucially, it was Armenians themselves who were responsible
for the importations.
Mgrdich Sanasarian’s portrait could well act as a visual placeholder for the
absent portrait of Surmelian’s grandfather, remembered by the writer in terms of
‘the kind expression of his eyes, the handsome countenance, and the wing collar
and bow tie he wore’.38 It is clearly in part a subjective reading by a grandson,
but it also serves to insert both portraits within a standardized form of bourgeois
portraiture. Although what is presented to the lens has been referred to as a
photograph, the portrait is most likely to have been the oil painting of Sanasarian
that can be found listed among the school’s picture holdings.39 At the same time,
it is a photograph of Sanasarian that appears to have been the original source of
the painting, the later conversion of the photograph into a painting seemingly
making plain photography’s borrowings from the aesthetic conventions of painted
portraits.40 It stands as a curious example of the ongoing reproduction and
recreation to which photographs are subject. Photography does not hinge on a
single extraction, the ‘form from matter’ described by Oliver Wendell Holmes, but
is rather an ongoing process, extracting ‘form from form’ according to Geoffrey
Batchen, advancing the initial proposition to emphasize the myriad reproductions
in a variety of media that follow the initial photographic exposure.41 Lynch’s
photograph in one sense adds a further layer of removal to the process, taking the
photograph further from its source, while from another perspective it is an act
of restoration, returning it to its original photographic form. Indeed, it becomes
subject to a process of continual reproduction, annual portraits of graduating
classes being produced over the years by the professional domestic photographers
of Erzurum, Sanasarian’s portrait always at their heart. (Lynch’s photograph forms
part of this repetitious sequence; it cannot be stated with any certainty whether
local photographers duplicated the conventions of Lynch’s photograph or whether
Lynch’s photograph utilizes conventions already in place at the school.)
Centred around the founder’s portrait, the Sanasarian pictures allow us to
see the way in which photography’s standard template had grown to incorporate
wider group scenes, which themselves became rapidly standardized and rendered
through their own set of conventions. Lynch’s photograph shows how difficult it
3. Beginning in Erzurum 71
can be to manage and to marshal the new spaces of photography, with extended
casts and symbolic arrays assembled in the open air. Even the most proficient
studio photographers can struggle – witness in the Abdullah photograph of the
Imperial Civil Medical School how the pictures sit lopsidedly on the wall, the sheet
rebels against its task of covering a window frame, a tree branch intrudes into
view, and, most inexplicably, a figure who appears not to belong to the scene at
all lurks beside a skeleton at the right edge of the frame (see Fig. 3.7). Yet Lynch’s
photograph appears particularly clumsy in its composition and staging.42 The table
upon which Sanasarian’s portrait sits is covered with a cloth that only just meets
one end, while at the other it sits in excess. The props, meanwhile, are scattered
and strewn in an ad hoc manner, making identification difficult. The students
around the table seem arranged in just as haphazard a way, piled on top of each
other like the books on the table. Those on the right of this uneven arrangement
look particularly uncomfortable, for the placing of the group and the table has left
them wedged against the exterior wall of the school with seemingly little room
to breathe. All of this is captured and framed by Lynch’s camera, positioned at an
awkward angle and uneven slant.
Despite such inelegance of execution, Lynch’s photograph noticeably adheres
to the set formula of school photography, already well established by this stage.
Placing his Sanasarian photograph alongside that from the Imperial Civil Medical
School demonstrates as much: each shows a class of uniformed students against an
exterior wall of their school, separated into seated and standing rows, addressing
the camera, an array of attributes before them. In addition, there is what Marianne
Hirsch and Leo Spitzer identify as a key aspect of school photography, the
authority figure ‘whose presence, like the photographer’s, serves as a disciplining
force enjoining the children to assume postures and gazes that demonstrate their
acquiescence to an imposed group identity’ (by identifying the photographer
as a proxy and an agent in the regulatory process, they lend support to Shaw’s
suggestion of the camera as ‘the roving eye of the sultan’).43 Our examples
adhere to the convention in an unusual manner by referencing, and providing a
proxy presence for, an absent authority figure. The portrait of Sanasarian has its
counterpoint in the sultan’s tuğra, the marker of his authority which can be found
framed, hanging on the Medical School wall, looming over the assembled group.
There the similarities end, however, for Sanasarian was not the remote figure that
Abdülhamid was; when Lynch’s photograph was made, he was recently deceased.
As far as the school was concerned, authority, in fact, lay in the hands of a board
of trustees in Constantinople and benefactors in St Petersburg. One can imagine
the class portraits being sent to these groups to keep them apprised of progress in
Erzurum and of the smooth running of the school. Lynch’s photograph is fairly
typical in presenting a globe, books, violins, and a hammer and anvil, items that
return over the years in a variety of Sanasarian displays. The objects on exhibition
seem designed to act as much as attributes of the trustees and benefactors as the
students, particularly the candlestick, which belongs above all to the symbolic, an
apparent play on the enlightenment provided by education. Light was a particular
theme of missionary work and missionary photography;44 perhaps it was similarly
72 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
so for the new Armenian educational movement that sought to ‘illuminate’ the
homelands in what can be considered a ‘civilizing mission’ on a par with that of
the ABCFM.45 In the end, however, the image of the founder remains in the most
prominent position and remains the most substantial prop, becoming a proxy for
their remote authority and a symbol of students’ allegiance. Indeed, with ‘constant
tension’ between the trustees and benefactors on one side and the institutional
directors in Erzurum on the other, is it a portrait that serves to reassure, acting as
a shorthand signifier of the students’ – and by extension the directors’ and wider
institution’s – deference to Constantinople and St Petersburg?46
The concerns the trustees and benefactors had may well have coalesced
with those of the state, the authorities coming to view the Sanasarian and other
Armenian schools in Erzurum as the sources of sedition that needed to be kept
under surveillance.47 A nationalist self-defence organization Bashdban Haireniats
(The Defenders of the Fatherland) was established by Sanasarian students almost
as soon as that school had opened, the group being discovered by the authorities
soon after, in 1882.48 The organization and the school were once again the focus
in 1890 during a series of weapons searches that led to armed clashes, an incident
that attracted international attention, particularly in the British press, becoming
a central focus of reports of state violence and the ‘Armenian question’.49 That was
the Bezdig Tebk (Minor Incident); later came the Medz Tebk (Major Incident), in
the aftermath of which a series of images was made but a stone’s throw from the
Sanasarian, across the street in the city’s great Armenian cemetery.
Lynch’s account of his first visit to Erzurum in the winter of 1893–94 describes a
precarious situation in the surrounding countryside as Armenian peasants, and
increasingly Muslim peasants too, were subject to regular assaults by Kurdish
bands allowed to operate unconstrained, some even led by officers in the
sultan’s Hamidiye regiments.50 The situation, already resulting in a new exodus
of Armenians across the Russian border, only grew worse in the period that
followed. Massacres perpetrated by Kurdish groups and Ottoman soldiers in 1894
in the Sasun mountains, due south of Erzurum, signalled a distinct escalation
in violence and set off a chain of events that saw Armenian protests and pleas
to the international community met with suppression and further violence.51
As presented in official Ottoman reports, Armenians were provocateurs, the
victims thus themselves responsible for the series of massacres that swept through
Armenian-populated sections of the empire late in 1895.52 One of the first was
perpetrated in early October in Trebizond, and from there, as a commentator
of the time wrote, the great swell of violence ‘spread southward, following the line
of the road’, to Gumushane, then Baiburt, before arriving in Erzurum at the end of
October.53 Violence became not only ‘banalized’ but standardized also. Events in
Erzurum followed the pattern established elsewhere, and even involved some of the
3. Beginning in Erzurum 73
same perpetrators, with orchestrated murder and looting that specifically targeted
Armenian shops, markets and homes taking place over a period of days.54 The
scene along Gumruk, according to one report, ‘beggars description’, an assault on
nearby housing having apparently been mounted from the nearby army barracks.55
The massacre at Erzurum did have at least one distinctive feature, for its
aftermath was documented photographically, the focus in large part being on the
mass burials at the great Armenian cemetery. They are photographs that owe their
existence to Western mobility and technology, thanks to the presence in Erzurum
‘by force of circumstance’ of William Sachtleben, an American cyclist, writer and
amateur photographer, who was investigating the disappearance of a fellow cyclist;
and to the fact of Sachtleben carrying with him on his travels a Kodak camera, the
light, handheld instrument that, still young, was in the process of bestowing upon
photography a new ease.56 And yet, at the same time, another proposition is also
true, specifically that local Armenians were themselves instrumental in the making
of the images. Buried within Sachtleben’s reports lies important information
about the making of the photographs, with him describing going to the cemetery
‘with one of the cavasses of the English Legation, a soldier, my interpreter, and
a photographer (Armenian)’. Only one further detail concerning the second
photographer is provided, the report mentioning that at the cemetery he ‘saw two
children, relatives of his, among the dead’.57 Even with such minimal information,
we can situate the photographer in relation to what is recorded, his proximity to
the events and his place as a member of the effected community established. His
relationship to the photographs themselves is less clear, but we might begin to
understand him, at the very least, as an intermediary whose presence at the scene
is important to the making of certain photographs, notably those in which subjects
engage the lens directly, some displaying their injuries for the record, others
displaying the dead. This second photographer also seems to make his presence
felt in the staging and framing of scenes, the images possessing a formality and
sense of compositional order unusual for an amateur (and indeed nowhere to be
seen among the photographs Sachtleben made at other stages in his journey) but
redolent of the studio. We might observe, for instance, the almost perfect spacing
(for the most part) of a group of men that present a coffin and corpse to the lens
(Figure 3.9). With its evident arrangement, the photograph bears distinct relation
to some of those already examined and speaks of its own lineage. It also sounds
an echo quite unintended, for with its central display it provides a cruel reflection
of the medical portraiture already examined. We deal here with another form of
portrait, one that speaks not of mastery of the modern world but of susceptibility
to it, its subjects the victims of an ‘Ottoman modernity’ that sought to diminish
Armenian communities and restore the traditional order.58
When studied closely, the photographs made in the aftermath of the Erzurum
massacre suggest themselves to be collaborations, the products of one camera and
two photographers, combining the mobility of the Kodak and the formality of
the studio apparatus. They suggest, further, that this collaborative work extended
beyond the two practitioners to include those that worked with them to show
74 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
the destruction to the camera. After all, it is indeed a display at the centre of the
photograph here under examination, the coffin raised onto a tombstone and
tilted to guarantee the visibility of its contents. The photographed ask that the
scene be recorded while the traces of the massacre are still evident, the coffin lid
immediately on hand announcing that the moment of visibility is limited. In this
way, they seem to speak to a presumed international community on the other side
of the photograph. It is an understanding of photography along the lines laid out
by Ariella Azoulay, as a civil practice in which all can actively take part, bypassing
state structures. Indeed, it is the very inclusivity and availability of photography
that marks it as a system to be engaged with, one that is open to Armenians where
others are closed or set against them. Photographed subjects ‘participate actively in
the photographic act and view both this act and the photographer facing them as
a framework that offers an alternative […] to the institutional structures that have
abandoned and injured them’.59 It is a new civic space that to a certain extent stands
3. Beginning in Erzurum 75
in for the existing civic spaces that have let them down. In the great cemetery
in the northern part of the newly integrated Erzurum, Armenians demonstrate
the way they have been excluded – in violent and dramatic fashion – from the
protections of the city and the protections of the state. Does this explain, then, the
propensity with which Armenians present at the scene acknowledge the camera,
turning to it and wilfully displaying themselves for it as if engaged in open address?
In one photograph, a ring of figures stand assembled around a central scene of
mass burial, with some witnesses leaning into the frame (Figure 3.10). Do they do
so out of curiosity, evidence of Sachtleben’s assertion that his activities attracted
the eyes of the assembled crowd? Or is their aim not to see but rather to be seen,
to ensure that they are visible to the lens and that they are recorded as part of the
scene? Their actions are reminiscent of those in another massacre scene, discussed
Hitherto […] the accounts of these heartrending scenes have been solely
recorded by the pen, and consequently denounced as exaggerated and highly
3. Beginning in Erzurum 77
into which he incorporated, after the massacres of 1895, images from Erzurum.
The show was frequently presented at churches, with religious groups acting as
the central driving force behind campaigns on behalf of Ottoman Armenians.72
Equally, Tcheraz met with and relied upon Armenians themselves, touring along
the lines of diasporic networks, including the young and growing community of
Worcester, Massachusetts.
Echoing the language of The Graphic, Tcheraz spoke of the veracity and
certainty offered by the camera. On the occasion of a speech in honour of E.J.
Dillon, the noted journalist who had reported on the Sasun massacre for the
British press, Tcheraz praised his employment of ‘the fidelity of photography’
to communicate the terms under which Armenians lived in the Ottoman East,
announcing that he had ‘torn off for ever the mask of hypocrisy with which the
barbarous Turk covered himself, and […] proved the facts of the Armenian
atrocities so clearly that the most unbelieving have been obliged to give credence
to them’.73 However, photography’s evidentiary power was more limited than
Tcheraz would like to have believed, as demonstrated by at least one respondent
to his lecture who passed judgement on his use of the images from Erzurum.
Viscount Des Coursons attacked Tcheraz’s show, expressing his ‘surprise that there
was found, at a given point, in the half-savage mountains of Kurdistan, a squad
of photographers to collodion from life these death scenes’.74 The writer evidently
had but a poor understanding of contemporary photographic practices, for even
before the advent of the Kodak that Sachtleben carried with him on his travels,
the collodion wet plate had largely disappeared, replaced by dry plate processes.
However, there is a more important point that his words demonstrate, namely
that the ‘proof ’ of photography was sorely limited. Viewing of photographs takes
place from positions already established and informed by myriad factors and
circumstances lying outside the photograph’s frame.75 Robert Melson’s call to
situate historical actors in an experiential ‘field of action and perception’ is no less
relevant here, applying equally to those viewing photographs. It tends to be these
perceptions, and the wider pre-existing political positions that perceptions nestle
within and feed off, that shape the reading of photographs and not vice versa. The
photographs from Erzurum, therefore, were not likely to convince those inclined
to believe in Armenians as agitators and disinclined to believe that such things as
wholesale massacre could take place.
For some commentators the failure of nineteenth-century campaigns
was a result of the particular media employed. The processes that saw the
extraction of form finally ended with the evaporation of matter, projected
images appearing then disappearing before the eyes of audiences in attendance
at magic lantern shows. Lacking in substance themselves, illustrated slides
were ill-suited to provoking substantial responses and forging the imaginative
connection for which Tcheraz, among others, hoped. The spectral, illusory
apparitions through which they momentarily took form and communicated
the real seemed to belong to the moment alone and possibly promoted a
fleeting, insubstantial form of engagement, the detached reverie brought on
by phantasmagoria, to use Benjamin’s term.76 Yet while the material nature of
photographs plays a part in their reception, it is, ultimately, no guarantor of
3. Beginning in Erzurum 79
either attention or neglect. After all, the large, luxurious Abdülhamid albums
were at this very moment sitting ignored in the libraries to which they had been
sent, while numerous small, slight cartes de visite stood pride of place in family
homes and in the hands of loved ones.77 To blame photographic materiality
would be to ignore political reality. Public sentiment of the era, strongly on the
side of the Armenians, was not as powerful as the realpolitik that prevailed in
governmental policy.78 With time, the strength of opinion waned, and magic
lantern shows perhaps simply provide us with a fitting analogy, for like images
on a screen, the subject of the massacres flared up and flickered for a brief
moment before disappearing from view.
The recognition of the degree to which Garnetsis were involved in the production
of images in the great cemetery might help us to reconsider the dynamic of
photographs made by visitors to the city, including Lynch’s portrait of the
Sanasarian class (see Fig. 3.8). To think only in terms of Lynch’s framing of that
image is to neglect its subjects. The students might have been approached by Lynch
in the same way he approached any subject, as raw information for his grand
survey project (which can certainly be characterized as belonging to the ‘great
period of taxonomies, inventories, and physiologies’), but they were by no means
novices when it came to images. They existed in a highly visually literate world,
the Sanasarian being a great regional repository, its library and museum giving
students access to numerous and diverse holdings of illuminated manuscripts,
marble busts, pottery, ivory, embalmed and taxidermied animals and birds.79 Of
particular note must be the school’s collection of oil paintings which, in addition
to portraits of Sanasarian, already seen in Lynch’s photograph, and Yeziantz,
held works by, amongst others, Rubens, Poussin and several nineteenth-century
Russian painters, including the war artist Vasily Vereshchagin and the celebrated
Russian Armenian Romantic seascape artist Ivan (Hovhannes) Aivazovsky.80 And
students were artists themselves, receiving an arts education at the school, with
numerous professionals emerging from their ranks, notably the painters Sarkis
Katchadourian and Vartan Makhokhian.81 Importantly, they were photographers
too. The student body, Ghazar-Charek writes, became inspired by the great
collections amassed at the school and developed a desire to learn photography
and then later to develop their own processes for producing colour photographic
paper.82
Students appear to have been just as concerned with capturing ‘the things of the
world’ as Lynch was. Accordingly, we see this desire and its associated practice at
work in the outside world, beyond the bounds of the school and of the city. Each
year around the end of June, after final exams had taken place, the school would
break for the summer and those students not returning home would set off on
foot with the faculty, departing through the Olti Gate (led by a marching band)
on a 25-mile trek. On their two-month excursion in the countryside to the north
of the city, they studied Armenian churches and monasteries, and the geography,
80 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
geology and botany of the region.83 We find scenes from these excursions amongst
the photographic plates left by one of the Sanasarian’s resident amateurs, George
Djerdjian. Djerdjian might be considered typical of the Sanasarian. A native of
Arabgir, he was a student and then teacher at the school before spending the last
years of the nineteenth century in Reichenberg in the Habsburg Empire (today
Liberec, Czech Republic) and Zurich, studying for a doctorate in Natural Sciences.84
In 1900, he returned to Erzurum and the Sanasarian, bringing with him from
Europe the latest scientific learning and a recently purchased field camera, which
he put to use in the city and on excursions outside of it.85 In the latter he was not
unique, judging by other photographs of Sanasarian excursions we find, and judging
also by one plate in Djerdjian’s collection that shows him posing with his camera
in the process of photographing the waterfall at Tortum, a photograph that attests
to an overlapping photographic space, the simultaneous presence of two cameras
and two photographers.86 Students are also seen involving themselves in picture-
making by other means. Posing in the landscape before Djerdjian’s lens, they turn
‘his’ photography into a collective enterprise, one which is most noticeable when
they stand in pairs at the sites of churches or ruins (Figure 3.11). Such positioning
of figures is a common pictorial device – serving to provide scale, frame views and
focus the eye – with which the students were evidently familiar. Indeed, they may
well have seen it in Poussin’s paintings at the school or else in prevalent Western
photographic depictions of ‘the Orient’, where it formed a regular motif. Yet there is
not in these photographs the cool remove that tends to accompany such formations
in the work of other photographers, notably Francis Frith and Félix Bonfils; instead,
photographer and photographed work in tandem, and in so doing indicate an
attachment to each other and to a sense of a shared land and history, to the world they
present together as part of a collaborative photographic effort.87 The same cannot be
said for scenes of peasants and rural life, as when Djerdjian photographs farmers at
work ploughing as the school contingent marches northwards (Figure 3.12). Local
people are apparently as much objects of study and signifiers of Armenian character
as churches and ruins, and here there is certainly a discernible detachment. Djerdjian’s
photograph appears as a graphic illustration of people existing in different worlds,
the (literally and figuratively) mobile metropolitan Armenians passing by those who
dwell on the land, the two groups meeting only briefly, if indeed they met at all.
It acts as a reminder of the diversity of Armenian lives, with many of those lives
typically lying outside photography’s purview and going unrecorded by the lens. The
countryside north of Erzurum may well have experienced a surfeit of cameras and
become an overlapping photographic space during the summer months, but for the
rest of the year it was very different in this regard, a place instead where photography
was notable for its absence. The camera was predominantly a city-dweller. Certainly,
rural villagers travelled to cities to be photographed and photographers in turn
travelled to rural villages, but these movements only serve to emphasize the fact that
photography’s anchor was in the city. The studio was chiefly a resource for urbanites
and amateur cameras such as Djerdjian’s were found only in the hands of those with
a degree of privilege.
3. Beginning in Erzurum 81
visible on the right (‘Yagoopian’ and ‘Baghdasar’). Yet this act of homage, this salute
to the school’s founder, belongs not only to those who have placed the garlands and
placed their names. Through his picture-making, Djerdjian himself was performing
an action in essence very similar, for with his camera he makes his own offering.
Photographs, whether amateur or professional productions, declare the importance
of what they contain, the photographic frame a garland that honours the fragment
of the world it surrounds. The propensity with which flowers adorn photographic
mounts reinforces this idea of image-making. Such flowers provide not simply a
decorative motif but an implicit acknowledgement of the role that photographs
play as tributes. Even in Erzurum’s great cemetery in 1895 the camera performs
a variety of this function – it declares that the scene must be looked at, that its
importance must be acknowledged. It does not do so in a mood of celebration, of
course, for there its garland is a funerary wreath.
In class photographs from the Sanasarian, a flower motif can also be discerned
on the frame encircling the founder’s portrait. Indeed, looking again at Lynch’s
photograph, we now find that the portrait on that occasion has been further
festooned with real flowers, reinforcing the element of tribute (see Fig. 3.8). With
this we might shift back to those operating in front of the camera rather than
behind – to the student body who had photographers amongst them, who were
inspired to learn photography, to experiment and to engage with the medium
collaboratively – and see the extent to which they actively participate in the
construction of the scene, thus in their own way using the camera as garland.
We see, for example, how one student clasps the candlestick, while another
gestures towards it from the row behind (those pressed against the wall, it seems,
participate in the photograph most emphatically, using what little space they have
to full effect). Their actions suggest a vision of education not belonging purely to
the institution or to the photographer, but one in which they themselves profess a
belief. Equally, they appear to express a genuine fondness for Mgrdich Sanasarian;
just as the portrait of Sanasarian might help us to picture that of Surmelian’s
grandfather, so too might Surmelian’s loving description – ‘the kind expression
of his eyes, the handsome countenance’ – help us to imagine the formulation of a
similar response to Sanasarian’s image. An affection for Sanasarian becomes more
evident over the years in the studio portraits that follow Lynch’s, his portrait a
mainstay that remains rooted to the centre of the frame. It is the one constant, it
would seem, of a flexible format, for books, globes, and musical instruments come
and go, appearing in different configurations before disappearing, but Sanasarian’s
portrait remains, the enduring element that allows the photographs to be read as
a series with a common source and a common ethos. Students lay their hands on
the frame, as they might lay their hands on the shoulders of their own fathers in
family photographs. Equally, they can be seen enacting a form of garland motif
themselves as they encircle and embrace the framed portrait, adorning it with
their own bodies. They do so in a class picture produced by the Voskertchian
Frères some sixteen years after Lynch made his, and do so on their own terms
(Figure 3.14). The photograph seems largely free of anything that might be
described as institutional control; even the college uniforms of previous years have
84 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 3.14 Voskertchian Frères. Class of the Sanasarian Varzharan, Erzurum, 1910.
AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.
has been placed before the lens’.93 The portrait stands as a material trace of the
Pasdermadjian family, testifying to their presence in the studio. Following this, we
might speak of another way in which the photograph provides proof and creates a
certificate of presence, for it testifies to what stands behind the apparatus. It tells us
of the presence in the process of people with the capacity for capturing the image.
While we tend to speak of the eye behind the lens, the creation of the physical
photograph was also reliant upon the presence of a brain that had mastered the
necessary scientific knowledge and a hand to apply that knowledge in order to
produce material results. Every step in the process required the handling, application
and manipulation of chemicals. The photographer of this day had to prepare a
photosensitive emulsion of metal particles – most likely potassium bromide and
silver nitrate – and a binding agent; to adhere the solution to a glass plate support;
to expose the prepared photosensitive plate to the correct degree of light; to reveal
and fix the latent image by immersing the plate, at the correct temperature and
for the correct duration, in a series of chemical solutions (a developer solution to
convert the silver halide microcrystals into metallic silver and an acidic stop bath
solution to halt the process, followed by a fixer of sodium hyposulphite to make
the image stable, and finally a wash of clean water).94 All this was required for the
creation of a photograph – and of course had a bearing on its quality. There is still
the instinct to think of the photography of this era as a lengthy process, specifically
in terms of an extended period of stillness required from the sitter so their likeness
might be captured by the lens. In fact, exposure speeds were relatively fast and the
actual sitting might be the quickest part of making a photograph (the last lingering
trace of long exposures might be found in Armen Garo’s resting elbow, for such
poses were a hangover from the days of enforced immobility, according to Gisèle
Freund, a further indication of how convention survives and is passed from format
to format).95 The longer processes occurred elsewhere, timed in seconds, the small
measures that made all the difference in darkroom processes, and in years, the
longer time that it took to master the required knowledge. The photograph is a
product of this knowledge and a testament to it.
The photograph speaks of the time spent by the photographer, and of the spaces
inhabited by that figure, too, which might be thought of in similar terms of scale,
from the small spaces of the studio and the darkroom from which the photograph
emerged as a finished object to the wider spaces of the Ottoman Armenian world
that produced the skills necessary for the enactment of the processes. Khachig
Pasdermadjian’s technical knowledge was as much the product of Beirut as of
Erzurum, thus a product of his ability to live, learn and work in that city and a
testament to his mobility across an archipelago of Armenian communities and its
networks of commerce and education. Something similar can be written of the
Voskertchians, who appear to have studied at the Sanasarian also. According to
family history, to study photographic techniques Yervand Voskertchian travelled
to Germany – possibly following a Sanasarian connection – and to Tiflis.96 The
latter stood in contrast to Beirut, having become in the course of the nineteenth
century one of the most important Armenian economic and intellectual centres,
a ‘Constantinople of the east for the Armenians’.97 The Armenian element of the
city had been bolstered over the years by Russian expansion, with the exodus from
88 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Erzurum in 1878 part of a wider population movement that accompanied the shift
in imperial borders in the region, Armenians emigrating from the Turkish and
Iranian sides of the new borderlands and resettling in what were felt to be the safer
and more prosperous lands of the Russian Empire. In many ways Tiflis and Erzurum
were parallel cities, both commercial hubs on trade routes between Europe and
Iran, frequented by travellers with their own populations of resident foreigners and
burgeoning middle classes of traders and financiers.98 These elements were even
more conducive to the rise of photography in the rapidly expanding environment of
Tiflis, a growing site of transculturation where a ‘connectedness’ born of geography
was accentuated and accelerated, as Houri Berberian describes, by developments
in transportation and communication technologies.99 From the 1860s, it became
home to myriad studios, notable among them the early Armenians pioneers Pertch
Proshyan, Grigor Ter-Ghevondyants and Hamazasp Mamikonyants.100 Importantly
for our study, Tiflis subsequently served as a vital feeder city serving the medium’s
progression in the Ottoman East. Yervand Voskertchian was among those
whose careers grew in part out of Tiflis, not only studying modern photographic
techniques there but also importing photographic equipment from Germany by
way of the city, returning to it regularly for the purpose.101
As we shift perspective, Khachig appears as one of the easier people to rescue
from the Pasdermadjian portrait for we can rely upon the traces of him found in
histories of Erzurum. More difficult are the women of the family, for they seem to
exist only in the image; captions do not contend with their presence and histories
do not seem to even record their names. These are the people who tend to fall from
view, even as they occupy the photographic frame. Ali Behdad sees Armenian
practice as the exception in a region where women tended to be hidden from
the camera’s gaze, his studies showing the part played in Iranian photographic
production by namus, the patriarchal code that hid women from view in order to
‘protect’ them. Yet we still might say that something of that spirit ruled, and that
‘men utilized the camera in its honorific function to produce idealized portraits
of masculinity to reaffirm their social status and, in an exclusionary fashion,
to consolidate their patriarchal power over women’.102 The difference was that
Armenian women found themselves excluded in images rather than from them,
subjected to a hierarchical system in which they frequently appeared as secondary
figures, even as props, attributes of the central male.
Leaving Erzurum
In this way, photography, even with its enlarged casts, returns persistently to
its default position. Yet studio convention was being challenged, in large part
owing to a great migratory movement that took many Armenian men away from
their homelands in the Ottoman East. The new migrations reshaped Ottoman
Armenian life and thus its photography too, becoming a particular theme of
and impetus behind picture-making. Indeed, it reshaped photographs in a
3. Beginning in Erzurum 89
Figure 3.17 Alexandre Papazian. The Saroyan family of Bitlis (Aram, Lucine, Verkine,
Takoohi, Cosette, Zabel, Henry), Erzurum, 1905. Courtesy of Charles Janigian/Forever
Saroyan, LLC.
literal sense, altering their very structures. Knowing the established make-up
of Armenian family photographs, the absence of a patriarch from a portrait of
the Saroyan family made in Erzurum in 1905 seems glaring (Figure 3.17).103 The
new arrangement, with women to the fore, might be taken as an indicator of how
migration had begun to play with traditional family structures and the associated
studio conventions.
Such migrations were by now legal, at least potentially if not necessarily. They
had not always been so, for between 1888 and 1896, Armenian migration to the
USA had been officially banned. In an era of ‘suspect’ Armenians, Armenian
mobility in general, and migration to the USA in particular, was thought to pose
a unique threat to the state. In common with the idea it had of what was taking
place inside missionary schools, the state saw the USA as a crucible of dangerous
ideas that might subsequently be imported into the Ottoman Empire by returning
Armenians. Armenian migration still took place during this period, some of it
through limited legal allowances made for traders, the bulk of it through illegal
movement via people-smuggling networks. The situation changed in October
1896, in the wake of the spate of massacres and, notably, the infamous armed
takeover of the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople by Armenian political activists
(Armen Garo among their number). After that time, Armenians were allowed to
migrate legally on the condition they agreed to forfeit their Ottoman subjecthood
and never return to the empire.104
90 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Harput, as will be seen, lay at the centre of the migratory phenomenon, and yet
Erzurum, like most places of Armenian habitation, was also implicated in these
movements. The city supplied its own migrants, including Movses Papazian who
we find a trace of in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1900.105 For a larger number of
migrants, Erzurum was not a place of origin but a temporary host city. Acting as
a stopping point on the road to the harbours of the Black Sea and the lands that
lay beyond, the city saw migrants from other regions passing through its streets
or staying for a time on their protracted journeys, divided into many stages. The
Saroyan family’s experience gives us a sense of what these journeys entailed, the
writer William Saroyan later providing a description of their trek from Bitlis, a city
in the Taurus Mountains to the south-east of Erzurum:
it wasn’t easy: the people who control the papers and the rubber stamps had
to be bribed with gold one by one, and then transportation had to be paid for,
first by donkey train over high mountains along narrow roads from Bitlis to
Erzeroum, where my brother Henry was born in 1905, and from Erzeroum to
Trabizon, where a ship carried them to Constantinople, and then to Marseilles,
where they all had to work to raise money for the train ride across France to
Le Havre, where again they had to work until there was enough money to put
everybody on the ship that sailed to New York – a long crossing, far below in
the ship, in steerage, where hundreds of families prepared their own meals and
made sleeping places on the floor, followed at last by the terror of Ellis Island.106
The photograph they posed for in Erzurum, during a stay in the city of
approximately three or four months, was made as a mid-journey communication,
a message from the road addressed to Armenak, the husband and father who had
not long before travelled ahead to the USA under the sponsorship of a Presbyterian
minister and was awaiting the arrival of the family in New Jersey.107 The general
purpose of the image was to indicate that the family was en route and in good
health, while a more specific purpose was surely to present an image of the son
who, having been born in Erzurum, had never been seen by his father. For that
purpose, the Saroyans visited the Papazian studio, now in the hands of Movses’s
younger brother. Alexandre Papazian appears to have taken over the running of
the studio in the absence of Movses, working first under the new studio label of
Papazian and then under his own name.108
William Saroyan’s account hints at the bureaucratic hurdles with which migrants
had to contend, a bureaucracy in which Alexandre Papazian himself played a role.
As his brother had done before him, Alexandre catered to disparate photographic
demands and is found taking on, during the same period that he photographed
the Saroyans, official state commissions to document migrants (Figure 3.18).109
Their abrogation of subjecthood and vow of non-return was legalized through the
provision to the authorities of a signed pledge and two photographs of themselves.
These photographic documents were the logical outcome of the state’s desire to make
visible and regulate all forms of Armenian mobility, and with them it guarded against
possible contraventions and efforts to return to the empire, the camera once again ‘the
3. Beginning in Erzurum 91
L E AV I N G H A R P U T
In keeping with convention, the patriarch sits at the centre of the family group,
his wife deferring to him through a hand placed on his shoulder (Figure
4.1). Yet something else is afoot. The family is shown as a firm, impermeable
structure, a close-knit group. In placing the family within a tight arrangement
with maximum contact and minimum space between figures, the photograph
emphasizes close bonds and enduring ties, thus forming the very picture of unity,
stability, durability, the perseverance of the traditional order and the perpetual
way of things. Its declaration of permanence, however, is made at a moment of
impermanence and of change. More than a family photograph, it is a final family
Figure 4.1 A. & H. Soursourian. The Vaznaian family of Harput (parents Kevork and
Aghavnee ‘Guzel’ Vaznaian, with children Hovaness, Maritza, Merhan, Victor, Avadis,
and Mgerditch), c.1912. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown,
Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Maritza Soorsoorian.
94 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
photograph for which the Vaznaians pose, the last made before the departure for
the USA of son Mgerditch. Indeed, with this knowledge Mgerditch now appears
on the verge of a movement between worlds; he stands on the right edge of the
frame, seemingly dressed for entry into New York.1 But standing on the edge
too, having their own moment of waiting, are his family. They are on the brink
of saying goodbye and of living with absence – on the brink, in other words, of
staying behind.
The family prepare for what lies ahead. A final picturing of the intact family
unit becomes in Harput the standard means of marking departure and preparing
for separation. The image almost becomes a performance of inseparability
and intimacy, ostentatiously exhibiting a togetherness that is under threat.
Perhaps the family lies to itself through its photograph, minimizing the extent
of the danger, denying the gravity of what is taking place, preferring instead the
imaginary cohesion that can so often be a part of the constructed vision of family
photography.2 Or perhaps it acknowledges what is happening and makes a pledge
through the image, announcing that, even apart, it will stay together, that in spite
of the pressures exerted on it, the family and family life will be sustained, and that
one day in the future there will be a reunion. The truth might be that it constitutes
both, the photograph caught between states much as its subjects are. Indeed, the
photograph makes dual states and double lives possible. It will allow Mgerditch to
stay behind, for he will remain with his family in photographic form. Meanwhile,
another print – for this photograph surely will lead a double life too – will enable
the family to travel to the USA and to live with Mgerditch there. With family
members heading in separate directions, they hold each other close at this moment
in the studio, as they will hold close the photograph in the days and years to come.
Arriving in Harput
A traveller heading southwards from Erzurum would have left the city by
way of the same gate through which the Saroyans arrived, a gate that, like its
companions around the city, announced in its name the place with which it was
in communication: the Harput Gate. From there, the road followed a south-
westwards trade route between Erzurum and Diyarbekir, weaving through the
central mountainous region before alighting on the banks of an arm of the lower
Euphrates (known in Armenian as the Aradzani, in Turkish as the Murat). That
river would lead to the fertile plain of Harput province – the Vosgetashd or Golden
Plain – and, sitting prominently 350 metres above the plain, the city of Harput,
sometimes referred to by Armenians as simply Kaghak (the city) or as Veri Kaghak
(the upper city).3 It was a manufacturing and mercantile city and a stop on, in
addition to the Erzurum–Diyarbekir road, an east–west route between Iran and
Anatolia. They were roles that it had come to share with the city below, Mezre (thus
sometimes known as Vari Kaghak, Lower City, today called Elâzığ). Recollecting
his childhood in Mezre, the writer Vahan Totovents recalled the street where he
had lived as ‘a small section of that road of the Ancient East which began from
4. Leaving Harput 95
Ancient Rome and ran all the way to the old Byzantine capital […]; from there,
it went on to encircle the whole of Asia Minor and, passing in front of our house,
continued on its way to the “end of the world” – Baghdad’.4 Despite being thick
with historical connotations – thinking of his home in such terms meant that
Totovents ‘seemed to sense the Persian, the Greek, the Roman soldiers march past
our door’ – Mezre itself was a recent construction.5 It was a town that had emerged
from the increased centralization of the reform period. The first regional governor
Mehmet Reşit Paşa was appointed in 1834 and soon afterwards he requisitioned
a mansion belonging to local Kurdish notables. A sizeable military installation
was also constructed and added to over the decades that followed.6 The town was
officially renamed Mamuret-ül Aziz in 1867 in honour of Sultan Abdülaziz, thus
further cementing the state’s claim on the place. Yet rather than see Mezre as a state
project and a colonial town, Ali Sipahi reads it more as a local creation, the product
of collaboration between the Armenian trade bourgeoisie and a largely Muslim
local bureaucracy. Importantly, he has shown how, despite the story of Harput and
Mezre being often told in unidirectional terms, with the modern city growing as
the old city shrank, in reality the two co-existed, leading a ‘dual life’ until the early
twentieth century.7 Together they formed the active heart of the Golden Plain that
stretched southwards towards Lake Dzovk (today known as Hazar Gölu), ‘thickly
sown with thriving villages’, most of them Armenian.8 The largest of these, and the
first that one would meet if arriving on the plain from Erzurum, was Hussenig, a
substantial weaving town that can be seen in our photograph, lying immediately
below Harput Kaghak and just to the east of Mezre (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Uncredited photographer. View of the Golden Plain with Hussenig and
Harput Kaghak, 1900s. Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for
Armenian Studies and Research), Belmont, MA.
96 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
The twin cities of Harput and Mezre acted as the centre of the local textile
industry; Zeynep Kezer uses the chief local product as a powerful motif, silk tying
the region together and connecting it to the outside world.9 Historically, despite its
position on trade routes, its weak regional infrastructure and relative isolation in
the mountainous interior kept the Harput plain poor. However, as the nineteenth
century progressed, new roads improved regional links to Harput-Mezre; so, too,
did they link Harput-Mezre to the ports of Trebizond on the Black Sea and Mersin
on the Mediterranean, the latter growing in stature and coming to dominate from
the 1890s as a steamship link to Europe.10 In the era of heightened connectivity, a
powerful foreign presence grew, particularly in the form of French, German and
American missionaries, the latter being the presence most keenly felt. Alongside
these arrivals, the Harput region also witnessed corresponding departures, an
increasing number of its people travelling far afield for work. Kharpertsis still
gazed imaginatively from their homes along that road of the Ancient East towards
the ‘end of the world’, as Vahan Totovents puts it, but the bounds of the world
had grown. This, it might be said, was the true duality of the province. Harput
Kaghak and Mezre may well have been twinned with each other but, perhaps more
pertinently, the two towns, together with the villages of the plain, were linked to an
‘elsewhere’, held in regular dialogue with foreign spaces to which Kharpertsis had
migrated, the parallel diasporic Harputs that had been created in various quarters
of the world, photography now acting as the pre-eminent connecting thread.
In his history of the province, Vahe Haig describes how Harput’s first encounter
with photography occurred in the 1860s with an unsuccessful visit from an
itinerant photographer.11 This forerunner is but a shadow, an early figure that
seems to have left little trace, not even a name on mount boards, and yet, despite
a dearth of information, shrouded as he is in Benjamin’s fogs of beginnings,
there are points of note. The photographer’s origins in the Caucasus provides
further evidence of the role played by the Russian territories in the importation
of photography into the Ottoman East. Above all, it is the reception given to
his wares by the local populace that stands out. At that time, Haig writes, the
making of photographic portraits held no appeal for the ‘common people’, and
few photographs thus seem to have resulted from the visit.12 This lack of interest
attests to a central truth about the way photography came to be established in
various quarters, only taking root when accepted as having a role to play in local
lives. In Harput, this role emerged later in the century, Haig carefully situating
it amidst the rupture of the era of mass bantkhdoutioun. The departure from the
province of vast numbers of migrants, he states, created a need for pictures, visual
vestiges that allowed them to maintain a presence in the homes from which they
were absent and in the lives of the families from which they were separated. Being
found in almost every home, such photographs, Haig tells us, provided families
with ‘certain comfort’.13 It is an account in which can be heard echoes of Pliny’s
famous story of the birth of painting, in which a Corinthian maid traced the
outline of the shadow, cast upon a wall, of her lover before his departure for war,
thus proposing absence and the threat of absence as the driving forces behind the
image-making desire.14 The echo between the two poses fascinating implications
for where we should look for the story of photography, for it suggests that it is
4. Leaving Harput 97
not in the ‘centre’, in the place of ‘action’, that photography takes place, but rather
on the fringes of the central narrative in the space of absence and departure, the
quieter, domestic places where things ostensibly ‘do not happen’. It suggests, in
other words, a rhopographic history, and presents an important lesson as we
endeavour to break Constantinople’s stranglehold on the history of photography
in the region. It similarly breeches a class barricade, for it is not simply spaces
that have been neglected but demographics also (the two cases of neglect no
doubt being related). Haig notably describes the medium ‘becoming popular’ in
response to migration, and by this he specifically indicates the medium gaining in
popularity among the aforementioned ‘common people’.
That said, early photographs from Harput are cartes de visite in the established
mould that hail from the ranks of the region’s trade bourgeoisie. A photograph
made around the year 1880 depicts Avedis Jamgochian from Agn (today known
as Kemaliye), a town to the north-west of Harput Kaghak; more softly rendered
than Cacoulis’s portrait of Yeghiazarian, it can nevertheless be mapped closely onto
that photograph as it presents this son of a prominent, well-to-do cotton merchant
family in accordance with the dominant modes (Figure 4.3). The global nature of
the carte de visite aesthetic and the spread of its norms across national and imperial
borders is a tale also told on the reverse of the photograph. It is adorned with a
Figure 4.3 H. Soursouriants. Avedis Jamgochian from Agn, 1880 or 1881. The
Jamgochian Family Collection.
98 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
striking design featuring a winged man on the back of a bird, flying away from
the background scene of a ship atop a mountain, making clear its allusion to the
biblical story of Noah, who sent out a dove once the ark had landed on Mount
Ararat. The photographer appears to be declaring himself as a man from Ararat –
from Armenia, in other words, the mountain a metonym – and as the bearer of
messages across distance. In Russian, Armenian and French (some of its Latin
letters reversed), he declares himself to be H. SOURSOURIANTS. This form of
name, with its -ts suffix, was typically found amongst Russian Armenian bourgeois
families, a means of indicating social status and upward mobility. Its appearance
here is another example of the way photographers utilized their mount cards as
marketing tools, conjuring identities and histories for themselves and their studios,
and furthermore tells us about the targets of that marketing and the class positioning
of the studio’s products. Of course, the appearance of a Russian Armenian name
in the Ottoman East is highly unusual, as is the presence of the Russian language
(and similarly, the absence of Ottoman Turkish, although, as witnessed in the case
of Movses Papazian, it is not unheard of). The details of name and language only
begin to make sense when we understand that, while the photographic image was
produced in Harput, the mount that supports it hails from elsewhere.
Hovhannes and his brother Mardiros learned photography in Tiflis, and it was
there that the first Soursouriants studio was based in the 1870s.15 Vestiges of that
studio linger in Harput for a time; the brothers appear to have arrived with a supply
of mounts from Tiflis, left over from the previous incarnation of their business and
put to use in the new one. That this mount card was still being used at the time
of the portrait of Avedis Jamgochian, around the year 1880, suggests they had only
relatively recently arrived from the Caucasus and established the Harput studio.16
This makes for curious timing, of course, with the brothers seemingly leaving the
Russian Empire for the Ottoman at a moment in time when many Armenians were
making the reverse journey. Theirs appears to be a case of return, with a suggestion
of the family having its origins in the village of Sursur on the Harput plain, wearing
ever after a trace of the land in their name.17 We find the family based, however,
not in Sursur but in Hussenig, giving them
ready access to Harput Kaghak and Mezre. In
Harput, the elaborate printed mount of Tiflis
morphs into a small wet stamp (Figure 4.4).
The multilingual text remains, but with the
pigeon French dropped in favour of Ottoman
Turkish; a concession to the new surrounds
and its political environment, perhaps, and yet
the Russian language remains and in a curious
mixed message it is in Ottoman Turkish that
the brothers declare themselves as being ‘of
Tiflis’. The city seems to stand as a sign of
prestige and a mark of accreditation, in the vein
Figure 4.4 Soursouriants studio of the sultan’s seal and Cacoulis’s references to
stamp. The Dildilian Collection, photography’s pioneers, yet it seems an odd
courtesy of Armen T. Marsoobian. choice considering the post-war atmosphere
4. Leaving Harput 99
Leaving Harput
What began in the late 1860s with a small number of individuals, often
pursuing business interests, developed into a larger movement involving those
from the less well-off artisan and peasant classes in the late 1870s, an exodus that
continued to expand as the nineteenth century headed towards its close.24 The
first arrivals travelled directly along the strands of the missionary network – the
first Armenian in Worcester, Massachusetts, arrived in 1877 with missionary
George Cushing Knapp.25 But he stayed for the employment, the town being an
industrial as well as missionary centre (an indication of the extent to which these
aspects of American life overlapped). He worked in the wire mill, and his letters
home, detailing the wages on offer in American industry, gave rise to a stream of
other Armenian migrants following in his wake. Wire became a new thread in
Armenian lives for bantoukhds headed for Worcester and other industrial centres
of the north-eastern United States, but the old threads remained, with migrants
also finding employment in the textile mills of the region.26 It might have been the
presence of American missionaries that first created a link between Kharpertsis
and the USA, but once the link was forged, and once the tear was made in the
fabric of the Kharpertsi world, it was largely self-sustaining. The solidification of
Armenian communities in North America prompted but more migrants, as did
the weakening of Armenian communities in Harput.
In an incident of 1889, the home of ‘the photographer Ohannes’ – without doubt
Hovhannes Soursourian – was raided by Ottoman authorities. Perhaps it had been
the (hardly secret) Russian and Armenian references on those photographic mounts
that had prompted the search, and it was precisely Russian and Armenian-related
materials that were found and, being deemed suspicious, were seized. The official
report makes reference to bound volumes of old Russian newspapers, and while
the officer in charge states that these appear not to be politically sensitive, he also
requests either that he be sent an interpreter (having no Russian-speaker locally)
or that he be allowed to send the materials to the capital for examination. Of more
concern to the raiding party, apparently a clearer indication that further investigation
into this man Ohannes is required, is the discovery of pictures bearing the coat
of arms of Ancient Armenia.27 We see present in Harput province the miasma of
visceral suspicion that had rolled in from the borderlands since the Ottoman defeat
of 1878, clouding the way in which Armenians were perceived. Armenian words
and symbols – even, and perhaps especially, ancient ones that referred to historic
periods of Armenian independence and power – came to carry connotations of
sedition. Their presence in both public life and private spaces were targeted, most
overtly in the prohibition of the term ‘Armenia’, with offending books and maps
being censored or seized.28 The clearest manifestation of this policy as experienced
by Kharpertsis on the local level was the local governor’s 1888 objection to the name
Armenia College, leading to it being restyled as Euphrates College.29
This was, of course, the era of the Abdülhamid albums and those productions
are given further context by these events. Just as the flattening of Ottoman identity
and the omission (broadly speaking) of Armenians must be understood as in part
the product of an era in which Armenians were being targeted in and removed from
the eastern provinces of the empire, so too must the related flattening of Ottoman
space be understood in relation to other geographical erasures, particularly that
4. Leaving Harput 101
of ‘Armenia’. It is striking, then, to think that the Soursourians are surely the
photographers responsible for the Abdülhamid images made in the area in the early
1890s. The studio certainly undertook at least one official commission at this time,
with its stamp appearing on an 1889 photograph depicting the landscape around
the city of Diyarbekir. Found in an album in the Yıldız archives, the photograph
was evidently made for the sultan, most likely at the request of the local governor.
It was now the Soursourians acting as the proxy eye of the state, mapping the
landscape from a high vantage point above the city, producing what Berin Golonu
describes as ‘an image from above, a symbolic manifestation of imperialist vision
and state perspectives’.30 Their elevated position is mimicked below by two figures
positioned on a rooftop, most likely Ottoman officials connected to the telegraphic
network.
We find nothing in the Abdülhamid albums that professes authorship in
quite so clear a manner as that stamp
in the Diyarbekir album. In rather
spartan additions to the albums,
the photographs from Mezre – or
Mamuret-ül Aziz, to use, as the albums
do, the official appellation – present
us with neither studio props nor a
backdrop of any distinctive design
(in the way that Movses Papazian’s
Erzurum pictures do). The backdrop
that is on display, against which
military high school students pose, is
little but a plain dark fabric. Yet even
in its seeming anonymity, it bears a
certain character and a resemblance
to that employed by the Soursourians
at this time. Curiously, we once again
find lines vertically dividing images,
suggesting there to have been a Figure 4.5 Uncredited photographer (likely
further instance of misunderstood H. & M. Soursourian). Students, Imperial
instructions and portraits stitched High School, Mezre, early 1890s. Abdul
together at a later date so that they Hamid II Collection, Library of Congress,
might stay true to the desired format Washington, DC.
(Figure 4.5).
Hovhannes Soursourian received contradictory treatments at the hands of the
Ottoman authorities. He was hired to work on a prestigious project that would
travel the world; his home in Hussenig was raided and his possessions rifled
through with a suspicious eye. As a photographer, he possessed a skill rare in the
region at this time; as an Armenian, he was an object of common mistrust. While
the former is vital to understanding his own unique position, the latter is what
helps us to understand his sitters and the realm in which his products circulated.
He was hardly unusual in being targeted by the local authorities and indeed
we find echoes of his story in the lives of those he photographed, with Avedis
102 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Jamgochian having very similar treatment meted out against him. Something
of a local intellectual, Jamgochian was jailed after a search of the library in his
Agn home, housing a variety of books and his own writings and translations,
disclosed his apparent offence of writing a poem that contained the forbidden,
incriminating word ‘liberty’. Even after his release (brought about through a
bribe), he was still of interest to the local authorities, his home continuing to
be targeted for raids. It was soon afterwards that he left Harput for Manchester,
following the threads of the cotton trade and joining the established Armenian
community of that English city.31
A suspicion of Armenian activity revealed itself in official surveillance,
searches, seizures and arrests; it added to a precariousness in Armenian lives that
also experienced, amid the deterioration of rural conditions during the latter
years of the nineteenth century, poverty and famine. While Avedis Jamgochian
moved through mercantile networks to England, many others travelled along
newly forged paths to the USA, so-called ‘American fever’ taking hold of the
province in the 1890s.32 Few Armenian communities remained untouched by
the ‘fever’, but the province of Harput experienced a particularly sizeable exodus
and stood at the heart of the phenomenon. The Soursourians’ town of Hussenig
showed itself early on to be an especially strong provider of migratory labour; of
its 3,500 residents in 1888, 200 were away in the USA.33 Come the first decade of
the twentieth century, the American consulate in Mezre can be found estimating
that approximately 80 per cent of the Armenians migrating to the USA had
their origins in Harput.34 This mass migratory movement came, in no small way,
to define the province and reshape the lives of its citizens, a mass disturbance
that cut through the lives of all Kharpertsis. If Armenia/Euphrates College was
the most visible sign of the missionary presence in Harput, migration was the
invisible sign, one that manifested itself as emptiness and was experienced as
absence.
The province fell under the influence of the missionary movement in other ways,
too. The extension of education in the provinces encouraged the establishment of
other schools, with French and German missions and missionary schools adding
to the foreign presence.35 The military high school opened in Mezre in 1881,
mirroring developments in Erzurum and elsewhere.36 Armenian community
schools were established, the best known being the National Central School,
also known as the Red College, founded by writer and educator Tlgadintsi in the
Sourp Hagop quarter of Harput Kaghak in 1887.37 There, Tlgadintsi fostered a
generation of Armenian intellectuals and a whole school of provincial literature
based upon the guiding principles of his own work. An eye for the distinctive
everyday life of the province was instilled in his students, notable amongst
them Rupen Zartarian and Peniamin Noorigian, as well as the aforementioned
Vahe Haig and Vahan Totovents. Our knowledge of Harput is indebted to their
accounts.
4. Leaving Harput 103
It is not hard to understand why Tlgadintsi devoted so much time and attention
to America. There was not a single family in Kharpert that had no one living
in the United States. There was not a single girl who was not on fire with the
idea of going to the United States as a young bride. America was the subject of
conversation among the people of Kharpert, and their ideal.40
Tlgadintsi, Totovents concludes, levelled his ‘cannon and sword’ at these aspects of
Harput life. His work also considered the provincial problems – poverty, hunger
and local misgovernment – that influenced the new bantkhdoutioun. Equally, he
did not shrink from assigning blame to Kharpertsis’ own role in the decline of
the province. In the story ‘Goulig and the Schoolmaster’ (1913), for example, an
illiterate woman employs a local teacher to write letters to her migrant husband.41
The story acts as a platform for Tlgadintsi to speak of the moral corruption that
he saw stemming from bantkhdoutioun, with the schoolmaster a self-serving and
opportunistic character who takes advantage of Goulig’s situation for his own
gain.42 Her absent husband, meanwhile, is no more sympathetic a character, shown
as having abandoned his family.
A close examination of a photograph of a bakery shows us something of the
way in which Harput was opened up to other worlds (Figure 4.6). The photograph
is one of many made by ABCFM missionaries, yet rather than simply consider it
a document of an outside observer studying the locals, we might also think of it
as the reverse, a document of locals studying the outsider. It suggests the way in
which many Kharpertsis were exposed to Americans in their daily lives – it was
not the students of the college alone that came into contact with the missionaries
but sections of the wider populace, and not in the form of passing encounter
but as regular contact with those that had established a permanent, influential
104 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
presence in the place. While the human presence of the missionaries had a huge
bearing on developments in the province, the photograph also speaks of a visual
presence and an imaginative presence. Indeed, as we study the detail of the wall
in the background and see what is pinned there, seemingly pages from American
illustrated magazines, it becomes an image about the circulation of images.
Settling in new lands, migrants sent home postcards and newspaper pictures
of their new lands, pictures which were studied at length by friends and family
and which, fixed onto
walls such as those of the
bakery, became a physical
part of the cityscapes
of Harput and Mezre
and of the homes in the
villages of the plain.
The bakery scene hints
at a certain breakdown
of local physical space
experienced in Harput,
with photographs
creating breaches in
space through which the
other side of the world
could be glimpsed and
with which the faraway
Figure 4.6 (detail). could maintain a daily
4. Leaving Harput 105
presence in the lives of Kharpertsis. It was a visual presence that played a part
in the directional pull ‘towards abroad’ described by Tlgadintsi, with Kharpertsi
eyes becoming fixed on a distant horizon, and a gleaming horizon at that. One
section of the bakery wall in particular now stands out, for it carries an image of
a skyscraper and the words ‘City of Glass and Steel’, a press clipping that calls to
mind Isabel Kaprielian’s assertion that ‘[f]or a people on the perpetual verge of
famine the fabled abundance of the United States was incredible’ and ‘the vision
of automobiles, movie theaters, skyscrapers, and lighted streets was glorious’ (see
detail).43 The impact of photographs like the one seen pinned up in the bakery
must have been substantial, something perhaps akin to what was experienced by
Hampartzoum Chitjian (from Perri, north-east of Harput-Mezre) in his account
of a scene in Mezre, where a bulb put on display opposite the government building
by some enterprising individual gave him his first glimpse of electricity: ‘I still
remember standing there in awe. It seemed as if the light from the stars and moon
had been encased in the bulb for all to admire.’44
It becomes difficult to think of photographs as elemental points of contact,
carriers of light from far distant worlds, without thinking of Barthes’s declaration
that ‘the photograph of the missing being […] will touch me like the delayed rays of
a star’.45 It is, above all, ‘the photograph of the missing being’ that we are discussing
here. For most Kharpertsis, the image desired from abroad was not of the fabled
lands but of those that had travelled there, the loved ones from whom they were
separated. The majority of the photographs arriving from the other side of the
world thus took the form of studio portraits, ensuring that families did not have to
rely solely on those last images made before departure. More than any other form
of photograph, it was these studio portraits of migrants that formed the new image
landscape of Harput. That said, these were not simply images and portraits offered
more than a resemblance of the absentee, standing instead as physical traces, as
directly suggested by Barthes’s evocation of light and indirectly by Pliny’s story,
for it is the nature of the image retained by the Corinthian maid that makes the
story of particular relevance to photography.46 The hand tracing the shadow and
the camera registering reflected light are each dependent on the actual presence of
their subjects and what results can thus be thought of as physical manifestations of
those subjects, providing a lingering presence during times of absence. Yet this was
only part of the process. A photograph became ‘real’, taking on presence, through
not simply the bantoukhd body in the studio but moreover his family’s actions
many miles away in Harput. It was their physicality, performed on a daily basis,
that brought the photograph ‘to life’, their willingness to hold, kiss, cradle, converse
with the photographic object, to show it around to others as Tlgadintsi imagines
a proud mother doing in his short story ‘The Boy in the Picture’ (1905). In short,
the photograph’s power lay in families’ acceptance of it as the proxy, in the fullest
terms, of the absent.
Absent migrants understood the role that photographs would play – as signs of
love from afar, as their agents in the family home – and shaped them accordingly,
working with studio photographers to project a certain image of their lives. The
images that were fixed in the studios were intended as dynamic, constituting in
106 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
We are given a glimpse of a photograph like that made by Garougian and his
friends in the British biblical scholar J. Rendell Harris’s account of journeying
through the Ottoman East in the aftermath of the massacres. Arriving in Tlgadin/
Khuylu, Harris ‘found that it consisted of about three hundred houses, and that
not more than six were standing’. Continuing his description, he writes:
One single thing I found which had escaped destruction. High on the wall of a
ruined house, in the second storey, a photograph was nailed […] It was a group
of Armenian workmen from a factory at Worcester, Mass., and had doubtless
been sent home by some happy emigrant to his relations.51
The scene hints at the place of the photograph within the home, the destruction
allowing the outside visitor visual access to a private interior that would otherwise
have remained hidden and emotional access to a private relationship once mediated
through that photograph. Yet seen now, amidst the destruction, the photograph
also tells another story. What Harris records in Tlgadin/Khuylu constitutes a dark
reflection of the ordered vision presented in the Abdülhamid albums and other
state productions. With the photographic viewing made possible by the state – by
the violence of the state – the scene becomes itself an Ottoman album, a part of
the corpus of state productions. It tells us what is typically missing from the state’s
own photographic record, and equally what is missing from many Armenian-
made photographs which occlude in their own way. Destruction has revealed
the photograph and revealed itself as part of the photograph. It is the invisible
history that usually lies ‘beyond the frame’ but which now registers in the field
of vision. In a related manner, we can now read the traces of violence in our own
108 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
photographs, those children in the foreground of the view of the plain being from
the ‘orphanages where a thousand children left fatherless by the massacres of 1895
were fed and clothed’ by the ABCFM (see Fig. 4.2).52
Although the migrant’s departure and photograph both, of course, pre-date
the massacres, Harris records, in essence, their origins, the conditions that made
them possible. We can now read in such ‘happy’ photographs the violence from
which migrants were fleeing and the violence they were fortunate enough to avoid
through their absence. At the same time, of course, that ‘happy’ aspect remains.
For Harris, the photograph’s joyous overtones were accentuated by – or perhaps
were even entirely the product of – the manner in which he encountered it, and the
knowledge and experience of violence must have continued to inform readings of
such pictures. Migrants appeared all the happier in their pictures, miles away from
the slaughter that they were. With the already poor local conditions deteriorating
further, relatively small-scale violence morphing into wholesale massacre, the
capacity of photographs to speak of a ‘better life’ can only have increased, the lure
that they posed becoming all the greater. The exodus grew in the aftermath of
the massacres, and provisional stays abroad took on aspects of the permanent.
The bantoukhd continued to come and go, but increasingly he stayed, setting up
home in the New World. It becomes difficult to categorize distinctly Armenian
movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quest for
opportunity, never a pure one to begin with, increasingly merging with the bid
for survival.53
Migrations and family separations were part of the daily business of
photographers in Harput; they were observers and recorders of the process, and
furthermore actors too. ‘Photographer families’ were not immune to the forces
that shaped other Armenian lives, being just as susceptible to the lure from abroad,
just as vulnerable to violence at home. Harput province saw the departure of a
number of the Gabrielians from the family photographic studio of A.E. Gabrielian
in Agn shortly after a massacre there. As it was with other migrants, their departure
was marked with the making of a picture, with Nicolas and Makrouhy Gabrielian
posing with their children for one last portrait in the family studio.54 Into the
twentieth century, we find sons of Mardiros Soursourian migrating to the USA.
Listing themselves as photographers in immigration documents, they had surely
played a role in their father’s business in Harput. Their stories demonstrate once
again the complex position of photographers in relation to the state, serving as
the instruments of state power on certain occasions while finding themselves the
objects of that power on others. An official document of September 1904 compiled
by the Minister of Internal Affairs records the name of Aram Soursourian of
Hussenig on a list of Armenians from the province desirous of migrating to the
USA who, ‘in accordance with regulations’, had been photographed.55 Thus Aram
Soursourian’s final experience of photography in Harput would have been as the
object of the institutional gaze of the state. To complicate this, the photographic
apparatus might have been directed not by an Ottoman official but by a member of
Aram’s own family, Hazal Özdemir suggesting that it was the Soursourian family
responsible for the production of such pictures in Harput.56
4. Leaving Harput 109
If Aram did indeed leave in 1904, that is. Reading this migration from documents
on the other side of the journey, it is another son of Mardiros, Haigaz, who arrived
in the USA.57 While it is difficult to know exactly what happened, it seems far more
likely that Haigaz was the emigrant on this occasion, given that he was three years
older than Aram, and given that when Aram’s name does appear on US immigration
documents some years later, Haigaz is listed as the family member he is joining.58
Thus while the state endeavoured to restrict movement, it appears that it was, at
least in this instance, its own understanding of that movement that was restricted.
The Soursourian case suggests the limits of state power and state photography, and
even the limits of what was being attempted by its photography. In photographs
of departing migrants, it is perhaps the desire for control that might be discerned
rather than control itself; they might be understood as ‘points of reassurance in
a fragile world’.59 This poses wider implications for our understanding of other
photographs produced by the state, suggesting the concepts of imperial gaze and
‘panoptic effect’ to be not entirely helpful when addressing systems of photography
intermittent and inadequate in application.
Toutounjian had trained in Jerusalem and his movement between there and
Harput is another demonstration of the way in which Armenians could step
with relative ease between different geographic locales and places of Armenian
existence, as first seen demonstrated through the figure of Yessayi Garabedian.64
Indeed, the photographic milieu of Jerusalem in which Toutounjian studied was
directly indebted to Garabedian and his travels. In marked contrast to Tiflis, the
Caucasian metropolis important to other Kharpertsi photographers, Jerusalem was
still at the time a relatively small provincial town, important in religious rather than
economic terms. Its photographic scene was, for most of the nineteenth century,
dominated by Europeans producing tourist views and biblical scenes. It took until
the end of the century for what Issam Nassar describes as a ‘distinctly local’ practice
to appear, emerging from Garabedian’s school.65 The most notable of Garabedian’s
students was Garabed Krikorian, who later went into business with his own former
pupil Khalil Raad; after years of being rivals, the marriage of the former’s son to
the latter’s niece brought the families together and allied the businesses, Krikorian
from that point producing portraiture, Raad city scenes.66 This gives us a flavour
of the photographic milieu in which Mihran Toutounjian studied and also, in
this noteworthy instance of business expansion, akin to ‘bees building a beehive’
if we remember Badr El-Hage’s analogy, provides a parallel to a development
taking place in Harput, a studio venture operated by Askanaz and Haroutiun
Soursourian. We know from the family history that the two were cousins, the
sons of Hovhannes and Mardiros respectively, but we sometimes find them being
referred to as brothers in other accounts.67 While their studio mounts proclaim a
togetherness, giving the unified credit of ‘A. & H. Soursourian, Harpouth’, the men
appear to have worked separately; it would seem that the ‘Harpouth’ of their stamp
refers to Harput province rather than Kaghak, for the Annuaire Oriental business
directory places Askanaz in a studio in Harput and Haroutiun down in Mezre.68
The suggestion is of two photographers working in tandem and one business
straddling two cities, the sort of arrangement that was perhaps only possible in
the twin city setting of Harput-Mezre. No strict demarcation of subject matter of
the sort implemented at the Krikorian and Raad studios was in operation for A.
& H. Soursourian. That said, somewhat unusually for the Ottoman East, the pair
did produce numerous landscape views depicting the plain, its cities and villages,
destined, it would seem, for bantoukhds abroad, who in their own way become
tourists, domestic consumers of distant views in the manner of Oliver Wendell
Holmes. But, by and large, portraiture was their central concern, and between their
two sites the A. & H. Soursourian business served the populaces of Harput-Mezre
as well as those who journeyed from the surrounding villages. And, as it was for the
elder Soursourians, migration played a heavy hand in the business.
On the back of one family portrait by A. & H. Soursourian, the patriarch
Gabriel Vartabedian has placed a dedication to members of his wife’s family, Mr
and Mrs Khachadour Bozian in the USA: ‘Wherever you may be / Keep this with
you / As a keepsake of those you love/And those who love you.’69 These few lines
express an outlook that assumes little fixity, suggesting that, for all the uncertainty
and precariousness of life in Harput, the migrant life did not offer anything more
4. Leaving Harput 111
certain. Instead, the certainty in all this, the solidity, lies in enduring family
affection and the photograph that expresses and sustains it. The photograph is the
link binding two uncertain worlds, acting equally on each side of the equation. For
sender and for recipient alike, it serves as a manifestation of their attachment to the
other, the words ‘those you love / And those who love you’ the perfect expression
of the photograph as bilateral object and gesture, the kiss that gives as it takes.70
The existence of processes of exchange is best demonstrated by visual
conversations, back and forths in which one photograph prompts another in
return. We see one such conversation unfolding in a portrait of the Koobatian
family of Hussenig, most likely made by the elder Soursourians (Figure 4.8).
The photograph shares much of its composition with the Vaznaian portrait (see
Fig. 4.1), especially with the presence of the eldest son at the edge of the frame,
his arm reaching inwards to his family. Except that the boy in this case, Sahag, is
not quite the eldest, only the eldest physically present. Visible in Sahag’s hand is a
photograph sent by the eldest son and brother, Markar, who had since 1901 been
in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was working as a barber. With this complex
arrangement of a photograph within a photograph, the scene seems itself to
participate in a migratory ‘to and fro’, pointing in different directions as it indicates
the convoluted and sometimes conflicted work of photographs, the variety of roles
they play and of emotional responses they might engender.
This is how migrant photographs often come to us, not as their own independent
objects but as details in family pictures, embraced by their loved ones and interlaced
into their own portraits. For the migrant it must have brought the comfort of which
Haig writes. The Koobatians hold Markar’s photograph, and through this they signal
to Markar that they hold on to him, that despite his absence he remains present in
their lives. In complimentary fashion, they ask Markar to hold on to them in return.
Yet the display cannot but speak of incompleteness; it ‘defines an absence’, in John
Berger’s words, being a physical token of exactly what is missing from the scene,
exactly what the family lacks.71 It makes clear the absence in the family and stands
as a sign of loss; there’s a clear sadness and longing to such displays, a mood of
yearning that stands as a domestic echo of the migrant’s sentiments in the Groung
lament. And as a manifestation of their longing for the missing son and brother,
might not comfort turn to discomfort? The bantoukhd in such a situation saw
themselves in the form of a photograph, specifically in the form of a photograph
that had been sent to the other side of the world as a sign of love and success, only to
return in reconstituted form, made to define so clearly his absence from the family
home. Perhaps discomfort was a necessary aspect. Photographs from Harput acted
as insistent reminders of home, the means of claiming the attention of those who
roamed abroad and whose eyes and minds might similarly wander away from the
homeland. Thought of in this way, the pull of photographs was not simply ‘towards
abroad’, away from the Armenian provinces; there was also a complementary force
at work, one that urged migrants to look back towards home.
The photograph ‘holds open, preserves the empty space which the sitter’s
presence will, hopefully, one day fill again’.72 Before photographs are used as
placeholders for missing histories, they are placeholders for missing people. They
fill gaps not in the past but in the present, seemingly hoping that the gap does not
continue into the future. With Markar’s photograph, the Koobatians bide their
time. Like the complete, unfractured group portrait made before departure, a new
portrait with the absent migrant’s photograph included in the family space does
not simply present an idea of togetherness that the group can believe in and take
consolation from, but rather looks forward in time to the moment of reunion.
As they look to the future, might they not also be taking part in the migrant’s
own vision? To see the display purely in terms of yearning is surely to limit the
photograph and what is expressed and performed though its exhibition. We might
think back to the Tlgadintsi story ‘The Boy in the Picture’ and remember the pride
with which the mother shows her son’s photograph – indeed, shows off her son’s
photograph. It is a physical action accompanied by and overlaid with a boastful oral
narrative, with the mother spinning yarns of the boy’s great success in America.
The boy is young, prosperous and full of vigour, she tells her listeners, ‘over there he
is a lord’.73 The mother wields the son’s photograph as a status symbol, a sign of the
family’s advancement. She takes part in acts of public exhibition that Disdéri had
made a part of photography, portraits ‘not only dutifully kept, but […] also shown
to guests as evidence of the prestige of the family’.74 The showing of the picture, in
a sense, acts as an extension of the bantoukhd’s own narrative, a reiteration of the
scene of success staged in the studio. Indeed, it would literally have been shared,
for the migrant’s success would have been his family’s also, the fruits of his labour
4. Leaving Harput 113
destined for the homelands in the form of financial remittances. We might even
be looking at evidence of this in the form of the Koobatian photograph, one which
could well have been paid for using money sent by Markar. In this sense, just as
they hold up his photograph as a sign of success, so too do they hold up their own.
The family might thus have their own future vision of prosperity and security,
sharing in precisely those dreams that the migrant projected in his studio portrait.
If we are to accept the mood of Tlgadintsi’s story, the stories a bantoukhd told about
themselves were happily embraced by his family and possibly even embellished
further. Thus clothed in narrative, photographs in Harput became not simply
part of the landscape but also part of its soundscape. Photographs brought people
together: across the world, as has been seen, but also in the sense that they brought
people together around them as objects.75 People gathered around photographs, to
look, to tell stories. Unlike other forms of portrait, such as a betrothed (we might
think back to Abraham Seklemian and the photograph of his fiancée Magdaline),
a migrant’s photograph was aimed at a wide audience made up of extended family.
Viewing was often a communal rather than individual experience, much like the
reading of a letter, and indeed the two probably went in tandem: Markar’s sits in
what appears an envelope of similar size, what we might surmise to be the means
by which the photograph arrived and the receptacle also for a letter.
Photographs encouraged migration, and so too did they try to bring
peregrinations to an end. Acting as insistent reminders of home, they called
bantoukhds back. The medium can often be found working in this fashion, trying
to undo itself and counterbalance its own excesses, and yet it did not throw its
weight quite so forcefully behind the project of repatriation. Returnees, such as the
man who carried with him the portrait of Varteres Garougian and other friends,
were always outnumbered by those heading westwards. Young men would follow
their migrant brothers – indeed, we discover that the Vaznaian family was not
quite as intact as it appeared in the studio, for Mgerditch was joining his brother
Aharon, already in the USA. Meanwhile, young women voyaged for marriages
arranged through the sending of portraits, thus becoming ‘picture brides’.76
We might remember Totovents writing that ‘[t]here was not a single girl who
was not on fire with the idea of going to the United States as a young bride’, and
understand how photographs, as well as sustaining existing relationships, became
involved in the construction of new ones. Such arrangements were common for the
time. Marderos Deranian, the chronicler of the town of Hussenig, offers as a typical
occurrence of local life a scene in which a young woman announces to fellow
townswomen: ‘“My brother sent money for me to go to America and marry one of
his friends with whom he works in the wire mill. His friend has seen my picture
and wants to marry me.”’77 Tlgadintsi’s story deals with a similar situation, although
there it is the man who is put on display; he is ‘The Boy in the Picture’ that the
mother shows off to an audience made up of a potential bride’s family. The suitor’s
picture did not always play such a central part, or indeed any part at all. Instead,
the focus was on the portrait of the woman – the term ‘picture bride’ itself suggests
such an imbalance and the workings of an asymmetrical power relationship.
The circulation of a young woman’s photograph, often without the reciprocal
circulation of the man’s photographs, indicated the limits of her own agency. In
114 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Photographs forged relationships and forged physical passages across the world;
women followed their portraits, and followed the lines of relationships fostered and
sustained through those portraits. As did others. We also find arriving in late summer
1907 the Koobatian family of Hussenig. Their transit had been arranged by Markar, and
they seem to have arrived not too far behind their photograph. With this knowledge
that photograph seems to carry another message, at the very least announcing, as the
Saroyans do from Alexandre Papazian’s studio in Erzurum, that the family are on
their way. The photograph thus no longer trades in mere hope for reunion. It moves
from the abstract to the concrete, from sentiment to solid intent. It seems to add,
also, to the meaning behind the display of Markar’s photograph. Indeed, looking once
again, a noted aspect of the family portrait is less the display of Markar’s picture and
more the partial concealment of it. The migrant photograph is not brandished openly,
as in so many similar photographs, and as it peeps out of the envelope so too does it
seem to point inside, towards what is contained within, known to the sitters and to
the intended viewer but perhaps no one else, as if the family conceal a truth not from
themselves but from anyone else who might happen to see the photograph.84
Photographs kept families together, maintaining contact between them and
reuniting them in pictures and in the imagination – and sometimes reuniting them
in the flesh as well, making good on their promises to bring the fractured world
back together. Yet fractures healed were also fractures maintained. The journeys
of Annakh Azerumian and the Koobatians stand as indicators of the solidification
of Armenian life abroad, bantoukhds’ temporary abandonment of their native soil
taking on permanency.
At School in Harput
Around the time of the arrival in the USA of those Kharpertsis, a scene in Hussenig
was photographed by one of the Soursourian family – Askanaz or Haroutiun,
or possibly both (Figure 4.11).85 The photographer(s) stood on the roof of the
Apostolic girls’ school and looked over towards Sourp Varvar, one of the largest
and most famous churches in the province, built in 1848, its dome decorated with
paintings of the heavens.86 A holy spring ran under the church and it served as a place
of pilgrimage for those seeking cures, particularly cures for eye problems;87 indeed,
it might be wondered if this was a particular pilgrimage spot for hopeful migrants,
with trachoma being a prevalent issue among Armenians hoping to enter the USA
and the reason for the disbarment of many.88 The act of photographing the church
no doubt extended pilgrimage opportunities to those who migrated successfully;
it could be the means by which Armenians abroad visited the holy site, journeying
via the photographic portal that Oliver Wendell Holmes describes, imaginatively
occupying its spaces and participating in the life of the village. This role is perhaps
best understood through funeral tableaus – post-mortem photographs that might
appear to hinge on the absence of the deceased but were probably designed with
absent viewers in mind, their aim to allow bantoukhds a semblance of involvement
in traditional rites at the time of death and to provide an ongoing site of mourning
for those not able to visit the final resting place.89
4. Leaving Harput 117
Figure 4.11 A. & H. Soursourian. Sourp Varvar and Boys’ School, Hussenig, 1907.
Marderos Deranian Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and
Research), Belmont, MA.
Although it occupies a smaller portion of the frame, the boys’ school next door
to the church seems just as much the subject of the photograph, as suggested by the
way in which its students put themselves on display. A child on the left edge of the
roof raises a hand in greeting, seeming to understand that the camera represents a
means of contact with distant lands. Other children lean out of the windows below,
jockeying for position. Like the figures in the great cemetery of Erzurum (see Fig.
3.10), they strain to be seen by the lens, strain to be rendered visible in another part of
the world. Yet unlike those in Erzurum, their audience is not unknown to them, for
they specifically communicate with other places of Armenian habitation. Through
the photograph they make contact with Kharpertsis thousands of miles away, their
gestures of greetings traversing the gulf between. They participate in a new form
of community; Hussenig is no longer contained by the space of the physical town
itself but is spread across the world and held together by communications such as
these. What photography did for the family, it did for the wider community. Its
other roles similarly replicated themselves, and in addition to serving as a binding
agent there can be little doubt that photographs such as this were also charged with
more specific instrumental purposes. Hussenig still existed as a physical place, a
town in need of assistance, and photographs thus solicited support from abroad
and then served as evidence of the changes rendered through that support. One
example relating to the scene at Sourp Varvar is the donation in 1888 of a new
church bell, paid for by Hussenig Armenians in the USA, and forged in those lands
also; but more the focus of the Soursourian view of 1907 is the church school.
The school formed a particular site of photography’s involvement with
community building, Haig declaring education to be the other great impetus
behind studio production.90 The medium attended Harput’s educational
118 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
developments as it did its migratory flows, and the two ‘forms’ were entwined with
one another. Educational societies were established in the USA, each one drawing
together migrants from particular towns and villages and organizing them in
support of educational endeavours in those places.91 The activities and fundraising
of these societies – dedicated to constructing schools, employing teachers and
buying books – played a significant role in building up the places that migrants
had left behind while also building those migrants into a diaspora, linking them
through collective endeavour in support of their shared places of origin. This, then,
appears to be the specific meaning behind the gestures of some schoolchildren
in our photograph as they hold books out in front of them. This display takes
on further significance when we learn that Askanaz and Haroutiun Soursourian
served on the Library Committee of Hussenig, responsible for purchasing books
on Armenian history from Constantinople, subsequently utilized by not only local
school pupils but also others in the community.92 The photograph promotes their
own cause, and further carries an autobiographical element, telling something of
the story of their lives. They photograph their church and the school that they
served. And of course, we know this place to be their hometown. Indeed, were we
able to remove the church from our field of vision, we would be looking at the part
of the town where their homes were to be found. The western part of Hussenig,
where the Soursourian homes sat side by side, was also the nexus point of the
town, a junction from which a number of roads led.93 On a regular basis, Askanaz
would have ascended to the Kaghak on the Harput Road while Haroutiun would
have followed the Mezre Road to his own studio.
being plotted so explicitly, progress and advancement remain the message of this
Harput photograph, and indeed of all school photography. The typical presence
of an authority figure (in one form or another) – whether Sultan Abdülhamid,
Mgrdich Sanasarian or any number of others – might place pupils in a subservient
position in a hierarchical system, but it simultaneously marks their privilege and
places them above those outside the system, the ‘rank and file’. Such elevation is
the implicit message of school photographs, and is here given expression through
the utilization of the city itself. The Soursourians’ photograph consciously makes
use of the physical shape of the Kaghak to this end, while also, we might observe,
inadvertently replicating some of the city’s social structure. At the lower edge,
amidst a blur of passing figures around an arched doorway, two young boys stay
stock still, gazing up at the photographer, consciously impressing themselves
upon the image (see detail). Their inclusion is not part of the photograph’s design,
and yet it works to accentuate its message; in what is highly unusual for a school
scene, we see pictured within the frame the outside element, usually only implied,
that education seeks to lift its pupils above. Meanwhile, another presence, just as
unintended, makes something of a mockery of that message of separation, as a
boy intrudes upon the scene above, insinuating himself into the image by taking
up position on a roof between the class and their star pupil (see detail).
Figure 4.13 A. & H. Soursourian. Tlgadintsi and graduates of the National Central
School, 1910. AGBU Nubar Library, Paris.
122 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
being the case, the creation of class photographs stood for a belief in the future
and the continuation of an Armenian existence in those lands. In other words,
with such photographs Tlgadintsi constructs his own future visions, thinking
ahead to a time in which Harput is no longer threatened and drained but instead
thrives and prospers. With this outlook in mind, it might be wondered whether,
despite appearing to follow the hierarchical structure of school photography, the
photograph of Tlgadintsi’s class actually suggests something quite different. It
seems as though the conventional dynamic becomes reversed, for it is the teacher
that now looks to the class. The garlands – in the form of the diplomas, in the form
of the photograph – are his offerings to them.
This might in turn indicate a wider reversal in the photographs produced in
Harput province. The bantoukhd in the family portrait constitutes a small detail,
but it is one that disturbs the traditional order. With his inclusion, the structure
and logic of the family photograph shifts inexorably, upending its established
dynamic. The patriarch still clings to the apex of the picture, but that apex is no
longer what it was. It is now not the father but the son, standing at the edge of the
frame or appearing in miniature by way of the proffered photograph, who is the
heart of the picture. It is to him that the family look, it is to him that the family
defers. The dominant gesture of the Armenian family photograph is no longer the
hand on the patriarch’s shoulder but the hand on the son’s photograph. By holding
him up, they acknowledge that he holds them up, by sending home remittances,
by paving the way for their exit from Ottoman lands. It is a gesture evident in the
majority of photographs connected with the migratory phenomenon; it is there
even when no photograph is held within the frame, for a family photograph being
sent abroad in itself constitutes this gesture, a reaching out for the bantoukhd
across space. John Berger tells us that migration ‘does not only involve leaving
behind, crossing the water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very
meaning of the world’; it is ‘to dismantle the center of the world, and so move
into a lost, disorientated one of fragments’.101 The reorganization of the picture
plane seems minor by comparison, but it is a reorganization that refers to and
stems from this dismantling. Photographs from Harput might not speak as
ostentatiously as those that arrived in Harput from abroad, and yet they speak
just as much, in their own way, of existing in the modern world. They speak of the
world of fragments, of the unsettling of the province, the upending of norms, the
dispersal of people, the emptying of the land.
Chapter 5
RETURNING TO VAN
While three small archways frame shallow dark voids, a fourth, larger archway
on the right-hand side of the scene gives onto a view of a mountainous landscape
of two peaks and a winding path. For all its flatness and artifice, the painted
backdrop begins to take on a concrete presence as we see it repeated across a
number of portraits. Taking on some sort of presence, too, is the photographer
whose name we sometimes find printed on the mounts – H. AVEDAGHAYAN –
and indeed the world of which he was part, for the painted scene now seems to
evoke Van and the physical environment in which the photographer worked. The
backdrop, with its beckoning path, might act as a route into this world.
Above Van
In the foothills of the twin-peaked Mount Varak (Mount Erek in Turkish), above
the city of Van, lay the monastery complex that bore its name, Varakavank. One
of the few to photograph the place in the nineteenth century was H.F.B. Lynch,
doing so one November morning in 1893 after ‘the first snowstorm of the coming
winter’, the snow ‘lying in spite of a brilliant sun’.1 He addresses the vank from
the interior of its courtyard, gazing towards its portico and small bell tower, the
narthex of Sourp Kevork beyond that and the church of the Holy Virgin at the
rear (Figure 5.2). Established in the eleventh century, its fortunes had fluctuated
over the years. When Mgrdich Khrimian, a native Vanetsi priest, returned from
a stint in Constantinople to take up the role of Vartabed (abbot) of Varakavank,
the place was lying in ruins.2 By the time that our photographer, Hovhannes
Avedaghayan, was born, around 1863 in the city below, it was undergoing a revival
and gaining in importance as ‘the cradle of the national movement and one of
the symbols of the Armenian cultural rebirth’.3 The monastery was brought back
5. Returning to Van 125
Figure 5.2 H.F.B. Lynch. Varakavank (caption: ‘Monastery of Yedi Kilisa’), Van, 1893.
H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901).
to life during Khrimian’s tenure, with notable developments being the founding
of the Zharankavorats seminary school for boys and a printing house where
textbooks for the region’s schools were produced along with, importantly, the first
periodical for miles around, Ardzvi Vasbouragan (The Eagle of Vasbouragan). It
was a journal Khrimian had first published during his time in Constantinople,
establishing there its central theme of the Armenian homeland: its history read
through the religious buildings that peppered the land, often in states of ruin; the
dire conditions experienced by its people; the plight of those forced to migrate as
bantoukhds, seeking a living in Constantinople and elsewhere.4 Themes of decline,
displacement and abandonment were present from the outset, Khrimian having
pictured himself and the periodical as bantoukhds that had found themselves
far from home, a home that was not only personal but ‘national’, rooted in the
long collective history of a people. All of this was neatly expressed in Ardzvi
Vasbouragan’s subtitle: ‘Flown with patriotic wings from the Artsruni Throne of
Van-Dosb’, employing the medieval Armenian name for the region of Van and
making reference to one of its great noble dynasties.5
Relocated to Van, publication of Ardzvi Vasbouragan became the means by
which Armenians, particularly those of Constantinople, were kept appraised
of what was happening in the Armenian-inhabited provinces, before that time
a neglected and even despised place, looked down upon by the metropolitan
intelligentsia who preferred to see themselves as the heart of the Armenian
126 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
on the homelands and almost a distain for those who looked in the opposite
direction, equating bantkhdoutioun with ‘the tragic abandonment of Armenia’.14 He
established the Central School of Van, pictured by Vahan Papazian, the Armenian
political activist known as Goms, as a bourgeois counterpart to the ‘rusticism’ of
the Zharankavorats (Khoren Khrimian was the only university graduate teaching
at Varak).15 The schools, however, were united in a shared sense of education as a
vital means of ameliorating conditions in the yergir, and carried ‘the missionary
message of the greatness of the Armenian past’.16
Papazian writes of the importance of the schools in the emergence of Armenian
political parties.17 The touchpaper for the movement is generally seen as having
been lit in 1878 with the post-war peace treaties and an act that, in a career hardly
lacking in influence, might have been Khrimian’s most significant. That year, the
now former patriarch led a delegation, Minas Tcheraz included, to the Congress
of Berlin to argue for the implementation of reform measures in the Ottoman
East. These efforts resulted in Article 61 of the final Treaty of Berlin, a clause that
would become infamous, its reform measures laid out only in the most general
terms while others in the treaty made specific implementations for the Balkans.18
Khrimian subsequently returned to the Ottoman Empire with a descriptive
metaphor. The European Powers, he announced, had offered a ‘Dish of Liberty’ to
conference attendees; the Bulgarians, Serbs and Montenegrins had supped from
the dish with iron spoons while the paper spoons of the Armenians had crumbled
in the heat, leaving them to go hungry.19 With this, Khrimian adroitly diagnosed
the prevailing European notion that nationhood was expressed through violent
struggle; the iron of weaponry was all that mattered, he seemed to say, petitions on
paper counted for little. Many construed this as a call to arms, a declaration that
Armenians needed to employ Balkan tactics in order to secure the much-needed
reforms. Local Armenian self-defence societies arose in the years that followed,
such as Bashdban Haireniats in Erzurum. The first political party proper, the
Armenagans, emerged in 1885 from among Portukalian’s students in Van, and in
its wake came the other major groups of the era: the Hntchaks, set up in Geneva
in 1887, with its first branch, it is interesting to note, established among students
at the Imperial Medical School in Constantinople at the time of the Musa Bey
affair;20 and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, most often referred to as the
Dashnaktsuthiun (Federation) or simply Dashnaks, in Tiflis in 1890.21 In contrast
to the Armenagans, these latter groups, it is important to stress, were Russian
Armenian-led organizations, and while their eyes were fixed upon the yergir from
the outset, it was a number of years before they achieved active presences in the
Ottoman East.
During the 1880s and 1890s, when studios were opening and beginning to thrive
in Erzurum and Harput, there were no such establishments in Van and instead
images of the city and region come from travellers, including H.F.B Lynch and
Maximilien-Étienne-Émile Barry (who served as photographer to anthropologist
128 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
another ‘long crossing, far below in the ship’, one that was followed by another
‘island terror’, but one which makes the experience of Ellis Island seem supremely
pale by comparison. The final destination of Sakhalin Island was set in the remote
and unforgiving environment of the Sea of Okhotsk, off the Siberian coast.32 The
penal colony established there in 1881 became ‘one of the most dreaded of exile
destinations’, and by the time Avedaghayan arrived on the island, at some point in
the 1890s, he would have been joining approximately 5,000 hard-labour convicts,
part of a sizeable captive population on the island formed of ‘ordinary’ prisoners
with sufficient sentence (two years and eight months) and, importantly, any sort of
political prisoner.33 It is not clear how many other Armenian revolutionaries ended
up on Sakhalin, but we do know that one of the most famous was confined there,
an early, pioneering revolutionary whom Avedaghayan came to know during his
time on the island.34
Sarkis Gougounian had been a student in St Petersburg before he travelled to
the Caucasus with the intention of mounting a border raid to draw attention to the
Armenian cause. In 1890, he set off with around 125 men, riding and marching
under a banner emblazoned with five stars surrounding the number 61, referring
to the five Armenian-inhabited provinces of the Ottoman East and Article 61 of
the Treaty of Berlin. It was an expedition that ended in abject failure, with the
band pursued and captured by Russian Cossack forces and put on trial in Kars,
the Russian fortress city that lay closest to the Ottoman border.35 Gougounian was
sentenced to twenty years hard labour and, as would later happen to Avedaghayan,
exiled first to Siberia and then to Sakhalin.36 Despite this, the expedition, clearly
aimed at the Great Powers as a reminder of the responsibilities undertaken
in Berlin in 1878, went a long way to establishing an important revolutionary
paradigm whereby actions on the ground became inextricable from a presumed
audience of international observers. Gougounian set the tone for the politics to
come; the brashness and love of spectacle that he put on show in 1890 become
particular aspects of the movement, especially its photography. It was not yet,
however, a photographic movement; indeed, the revolutionaries of this early era,
if anything, were targeted by the lens. There is a strong chance that Gougounian
and Avedaghayan would have been photographed on Sakhalin, with there being
an official photographic system that pictured prisoners for identity cards and other
documents, as well as a doctor who had built himself a studio in order to compile
anthropological images of criminal ‘types’ and even a studio photographer who
produced souvenirs for the travellers on passing ships.37 With the camera on
Sakhalin an instrument of repression, pseudo-science and tourism, the island
seems to have represented something of a microcosm of nineteenth-century
photographic practices.
Returning to Van
Anton Chekhov and his 1890 journalistic study of the penal colony, then it might
be said that it was the distant city of Van that provided Avedaghayan with his
inspiration. ‘First foremost,’ Chekhov states, ‘an exile is spurred to leave Sakhalin
by his passionate love of his home district. If you listen to the convicts – what
happiness it is, what joy, to live in one’s own place in one’s own country!’39 He
declares the greatest lures to be the homes whose virtues stood in marked contrast
to the inhospitality of Sakhalin, for ‘most frequently of all, those exiles flee for
whom the difference between the climates of Sakhalin and their home region is
most perceptible’.40 Certainly, to read descriptions of Van and Sakhalin is to believe
that this theory could well have been true for Avedaghayan, the Eden consistently
evoked with regard to the former (the popular refrain ‘Van in this world, and
Paradise in the next’) lying in absolute contrast to the Hades we find in accounts
of Sakhalin (‘I was in hell’, wrote Chekhov, in but one of many similar analogies
by him and other writers).41 A route through Japan, China, India and Iran placed
Avedaghayan finally back in Van in 1903 (he had possibly been away for the past
twenty years). Upon his return, we find him getting married and embarking
upon a career in photography (we might conjecture that, like numerous other
practitioners, he had acquired the necessary skills in the Caucasus).42
Van had changed in his absence, continuing its expansion beyond its old
walled city, the densely populated commercial hub that housed khans, markets
and workshops with their famous silversmiths, tailors and other craftsmen and
traders. The process had been in progress since the mid-nineteenth century but
had picked up its pace with each new shock suffered by the city. Certain events,
including the great fire of 1876 and the famine of 1880–81, had prompted locals,
Christian and Muslim alike, to move eastwards in pursuit of a safer and healthier
life to be had outside the city walls in Aikesdan, which can be translated as garden
or orchard district. ‘Gardens, gardens, gardens’, Gurgen Mahari writes in the novel
Burning Orchards, his loving recreation of the city, ‘Green – amazingly green –
plush gardens with tall poplars and abundant orchards.’43 In contrast to the walled
city, Aikesdan was largely composed of low-built dwellings, each surrounded by
courtyards, orchards and gardens. These were fed by water brought down from
Varak via the irrigation channels that lined the streets of the garden city, running
between willows and poplars. The gardens and orchards themselves, meanwhile,
saw a variety of trees – apricot, apple, pomegranate, cherry, orange and lemon,
while roses and lilies were grown abundantly in the gardens. The movement away
from the old city was mimicked by foreigners – the consulates and the missions
– and the state, its buildings including the konak (governor’s mansion) and the
new military school.44 Massacre spurred further decampment. Vanetsis largely
avoided the violence of 1895 but met with massacre instead in June 1896. Despite
mounting a successful defence, several Armenian sections of both the walled
city and Aikesdan were looted and burnt down once the defenders had left for
the Iranian border as part of a negotiated withdrawal (many of those people
themselves being murdered en route).45 This was mirrored up on Varak when the
monastery was plundered and partially destroyed through fire, subsequently lying
abandoned for a time.
5. Returning to Van 131
The old city remained the central commercial site of Van. However, Aikesdan
appears to have developed its own share of business activity, as we sense as Mahari
plots the journey of three of his characters across Van. From the old covered
market in the walled city, they travel eastwards and, with Varak before them in
the distance, make their way along Khatch Poghots, the long poplar-lined central
avenue running east–west through Aikesdan.
As they came closer to Aikesdan, the street became noisier. Here were the
Turkish baths where the soldiers crowded round, waiting for their turn. On the
opposite side there was the shop of Arshak Dzetotian, the photographer, with a
sign that read ‘Arshak Dzituni’ […] The bakery of Minas Palabeghian was still
far away, but one could already smell the wonderful aroma of fresh bread.46
Mahari places the studio of Dzetotian, Van’s sole photographer in his rendering of
the city, somewhere along the western stretch of Khatch Poghots, not far from the
central crossroads of Khatch Square. Interestingly, it is just at this point that we
find, on the map produced by Müller-Simonis, the city’s baths marked, reinforcing
the suggestion of verisimilitude in Mahari’s city and suggesting that we might take
the spot as, if not a clear statement of Avedaghayan’s place in the city, then at least
an aid to imagining it.47 It certainly appears the best indication we have of the site
of a studio that was listed from 1906 in the Ottoman Annuaire Oriental, making
it the first Van studio to appear in the pages of that business directory and the
only one to be listed for a number of years.48 If Avedaghayan did indeed have
his business in this part of town, it would be in keeping with the way in which
photographic businesses had situated themselves in other cities, near to customers
both domestic and foreign.
A photograph taken nearby gives us a sense of the place (Figure 5.3). From a
spot close to Khatch Square, it looks eastwards along the main thoroughfare of
Khatch Poghots; behind lies the largely Turkish district Javshin, the baths and the
studio of which Mahari writes. Ahead is the more Armenian part of Aikesdan.
The photograph in itself testifies to a dual presence in Van, one that by now we
might understand as being conducive to the medium: the substantial educational
infrastructure, represented by the large white building of the Yeramian school that
looms at the centre of the frame, and the American missionary presence, with an
ABCFM representative being responsible for the photograph (and its handwritten
caption, declaring Khatch Poghots ‘a most beautiful street’). And in the wider
vicinity of this part of Aikesdan, between the Yeramian and the large missionary
compound in the south-east, especially along the broad avenue running from the
right of the picture down to the Armenian district of Arark, were those elements
that had proved so beneficial to photographers’ livelihoods in other cities: the
British consulate situated just around the corner, with the Russians, French,
Iranians and Italians not too far distant; French and German missions (with a
footprint somewhat lighter than that of the substantial American compound); a
hotel; and the homes of the wealthy Armenian merchants, being among the few
larger structures in the generally low-lying garden city.
132 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 5.3 Uncredited photographer. Khatch Poghots, Aikesdan, c.1900. Project SAVE
Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Vart
Shirvanian Hachigian.
Avedaghayan was contributing his skills. Far from leaving the revolutionary cause
behind, he was leading a double life as both a public photographer and a more
clandestine image-maker, with one account informing us that he was the producer
of ‘all the photographs of the revolutionary figures and groups of Van’.52
as inspiration for Gougounian and the generation that followed.60 His idealized
protagonists include Sahrat, who rides to the aid of villagers in acts of defence and
of protest in Jalaleddin (1878), based on eyewitness accounts, collected by Raffi
himself, of Sheik Jalaleddin’s targeting of Armenian communities in the Aghbag
region to the south-east of Lake Van;61 and Vardan, the protagonist of Khente (The
Fool, 1880), whose dream of Armenians living in a free and fair future world led to
him being held up as a powerful embodiment of the Armenian struggle.62 In their
own minds, Armenian fighters were not so much following in the footsteps of the
Balkan revolutionaries as their own heroic forebears, mythical counterparts and
fictional avatars.
In line with those figures, Armenian activists roamed the land, and their
repetitious picturing thus inverted the metropolitan as well as the bourgeois
aspect of photographic practice. A particular base of Dashnak operations was
Lernabar, the collective name given to the mountainous locales south of Lake
Van, ‘a maze of mountains and valleys, most of it unknown’.63 Elke Hartmann
writes of the variety of costumes sported in Lernabar by Ishkhan, one of the
Dashnak leaders, further placing them in the context of photography as a
performative act.64 Those photographs, a makeshift backdrop suggesting again
professional productions, constitute variants on his own act of naming, with
Nigol Mikayelian’s full nomme de guerre being Vana Ishkhan, Prince of Van in
other words, like many other fedayis wearing anachronism and historical allusion
in the very name he chose for himself. Photographs played a role in this process
of assuming guises and constructing identities. They were acts of reconnection
with an Armenian identity present in history and fable but felt to be missing
from the contemporary world. As with bantoukhd photographs, fedayi portraits
can be understood as future visions, images of idealized, dream selves that, once
conjured, might be ushered into the world. Self-conscious enactments of male
heroism constituted a breaking away from the imposed strictures of everyday
life, activists performing for the camera as part of the creation of heroic alter
egos.65 Could this be what Mahari implies by staging a photograph both in a
dream and at a festival? In a character’s dream, the fedayis Ishkhan and Vramian
ride up to a celebration by local villagers of the Feast of the Holy Cross at Varak.
They become ‘frozen like statues on their horses’, the ground beneath their feet
rising to turn them into a form of living statue, ‘making such an amazing picture
that Arshak Dzetotian took out his camera’.66
Even more than it was for the bantoukhd ‘lord’, the image of the fedayi
‘prince’ was clothed in heroic commentary. This was particularly so of the
Dashnaks. Photographic images, circulating widely through the ongoing
extraction of ‘form from form’ as postcards and reproductions in their journal
Droschak, formed part of an ‘aggressive propaganda campaign extolling
unprecedented – and often embellished – acts of Armenian heroism’.67 Once
again, the principles established by Disdéri are seen at work, photography’s
iconic potential and propensity to play into cultism – its promise, in other
words, to include its subjects in the Galerie des contemporains. Armenian
political groups recognized photography’s capacity for homage and put
themselves forward as objects of adulation.
136 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 5.5 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Sourp Krikor Monastery Orphanage for Girls, Van,
1907. Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA.
Courtesy of Vart Shirvanian Hachigian.
5. Returning to Van 137
fabled beauty of Aikesdan, yet his practice certainly seems set in the courtyards
of the garden city, away from the dense walled city. If there is natural life in these
photographs, it generally lies in the single flowers held by his sitters. Flowers, as
has been seen, form a regular feature in studio photography of the region, and yet
nowhere is the floral motif maintained quite so consistently as it is in Avedaghayan’s
work. The motif is consistent and so too is the manner of its presentation
– perpetually held in front of, or even clasped to, the chest, at waist height or
slightly higher – pointing to this being a concrete instance of a detail crafted by
the photographer rather than his sitters, with directions given from behind the
camera. In the group from Sourp Krikor, four of the five photographed, evidently
the orphanage’s wards, offer a flower to the lens. As they offer flowers, so does the
photograph appear to offer them, either as model pupils, seeking potential donors,
or, perhaps more likely, as ‘picture brides’, seeking potential husbands. It is only
the older woman on the left who does not proffer a flower; instead, she gestures
towards a book in her lap, a prayer book perhaps, as if to indicate the terms under
which the photograph’s offering is made.
Capturing Attention
We might think that anyone wanting to have their photograph taken had no choice
but to turn to Avedaghayan, for as it appears on paper in the form of the trade
directory, he had a monopoly on photography in Van during the first decade of the
twentieth century. Yet the more we study images and texts, the more we find the traces
of an unheralded image economy, with previously unknown photographers, like the
revolutionaries skulking around Aikesdan, suddenly emerging from the shadows. A
number of photographs indicate the presence of a photographer with a familiar prop.
It seems that after leaving Boston in 1901, Movses Papazian returned to the Ottoman
Empire and led for a time possibly an itinerant existence in the vicinity of Lake Van,
his gnarled tree in tow. Here he photographs the Gakavian family, and according to
custom we find the family patriarch Haroutiun Gakavian, a noted Vanetsi jeweller, at
the centre of the image (Figure 5.6). And yet Haroutiun shares the space, for this is
an image of several patriarchs, the portraits of Mgrdich Sanasarian and Victor Hugo
on conspicuous display.70
The latter represents a particular photographic forebear. In the 1850s, during
his time in exile from the France of Napoleon III, first in Jersey and then in
Guernsey, Hugo became interested in photography as a means of disseminating
his image beyond his island confines, so that he might still be known in the
world and participate in its daily life. The camera ensured that physical absence
was no disbarment to public presence.71 Being an age of visually centred renown,
Hugo continued the practice even after his return to Paris, most notably with the
production of a number of portraits by Nadar that became icons as the author’s
fame continued to increase. Finding one of those portraits – one made by Nadar
in 1878 – now in Van, we might recognize the extent to which Hugo’s likeness
138 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
The desire for visibility finds perhaps its clearest expression when armed
Armenian activists pose for the British vice-consul in Van, Bertram Dickson. There
is an evident willingness to perform for Dickson’s camera, the aim surely being to
turn it to their own advantage in order to deliver a message to the British government.
We can go further and position such attention-seeking as a part of their typical
experience of photography; after all, they recreate the modes established in their
own self-produced images. Examining one of the vice-consul’s photographs, we
see a number of revolutionary
tropes at work, the figure,
brandishing a weapon and
wearing ammunition, being
pictured against the plain
background of a wall; the
same in format to many
revolutionary images, it simply
lacks the exactitude, being
essentially an amateur version
of the usual professional
product (Figure 5.7). Yet it
simultaneously constitutes
a notable departure from
the norms of revolutionary
photography owing to its
female subject. Although such
portraits of armed women
can be found, they are the
exceptions amid the great
cascade of images celebrating
men. The revolutionary
oeuvre was hardly unusual
Figure 5.7 Bertam Dickson. Armenian woman in this regard, and yet the
revolutionary, Van, c.1908, Royal Geographical
diminishment of women that
Society, London.
is a not uncommon aspect of
Armenian-produced photographs became amplified in political imagery, a mode
of image-making so evidently predicated around the assertion of masculinity
having little space for women. Dickson appears to have offered an opportunity,
on this occasion, for one armed woman to bypass the usual strictures and codes of
locally produced photographs.
Some women took up arms on the revolutionary stage, many more acted
behind the scenes. The mention of Avedaghayan’s roles as photographer and
innkeeper give us a sense of the wider revolutionary network that activists relied
on, a network whose agents tended to be neglected, by images and literature alike,
in favour of the more ostentatious contributions of fedayis; where we do find
mention, we find little trace of the women who largely occupied such positions
(one might conclude, for example, that Avedaghayan’s role as a revolutionary
5. Returning to Van 141
innkeeper meant a similar role for his unnamed wife).83 The absence of women
from revolutionary photographs should thus not be taken as indication of a lack
of involvement in the revolutionary cause. Meanwhile, perhaps for image-makers
it was in their absence that women had a role to play. Fedayis were expected to
lead lives of asceticism, devoted only to the cause of liberation. This might provide
explanation for the pared-down portraits that are lacking in props, the material
trappings of wealth found in other photographs, and lacking in women too.
Asceticism included abstinence from sex, and there is the distinct feel of a variant
of namus at work in Gerard Libaridian’s suggestion that the fedayi might feel he
‘has to absolve himself as well as past generations of the sin of being unable to
defend his women from rape and kidnapping by conquerors, and that he had no
right to such relations until he had regained his honor and proven his manhood in
his own eyes’.84 Accordingly, the women absent from revolutionary photographs,
perhaps no less than the women present in family photographs, figure as attributes
of the male protagonist. They are signs of his dedication, his abstemiousness, his
‘becoming a man’.
All of Van mourned his death: someone wrote the Lament of Sebouh’s Mother
and this was sung at gatherings of all sorts. Even the Dashnak leaders attended
the funeral. His grave at Arark church was the beginning of a Van Pantheon.
Van was not to be the inferior of Paris, it too came to have a Pantheon. And now,
Sebouh, with his thick black beard, bow tie and black coat, looked down from a
wall of the Avetisian library. The photo had been taken beneath a lilac tree in the
Mughsaghian’s rose garden, and no one believed that such a serious, even stern-
looking, man was only twenty years old.95
Mahari here references a real photograph, one that, while closely focused on the
figure and showing little of its surroundings, gives an impression of a scene, a
rose garden, constituting a rare photograph of the fabled garden city.96 And the
photograph itself joins the Van landscape. Image, song and built environment are all
put to work as part of Van’s commemoration – and narration – of the revolutionary
hero. The community, Libaridian writes, participate in the construction of the
image of the hero through acts of storytelling.97 In photographic terms, this
equates to the figure of the revolutionary being performed as much by the viewer
as the photographed subject, created in the very act of viewing.
Ultimately such photographs ask to be recreated – in the flesh, for those viewing
them to take to the revolutionary life themselves. With this, the photograph
extends beyond its subjects and incorporates the viewer through direct appeal,
its narrative turning to instruction, imparting moral lessons of national ideals
and directives on how life is to be lived. In the same way that photographs of
migrants encouraged the pursuit of bantkhdoutioun through evocations of
wealth and success, so did revolutionary enactments of heroism draw others to
144 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
the cause and to the life of the fedayi (an important difference being that what
was the largely unintended corollary of one became a central rationale of the
other). There is certainly evidence that photographs were, to at least some extent,
successful in bringing new recruits into the revolutionary fold. In his memoirs,
Onnig Avedissian recalls the early formative impact of seeing a picture of Aghpiur
Serop in Droschak: ‘This made me dream [that] one day too I would be like him.’98
It is an indication of the feelings of community and comradery that portraits were
capable of inducing, while returning us also to the notion of the photograph as
future vision; as it might have been for students at the Sanasarian gazing upon
the founder’s portrait, some Armenians found in revolutionary portraits images
of potential and possibility. At the same time, it cannot be ignored that some who
were inspired to follow in the footsteps of fedayis followed them only as far as the
photographic studio.99 Acts of emulation were themselves emulated, and emulated
by those who perhaps acted more for the lens than for the cause. It was not simply
the ‘leadership ranks’ that spent time in the studio; photography offered volunteers
at all levels of revolutionary involvement the opportunity to share in the heroics
and write themselves into the grand narratives of struggle and resistance, even if
such pictures travelled in infinitely smaller circles.
Given that what we are dealing with here is a male-dominated world of dreams, it’s
hard not to draw parallels between revolutionary images and portraits of migrants.
For each, the camera offered opportunities for the creation of new identities and
the photograph marked a passage into a new world, projecting them into heroic
futures. Perhaps such correspondences should come as no surprise, for in the
migrant and the revolutionary we have parallel figures, shaped by the same forces.
The paths they forged constituted two responses to the predicament Armenians
found themselves in at the end of the nineteenth century and the dawn of the
twentieth. Indeed, theirs was at times a shared story. Itinerant lives frequently
followed and fed one another, the roving of the revolutionary overlapping with
or springing from the roaming of the migrant, a pattern perhaps suggested in
Avedaghayan’s own life. Another example is Kayl-Vahan (Minas Dolbashian),
who had joined the Dashnaks while away in the USA, and in the early twentieth
century was to be found in the Caucasus launching expeditions into Ottoman
territory. The fedayi and bantoukhd modes might be brought into dialogue
with one another, as we introduce alongside a photograph of Kayl-Vahan’s team
another image, a portrait made by Avedaghayan of eight friends from Avantz,
the lakeside village to the north-west of Van that acted as the city’s port (Figures
5.8 and 5.9). We see how closely they map onto one another: the tightknit group
arranged across three rows; comradery shown by hands on shoulders, purpose
by the exhibition of a flat image in the foreground, turned at a slight angle to the
right. That image is (most likely) a map in one scene and a photograph in the
other, one of a number of shifts in attributes that also see quasi-military uniforms
turning to suits, waistcoats to bandoliers, medallions to flowers, rifles to umbrellas.
5. Returning to Van 145
The parallels are unmistakeable. We are faced here not with evidence of a shared
author in the form of Avedaghayan (Kayl-Vahan’s photograph likely having been
made in Yerevan or its environs),100 but instead an indication of the degree to
which photography fed off itself, reusing its tropes and compositional principles
in an array of settings.
Despite aesthetic similarities between the products of the political parties and
photographs associated with the migratory phenomenon, the two sets of images
are inherently at odds, for they point in contrapuntal directions. Photographs
from these different realms, like the men they depict, are on different paths,
and their visions to a certain extent are competing. The parallel props of the
photograph and the map wielded by sitters is enlightening in this regard. For the
friends from Avantz, the photograph suggests an almost limitless, unbounded
expanse of community relations; by contrast, Kayl-Vahan’s group exhibit
their map as an indicator of a closely circumscribed place of operations and a
concrete place of belonging. Theirs is a bounded sense of home. Their pictorial
campaign is against not only the deterretorializing forces of their imperial
overlords but also those represented by other Armenians and members of their
own community. Where migration created a modern, expansive notion of home
and community, the revolutionary movement attempted to recentre Armenians
and focus their eyes on the physical turf of the yergir. Revolutionaries implicitly
lodged protests against those Armenians for whom home could be Worcester
146 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
While photographic modes bleed into one another, some tropes seem to belong
more to one form of picture-making than another. Avedaghayan’s frames tend
to be rife with reflections and doublings, nowhere more so than in the regular
occurrence of pairs of figures draped across the image foreground. It is a staple of
revolutionary images, but with Avedaghayan it appears as a feature of his regular
studio practice as well, as witnessed with the friends from Avantz and now again
with the Goergizian family (Figure 5.10). Here the placement of two brothers
Figure 5.10 Hovhannes Avedaghayan. Goergizian Clan, Van, 1908. Project SAVE
Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy of Annie
Goergizian.
5. Returning to Van 147
at the front of the scene does at least seem to address a compositional problem,
namely how to incorporate very tall men into a group without disrupting the
picture plane. The problems their bodies might have posed as disruptive forces
are hinted at by the one tall figure given a standing role at the back, tamed a little
by being placed at the centre of the group but remaining a somewhat awkward
presence. By having the tall brothers lie prostrate in the foreground, Avedaghayan
not only minimizes the disruption but actually uses them for wider effect, their
length now tying the image together. Like the flowerpots to left and right of the
group, they serve as framing devices. Indeed, they perform a pictorial duty that
Avedaghayan’s backdrop, now dwarfed by a large group, can no longer alone fulfil.
Elsewhere, however, bodies do not need to be made horizontal in quite the way
that they are, and they speak more of a commitment to a format than anything else.
Writing of the revolution in Mexico, John Mraz suggests that local photographers
pictured the unfolding rebellion in the only way they knew how, via the elements
of their already cemented studio aesthetic; it is tempting to say that Avedaghayan,
by contrast, pictured Vanetsi families and other groups in the only way he knew
how, through the revolutionary lens.102
It might be in these moments of cross-pollination that we are able to discern
Avedaghayan in revolutionary images. The similarities between the Goergizian
portrait and a photograph
of fighters from Shadakh
in Lernabar (Figure 5.11)
is unmistakeable: the two
figures lying prostrate in
the foreground; the striped
rug beneath, which appears
an exact match; and the
positioning of flowerpots
as decorative features and
framing devices. We might
finally have concrete evidence
of Avedaghayan’s revolutionary
work and, with the two
Figure 5.11 Uncredited photographer (likely
photographs side by side, a
Hovhannes Avedaghayan). Men from Shadakh, Van,
demonstration of the spectrum no date. Courtesy of The Arshile Gorky Foundation.
on which he worked. Looking
at these photographs together, Avedaghayan’s diverse output appears to cover
a great swathe of Armenian life, indeed incorporates almost a clash between
different sides of Armenian life. The native garb of the Shadakh group stands in
direct contrast to the westernizing appearance of the Goergizians, and one can
only imagine that their wider lives too were markedly different. The Goergizian
portrait points far afield: a Protestant family, with the central seated figure probably
being the Reverend Aghajan Goergizian; his sons lie at the front, on the left Arsen
Aghajan Goergizian, at the time of the photograph enrolled in Anatolia College,
the missionary school in Marsovan; the holding of photographs suggests an
148 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
The longing the poem describes is clearly the longing of an exile, and it is not
difficult to locate what must have been its resonance for Avedaghayan. It could
well have provided him with a strong poetic rendering of his own life, his own
wanderings and return. With this in mind, it is not such a leap to see the twin-
peaked mountain of his painted backdrop as representing Varak and his home
in Van. Yet the message goes beyond that, for the poem presents Varak as both
a particular sacred site and a metonym for a wider place of belonging, a sense
propagated through the teachings of Khrimian, through his schools and the
national movement.
Avedaghayan is hidden from the viewer, as he was most likely invisible to
those present on that sunny day; and as words about birds hover in the air above
Varakavank, so does the mark of the man in the dark itself lie in darkness. It is
in the shadows, cast by the structure on which he has positioned himself, that
he chooses to place the handwritten credit: ‘Photo by Hov. K. Avedaghayan.’ It is
rare to find in this era a photographer signing their name in such a way. It serves
to strengthen the importance of the scene, Avedaghayan seemingly laying claim
not simply to the authorship of the photograph but, perhaps more importantly,
the sentiment it expresses. We can link it back to those Sanasarian students who,
with their names, personalized the garlands that they placed around the founder’s
bust. Avedaghayan’s photograph is his offering and his tribute to Varak and all
that it stands for, a sense further confirmed when we see that he has attached
further identifying marks to his name: a small, square cross and one final, discreet
word, pilgrim.
150
Chapter 6
L O O K I N G F O RWA R D, L O O K I N G B AC K
It’s unclear whether or not Stepan Aghazadian was in attendance that day at
Varak. It certainly seems possible that the man who served as one of Khrimian’s
successors as the Vartabed of Varakavank, and later as primate of Van, might
be among the clergy gathered in a row; the second figure from the right, white-
bearded and cowled, carries a resemblance to the figure that appears in a portrait
made by Avedaghayan around this time.1 Either way, we might discern the mood
of the times, and thus read the photograph, through the speech he made in 1910
at the festivities marking the fiftieth anniversary of Khrimian’s founding of the
school.2 A sense of great progress was expressed by Aghazadian when he spoke of
how far the monastery had come since the dark days of 1896.3 They are words that
help us to recognize the physical changes that had taken place on the site. Gone
is the small bell tower atop the portico seen in Lynch’s photograph, destroyed in
1896 but since replaced with a more substantial, imposing structure. The portico
itself now stands white in its upper section, clearly the result of the repair work
done over the previous decade or so, paid for by subscriptions from Armenians in
the US, the Caucasus and elsewhere.4 On this note, it is worth remarking on the
way in which Khoren Khrimian, in the final verse of his Longing for Varak poem,
implores Varak, a site increasingly identified as home (‘my Varak, my homeland’),
to return to life: ‘You must rise again and heal your wounds.’5 In line with the
poem, Avedaghayan’s photograph of Varak can be read as not simply concerning
Armenians returning to their homelands, but moreover about those homelands
returning to life, Varak rising from the ruins. It was a return to life symbolic of a
larger resurrection and sense of healing. The jubilee held at Varak was a belated
one, but the fact that these celebrations took place at all was a sign of progress –
such festivities had not been possible in the actual anniversary year of 1907 and
only became so later amidst the new freedoms of the constitutional era.
A revolution had been mounted against the sultan in July 1908 by members
of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, also referred to as the Unionists,
or the Young Turks), a reformist political party, yet one with centralist and
nationalist inclinations (it is interesting to note that the movement was but
another product of the Imperial Medical School).6 As revolutions go, it was
bloodless, with Sultan Abdülhamid relenting to CUP threats that continued
failure to restore the constitution suspended thirty years earlier would be met
152 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
with an armed response (threats sent via telegram, demonstrating that power,
as Roderic Davison observes, ‘could emanate from either end of the telegraph
line’).7 There followed the restoration of the constitution, the transference
of power away from the sultan, and the relaxation of limits on freedoms of
movement, association, assembly and the press. A new discourse of Ottoman
identity seemed to suggest that those most elusive of things, equality between
subjects and renewal of the empire, might finally be attainable. In place of the
sultan’s divisive rendering of Ottomanism in the form of an empire dominated
and characterized by its Turkish Muslim elite, there was now a new vision of the
‘Unity of the Elements’ that echoed an earlier, pre-Hamidian discourse, holding
up as its aim an empire based upon a shared Ottoman citizenship of the different
ethnic communities.8
New public figures emerged, such as Enver Bey, the Young Turk ‘hero of
liberty’ who had spearheaded the movement to restore the constitution and who
recognized in the camera a means of sculpting a public persona.9 The raising of
Enver to the status of ‘national’ figure was greatly aided by his willingness to pose
for the lens and the dissemination of the resulting images by way of a greatly
expanded illustrated press, allowing photographic images to be increasingly woven
into the daily fabric of Ottoman life.10 The new ‘heroes’ were not restricted to the
ranks of the CUP, however, for there existed a strong strain of rhetoric dedicated
to saluting the various groups that had previously opposed the government.
Armenian revolutionaries emerged from hiding to be ceremoniously welcomed
by Armenians and Turks alike; ‘militants, villains only yesterday, were suddenly
being celebrated as heroes’.11 The new Ottoman discourse distanced itself from
Hamidian paternalism and projected instead ideas of brotherhood. The return
of revolutionaries was but one ceremonial staging of the new imperial vision,
a prime example of the ‘theatrical production of revolutionary brotherhood’
through a rhetoric of kinship, equality and togetherness.12 Van, for example,
witnessed the release of political prisoners. In long columns led by military
bands, the newly freed men returned home along a Khatch Poghots dotted with
flower- and bunting-adorned victory arches. Into the evenings and the nights,
torch-lit processions took place along the same streets and fireworks illuminated
the sky.13
Amongst the celebratory photographs is one made by the jewellers’ association
of Van, gathering before the lens with a display that includes the tools of their
trade, the Ottoman flag and, in the very foreground, a sign in Armenian reading
‘Liberty, Equality, Justice, Fraternity’ (Figure 6.1). They celebrate the constitutional
period as jewellers, as Armenians and as Ottomans, marking a turning point in the
history of the city and of the empire. One can imagine how the Armenagan and
Francophile Haroutiun Gakavian (sitting in the second row, second from the left,
his attention caught, like the man beside him, by something ‘offstage’), felt about
the events of a revolution that borrowed so heavily from French antecedents. In
those days it must have seemed as if he had indeed succeeded in importing the
ideals of Victor Hugo.
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 153
Figure 6.1 Uncredited photographer. Armenian jewellers’ association after the proclamation
of the Ottoman constitution, Van, 1908. Harutyun Marutyan collection/Harutyun Marutyan,
Capitals of Armenia. Book 1: Van (Yerevan: Gitutyun Publishing House, 2013).
stage, is the empty chair visible on the right. It is another in our series of empty
chairs in Armenian studio photography, but on this occasion it at least appears
as though it might have been occupied until shortly before the photograph’s
exposure, its inhabitant perhaps now behind the camera. It cannot be said which
of the Voskertchian brothers made the photograph (if indeed it was one of the
brothers), and there is also a question about when the photograph was made. It is
thought to have been taken in 1910 but by that year the studio label adorning the
mount – D. Voskertchian et frères – would already have been displaced in favour
of a more egalitarian version announcing all three brothers in turn (at least by
initial). Therefore 1909 or even 1908 might be a possibility; certainly it belongs
to the excited, optimistic days of the constitutional period, that much is clear. The
photograph seems to mark this new era, the friends looking confidently ahead to
a future full of possibility.
The changes at the Voskertchian studio that brought the three brothers into
positions of parity with one another were perhaps not purely the product of a
‘natural’ ascent of Dikran’s younger brothers Yervand and Haroutiun as they gained
in experience behind the lens; they might speak also of an expanded business.
Photography seems to have boomed everywhere during the constitutional era,
with new photographers and new clientele emerging. Among the new image-
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 155
being built in 1847.16 It was only in the second decade of the twentieth century,
with the coming of the constitutional revolution, that a belfry was permitted.
The new structure, modelled on that of Sourp Asdvadzadzin, was completed not
long before the making of the photograph (an inscription in the ironwork of the
railing suggests 19 August 1913 as the likely date of completion). It takes part in a
mode of photography at work in Armenian communities at that historic moment
marking developments and advances in civic and community infrastructures. The
most overt manifestation of this mode might be said to be the postcards issued
by the Sarrafian Frères – Diyarbekir-born photographers who had left for Beirut
after the 1890s massacres – of Diyarbekir’s Sourp Giragos church with its new,
taller steeple, an inset image showing its previous incarnation and emphasizing the
extent of the change through a variant of the before-and-after format.17 Alexandre
Papazian’s photograph does not make quite so overt a nod to the notion of upward
progress found in the Sarrafian postcard, but the significance of what it shows
would not have been lost on its intended viewers. They would have welcomed the
image as a report on the successful completion of a building project and, moreover,
would have recognized how the progress being declared was one that, ultimately,
pertained to people and a community rather than physical infrastructure. In these
building projects and their documentation, we find a particular quest for standing
and solidity. By building upwards they may well have sought a closeness to God
above, but undoubtedly it was also a firmness on the ground to which they aspired,
a solid basis for their community in freedom and security.
The photograph of the Zhoghovaran is another suggestion of links between
the Papazian family and English-speaking (or ‘American-Ottoman’) Erzurum. It
begins to place Alexandre inside this community, as a series of images from July
1912 do in literal sense. In them, he records a meeting of the Erzurum mission,
a form of report from the field it seems, with a contact sheet of the images being
dedicated on the reverse to William Peet, the ABCFM treasurer stationed in
Constantinople, by Robert Stapleton (Figure 6.4). The Stapletons are spread out
across the ensemble collection: Stapleton himself appears in the last frame of the
bottom row, while his wife Ida appears in the first frame of the middle row and
their children (with another missionary Mr Maynard) the last frame of the top
row.18 While the size of the frames suggests an amateur format – a light, hand-
held camera, made by Kodak or one of its rivals – the controlled handling of the
instrument indicates a professional at work. The camera addresses a succession of
people. Each has their moment under the gaze of the lens, sitting in an armchair
designated for the task; a click of the shutter, an exposure of the photographic
film, and then the next subject takes the chair (the only shift in framing is a clearly
conscious move to incorporate the Stapleton children as they pose atop the chair).
Papazian, in essence, turns this corner of the mission compound into a studio in
miniature, and the intimacy of the portraits do much to suggest the photographer’s
closeness to the missionary group, but also perhaps his distance, considering the
fact that he remains hidden behind the camera apparatus throughout, going
unrecorded in the field report.
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 157
Figure 6.4 Alexandre Papazian. ABCFM meeting, Erzurum, July 1912. SALT Research,
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Courtesy of ARIT.
The domesticity of the scene seems pertinent. We have a sense, from the evidence
of the available photographs, of much of Alexandre’s life and work being conducted
within the close confines of this small part of Erzurum. This is in contrast to the
activities of his brother, who was once again on the move. Movses, who, as has
been seen, spent time in Boston at the turn of the century, tried, unsuccessfully, to
return to the USA a decade later. He arrived in New York from Le Havre in July
1910 but was deported three weeks later. Six months later, in January 1911, he
made the same journey and another attempt at entering the country; the result was
the same but on that second occasion he was deported so quickly – only four days
after arrival – that he was sent out on the very same ship that had taken him to the
USA.19 The reason for these deportations is listed as ‘likely public charge’, meaning
that officials felt that Papazian would be reliant on the public purse, with a medical
report declaring him to have significant eye problems, indeed being almost blind.
This was a fate Papazian shared with hundreds of other Armenians, but perhaps it
was for him a more painful experience, his eyes having been for so long his living.
These journeys were of a piece with Papazian’s earlier peregrinations, but at
the same time they formed part of a new migratory movement that tells another
tale of these constitutional years. Armenian cities – their buildings, institutions
and communities – were rebuilt and expanded, but so too did they recede as their
citizens departed. After the Young Turk revolution, restrictions on movement,
both within the empire and ‘towards abroad’, were lifted, and many Armenians
took advantage of the new liberties.20 Nishan Toutounjian, a photographer in
Harput, quite possibly a nephew of Mihran Toutounjian who, we can assume,
158 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
worked in the Toutounjian studio, arrived in the USA in October 1908;21 Aram
Soursourian arrived there in June 1909.22 It might have been these departures
– and the associated loss of manpower – that brought about the partnership
that existed in later years between Mihran Toutounjian and the ‘Soursourian
Brothers’ (its unclear which of the family Toutounjian actually worked with). The
timing of Aram Soursourian’s departure from Harput is particularly suggestive,
for his journey was made at a time when the initial hope brought by the Young
Turk revolution was tempered by counter-revolution and massacre. The new
government briefly lost power, and on the suppression of the uprising it was able
to implement what it had not been able to bring about the previous year, the
removal of the sultan.23 New sultan Mehmed V, brother of Abdülhamid, proved
an ideal figurehead for the reborn Ottoman Empire; he did not carry the bloody
associations with which Abdülhamid had been burdened and the new Ottoman
rulers attempted to turn him into a symbol of ‘national’ unity.24 Some remained
sceptical as to the prospects of real change in the empire, with such fears seemingly
confirmed in April 1909 when around 25,000 Armenians were massacred in
a new wave of violence in Cilicia. The swirling of rumour played a part in the
violence, and it is interesting to consider one particular accusation: that the bishop
of Adana, Mushegh Seropian, had been photographed in the guise of an ancient
Armenian king. The photograph, in fact, depicted the bishop in ceremonial dress
on the occasion of a feast day, but it was read by some as revealing an Armenian
desire to establish an independent kingdom.25 The incident is evidence of how
readily semantic migrations could occur, an innate aspect of photographs that
became heightened in charged environments in which changes to the social order
threatened established power and privileges. Such readings, in short, revealed the
fears and perceptions of the readers. The violence seen in Cilicia threatened to
spread to other parts of the empire, and even when the tensions of the moment
cooled, life for Ottoman Armenians retained its element of precarity, their place
in the empire and thus their future being not truly known. ‘The question that
obsessed the Armenians more than any other,’ Raymond Kévorkian tells us, ‘was
whether the massacres represented the last gasp of the old regime or were rather
the inaugural act of a new policy of extermination.’26 In circumstances of the
ongoing threat of massacre and the relaxation of emigration policies, Armenian
departures from the Ottoman East surged.27
Setrag Adoian was already out of Van, having in 1906 left the family home in
Khorkom, a village on Lake Van, and travelled to the USA.28 His family made
their own, more limited migration in 1910, Shushan taking her children Satenig,
Vostanig and Vartoosh the twenty miles to the city of Van. They lived first in the old
walled city before settling in the south-east of Aikesdan, between the Armenian
neighbourhoods of Norashen and Arark, close to the American mission, where
Satenig, Vostanig and Vartoosh attended school.29 That same year, established in
Providence, Rhode Island, Setrag Adoian posed for a studio portrait, seemingly
to be sent home to Van in the established manner of the migrant, as a substitute
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 159
presence and as a report on his progress.30 Indeed, he seems to present his own
version of that now familiar image, the prosperous migrant successfully forging
a place for himself in the New World. Later, in 1911 or 1912, a reciprocal portrait
was made in Van, and it seems likely that Shushan had some choice concerning
the studio as substantial competition was emerging for Hovhannes Avedaghayan
(see Fig. 2.2). As happened elsewhere, a host of new photographic names
appeared in the streets of the city. In 1912, the Annuaire Oriental’s listings for
photographers in Van, for so many years a minute section that Avedaghayan had
entirely to himself, suddenly expanded, seemingly overnight, to include Karekin
Khandjian, Hagop Maghakian, Kegham Vasilian and Archag Tchitenian.31 Some
of these studios were no doubt already in business before 1912, meaning that the
Adoian photograph would have been made, even were we to give it the earlier date
of 1911, at a time when a number of photographers were at work in the city. We
can only make conjectures about the reason behind Shushan’s choice. In going
to Avedaghayan she might have been following a revolutionary connection, her
brother Aharon being a member of the Dashnaks, or patronizing the nearest
studio, or else simply opting for the most established photographer in town.
Nouritza Matossian is likely correct in thinking that Shushan entrusted the
photograph to her son-in-law, the husband of Akabi, her daughter from her first
marriage, when he left for the USA in the summer of 1911.32 Another departure
reveals another aspect of these years, for Mgrditch is said to have left to avoid being
conscripted into the Ottoman army. This was one of the reforms implemented
with the constitutional revolution; Armenians were no longer liable for an
exemption tax and were instead expected to serve in the armed forces in the same
manner as other Ottoman subjects. Some relished the new roles and the chance of
serving the empire that they offered, and we find Armenians taking to the studios
to be photographed in uniform. As might be expected, the vital fortress town of
Erzurum was the site of such celebratory military picturing, the Voskertchian
Frères one of the studios used for the purpose.33 Yet what was seen as opportunity
by some was felt as threat by others, as demonstrated in the story of Mgrditch,
along with the stories of numerous other Armenians who migrated during these
years. Indeed, shortly after Mgrditch’s departure the risk of conscription became
more acute, with Italy invading the Ottoman province of Tripolitania in North
Africa (present-day Libya) in September 1911, plunging the Ottoman Empire into
a year-long conflict.
The photograph entrusted to Mgrditch may well have been specifically designed
to capture Setrag’s attention (‘to say “Here we are back in Van”’, according to Peter
Balakian).34 Setrag is a man who, as he is largely pictured in biographies of Gorky at
least, bears a resemblance to Goulig’s negligent husband in Tlgadintsi’s story. In his
absence, Shushan does not hold open the patriarchal chair, as seen in Harput, but
does what women increasingly do in the absence of their husbands: she assumes
the mantle of family head and assumes the role of the photograph’s central seated
subject, commanding the photographic space. But as things change, so do they
stay the same – Vostanig takes his place by her side, the eldest and indeed only
son. That is to be expected perhaps, surprising are the absences. Missing from
the scene are Vostanig’s sisters, elder sister Satenig and younger sister Vartoosh,
160 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
around ten and five years old respectively at this time, glaring absences for which
no explanation has been offered or even sought.35 Children in photographs
tend to be subject to a collective ruling: either all of them appear or else none of
them. Rarely does a family portrait present a limited selection from the younger
generation. Indeed, the inclusion of the young indicates an expansiveness, the very
idea of family, and therefore to present one son alone makes little sense, even in the
domain of male privilege that was the Armenian photographic studio. If one of the
aims of the photograph was to show Vostanig’s ‘father in America […] what a fine
young man he had become’, as seems a fair assessment, then the inclusion of his
sisters could only have aided this purpose, for surely they would have emphasized,
as female figures do elsewhere, his centrality.36
It is a curious feature of the photograph. Curious too is its murkiness and
propensity to shadow, its lack of detail and closeness of crop. But otherwise, it
might be said that there is, in fact, very little to mark the photograph Mgrditch
carried with him as being any different to the numerous others that made similar
journeys across the seas. Its resemblance to other products of the same studio
is observable, for it was just another portrait commission for Avedaghayan. The
painted backdrop has now been seen many times, as has the woven rush matting.
Vostanig’s floral offering is consistent with the motif that has been observed
running through Avedaghayan’s work. It is a motif that takes the form of a gesture,
and just as that gesture of the flower proffered by the chest-level hand can be seen
in multiple Avedaghayan works, so too can more subtle aspects of composition.
In pose and positioning, Shushan and Vostanig have their counterparts in other
images; we might recall the portrait of Khisarji Kevork’s family (see Fig. 5.1),
particularly its centre with the comparable close pairing of seated parent and
standing child, or the similar correspondences provided by the group from the
Sourp Krikor orphanage, particularly by the two figures on the right of the frame
(see Fig. 5.5). We even start to find in these other examples echoes of the Adoians’
gazes and expressions – gazes and expressions that had seemed to belong uniquely
to them and which, accordingly, have been held up as the most salient features
of the portrait. Shushan ‘looks bravely at the camera’, Vostanig ‘prematurely
solemn’.37 Elsewhere, her face is ‘a mask of numb despair’, while he ‘appears slightly
embarrassed’; the ‘faces of both mother and child have the look of a plea’.38 Yet once
we establish the photograph as but one of many products of a particular studio,
with numerous visual counterparts, the expressions on the faces of the Adoians
appearing as neutral as those of Avedaghayan’s other sitters, such assessments
begin to unravel.
These are the repetitions inherent in photography, indeed repetitions nestled
within repetitions. They are the repetitions of studio photography, the heritage of
André Disdéri; they are the repetitions of the communal language that emerged
as a product of encounters between Armenian photographers and sitters; and
they are the repetitions of one particular image-maker in the Ottoman East, the
tropes and conventions that he himself developed and deployed over the course of
a career. When they pose for the lens, Shushan and Vostanig are taking part in the
same process as hundreds of others before them. Yet they do so in order to speak
of their own lives, to declare the uniqueness of those lives. The particularity of the
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 161
photograph lies not in pose or expression or composition but in those lives. For all
its repetition, the photograph remains the record of a unique encounter, particular
people in a particular place at a particular moment. It captures the likeness of
Shushan and Vostanig and puts that likeness at their disposal, an object that not
only records life but plays a role and has a force within it.
1914
When the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in October 1914 on the
side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austro-Hungry, a central focus became
162 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
the Russian border region. As in the 1870s, conflict brought those that dwelt in
those lands, their identities and allegiances, real and imagined, into the spotlight.
In photographic terms, an important final vignette involving the Erzurum-Tiflis
photographic axis should be recorded. Armen Garo, the former deputy for Erzurum,
was one of a small number of Ottoman Armenians who decided to join the Russian
ranks in 1914.42 The notion of performance lay at the heart of a stinging rebuke
later delivered by Grigoris Balakian, an Armenian priest and fellow Sanasarian
graduate who, surviving the genocide, became one of its first memoirist-historians.
Balakian states that Garo had his photograph taken in Tiflis with some armed
friends, despite being ‘without military merit or experience’ and ‘not once having
done anything real in war’. The photograph is, in this view, little but the fantasy of its
creator, and Balakian continues by suggesting that Garo produced the photograph
as a piece of advertising or promotional material.43 Garo engaged with photography
in precisely the way it had come to be understood by Armenian revolutionary and
Ottoman state actors alike, as an international diplomatic performance. It is akin
to the photographic statecraft of the Ottoman sultans, or Enver’s public image
constructions. Indeed, it was through a variety of collision with Enver’s own
posturing that Garo’s image performance became problematic. Balakian mentions
a particular printing of the photograph – in The Daily Graphic in London – but not
the date; it seems of some significance that it received this high-profile outing just as
Enver was arriving in Erzurum in retreat from a disastrous Caucasus Campaign.44
His reckless march into Russian territory had ended with heavy defeat and the near
total destruction of the Third Army at the Battle of Sarikamish.
Crucially, despite it being a battle in which Armenians fought on both sides, the
role played by the Armenian volunteers in Russian ranks was subsequently held up
by Enver as proof of Armenian sedition. From the moment of this early catastrophic
defeat, Unionists promoted an image of Armenians as a treacherous nation.45 The
actual extent to which Garo’s photograph informed the Ottoman agenda cannot,
in truth, be known. It certainly presented an opportunity; it was later amongst a
diverse array of images collected, decontextualized and semantically reconfigured
in a range of propaganda publications that detailed the Armenian ‘rebellion’,
including a 500-page book and a photographic album in two volumes.46 Sent to
foreign diplomatic offices and Ottoman embassies abroad, the books and albums
registered little success outside the empire.47 However, internally their impact
was likely very different. Grigoris Balakian goes as far as to present Garo’s image-
making as an act of photographic incitement, ‘provoking the already hateful and
vengeful passion of Turkish government officials and the mob against a defenceless,
bewildered and ill-fated Armenian populace’.48 There is some evidence to suggest
that the albums did play a role in mobilizing Ottoman Muslims against Armenian
communities. Writer and journalist Yervant Odian records seeing the albums,
‘specially published to inflame the Turkish mob and the Turkish police against
the Armenians’, being distributed by Unionists in Konya later in the war. Their
circulation, he writes, ‘was nothing but laying the groundwork for a massacre’.49
As in the Balkan Wars of previous years, state propaganda operations aimed to
militarize society in order to eliminate non-Muslim communities,50 a process that
Jay Winter has termed the ‘cultural preparation of hatred, atrocity, and genocide’.51
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 163
Van 1915
In April, Van became a particular site of tension. Armenians had been cooperating
with vali Tahsin Bey, the Dashnaks helping to mobilize Vanetsis for military service,
but relations changed with the appointment of new vali Cevdet Bey, the brother-in-
law of Enver and a veteran of massacres against Armenians and Assyrians in Iran,
who arrived accompanied by Kurdish and Circassian irregular forces. The tensions
stoked by his insistence on more Armenians joining the labour battalions, which
by now had begun ‘to be associated with an uncertain future – quite possibly death’,
were exacerbated by the ambush and murder of Ishkhan and a Dashnak delegation
as they travelled to Lernabar.57 As Van started to be cut off from outlying regions,
Armenians organized two separate self-defence committees, one for Aikesdan and
the other for the old city, in preparation for an expected attack. Over the coming
days, what ‘had begun as preparation for self-defense against potential massacres
[…] turned into destructive urban guerrilla warfare between government forces
and the fighters’ of those committees.58 In Aikesdan, Armenians occupied most
of the Varak side of the garden city, from midway through Javshin eastwards. The
site of the photographic studio referred to by Mahari would have sat on the front
line of the Ottoman attack, facing Armenian defensive positions that ran from the
central crossroads of Khatch Square down to the church at Arark, with many of the
consulates and schools being right in the firing line at this point where the town
was cleaved in two.59
While the siege was in full flow, major events were unfolding elsewhere. On
the infamous night of 24 April 1915, Armenian political, religious and cultural
leaders were arrested in Constantinople, many being subsequently murdered.60
The round-ups established a pattern of targeted destruction that was repeated
across the empire, the arrest of notables followed by the deportation of civilians
into the Syrian Desert. They were actions taken under the guise of clearing war
zones of threats, yet they belied any notion of military necessity, encompassing
regions far from the front lines, their focus falling instead on all areas of Armenian
concentration. Indeed, deportations themselves created war zones where none
had existed previously – and not war zones resembling Van, where resistance was
staged, but instead the sites of a one-sided war waged on civilian populations,
with forced migration everywhere accompanied by massacre, kidnap and sexual
violence.
With civilians at Van hemmed in along with committee fighters, they too
joined the defence, the skills of everyday professions put at the disposal of the
besieged. For instance, Vahram Gakavian, the restless figure at the forefront of
the Gakavian family photograph, and Vostanig Adoian were among the young
boys who delivered food, ammunition and messages to fighters on the front
lines.61 In such circumstances, was Avedaghayan doing something similar,
putting to work his skills as a photographer? It seems inconceivable that a
man reported to be so heavily involved in revolutionary photography would
not have pictured a siege in which the Dashnaks played a major part. After all,
the photographs made in Van in 1915 do cling to many of the set structures
of revolutionary photography – the group photographs are near identical to
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 165
way, regardless of the captions they carried (even Balakian’s scathing assessment
of Garo’s photograph notes that the ‘passions’ of the Muslim populace were
‘already’ inflamed).67 After all, the discourse in circulation was an old one, with
roots in the narratives of the Hamidian era.68 State narratives of the genocide
years harked back to and consciously stirred memories of the late-nineteenth-
century broad brush characterization of the Armenians as a conspiratorial
community, a longstanding negative image that the rhetoric of the constitutional
years had not dislodged.
It is precisely this negative image that is on display in the redeployed Van
photographs, for those images give physical form to what had already been
pictured in the imagination. A related observation is made by a witness to the
assault on Van, Rafael de Nogales, a Venezuelan officer serving in the Ottoman
army. Later in Diyarbekir, de Nogales encountered an example of the state’s
own picture-making efforts in the form of an accusatory photographic tableau
depicting supposedly confiscated Armenian weapons. Recalling a meeting with
Mehmed-Asim Bey, commander in the gendarmerie of Diyarbekir, de Nogales
describes how ‘this gentleman overwhelmed me with attentions; and offered me
two photographs, showing him and his secretaries aligned behind a stack of arms
which, so Mehmed-Asim Bey pretended, had been found hidden in the houses and
even the churches of the Armenians’.69 Presented as loose prints, the photographs
were free from the texts that guide interpretation in the printed albums, and yet
they had their own determining narrative, the commander painting Armenians
as the agents of a Russian-sponsored plan of revolution. Of this Nogales writes
that ‘it is impossible to know whether things were thus in hard fact, or merely in
the Dantesque vision of the Sublime Porte, which, habituated to its own regime of
blood and darkness, believed that the rest of the world acted in the same way’.70
It’s an account that suggests, albeit in tentative fashion, that what might actually
be located in these images and placed under examination is the Ottoman state and
its own outlook. Through its photography the imperial state holds a mirror up to
itself, revealing its own preconceptions and imaginings – its ‘Dantesque vision’ –
rather than any objective ‘facts’ concerning Armenians.
From another perspective, the ‘evidence’ provided by photographs from the
siege of Van is evidence of the city itself. Strangely, it seems that it was really
only now, in 1915, at the moment when the city was facing its greatest threat,
that Armenian photographers went into the streets and fields and photographed
the place itself. Like the maps of the siege that have since been produced,
showing where in Van combat lines and fortified positions became established,
photographs from 1915 record a particular historical moment while at the same
time allowing us to imagine and to navigate the living, thriving city it once was.
Discernible in the background of front-line scenes are the scattered trees of the
famous orchards; street irrigation channels now form trenches, garden walls
are ready made barricades. Our photograph above appears to have been taken
along the south-eastern section of the besieged part of Aikesdan, and with Varak
plainly visible in the background, we are at last given a sense of how that mountain
loomed large over Van and dominated life in the city. It played no less a role during
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 167
the siege, acting as a place of refuge, with around 6,000 Armenians finding shelter
at Varakavank, Sourp Krikor and the other monasteries of the mountain, and a
means of escape, being the principal safe route out of Van, the ‘last link to the
outside world’.71 This was the route eventually taken by Vanetsis. The arrival of
the Russians in May precipitated the retreat of Ottoman forces and the start of an
Armenian governorate in the city, one that lasted until Russian troops fell back
in July. Over 100,000 Armenians followed them eastwards on foot, two-thirds
reaching their destination in the Caucasus.72
Van in 1915 had become a photographic city, in the sense of being committed to
photographs and, importantly, in the Benjaminian sense of flaring into view at the
moment of its disappearance, becoming ‘present in passing away’.73 It is an instinct
that finds an unexpected parallel in historian Arnold Toynbee’s contribution to
the 1916 British Foreign Office ‘blue book’ The Treatment of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire – presenting evidence of the wartime massacres – as he writes
of an unexpected corollary of the conflict: ‘it is one of the strangest ironies of war
that it fuses together and illuminates the very fabric it destroys’. The labyrinth of
civilization was ablaze, its previously unseen corners standing revealed by the light
of the destructive flame, the Armenian people finally visible:
Then the fire masters its prey; the various parts of the labyrinth fall in one by
one, the light goes out of them, and nothing is left but smoke and ashes. This is
the catastrophe that we are witnessing now, and we do not yet know whether it
will be possible to repair it. But if the future is not so dark as it appears, and what
has perished can in some measure be restored, our best guide and inspiration
in the task will be that momentary, tragic, unique vision snatched out of the
catastrophe itself.74
In the glare of war and genocide, the camera lens opens, capturing a world briefly
perceptible in the moment of its vanishing.
Erzurum 1915
negatives were the ‘negative’ in more than just their light distribution, the way
in which their dark areas corresponded to the light areas of the photographed
scene and the light areas of the resultant print. They were also antitheses in terms
of physical attributes, brittle and fragile where prints were pliant and durable.
Innately vulnerable, they embodied the impermanence that photography at
large was thought to stand against, existing only in the careful conditions of the
photographic studio and surviving the destruction of the genocide years in but
the rarest of circumstances.85
We lose sight of Movses Papazian after his second failed attempt to enter the USA
in 1911, so his whereabouts in 1915 are difficult to state. There can be found,
however, a detailed account of what befell Alexandre and other members of
the Papazian family. When given his deportation orders, Alexandre went to the
mission station for help and was given their horse and three gold pieces. ‘He
loaded a mattress, a little food, his mother and two babies on the horse while his
wife and six-year-old walked alongside and they joined a small caravan’, which
formed part of the second convoy to leave Erzurum, on 18 June.86 In contrast
to the first deportees, this second convoy left by what would become the central
deportation route from Erzurum, through the Erzinjan Gate and onto the road
westwards towards Baiburt.87 Papazian’s small caravan was led from the road
some fifteen miles from Erzurum and directed into a remote valley where, after
having their money extorted from them, his family group were set upon by a
band of chetes. Papazian was stripped by the assailants and stoned to death, as
was his youngest child. His mother disappeared, surely murdered. His wife Anna
was subjected to sexual assault, passed around Ottoman officers, but managed
to survive. She protected her two remaining children for eight months until she
heard of the approach of Russian forces in early 1916 and managed to return
to Erzurum, by that time under occupation. It was then that she delivered an
account of her husband’s death to Ida Stapleton at the mission station, who later
included it in her own testimony to the ABCFM concerning the events of the war
years. It is through Stapleton’s second-hand account of his death that we learn
about Alexandre Papazian, the man the missionaries called Baron Alexander
(Mr Alexander). It confirms his links to the Protestant church and the American
mission and further tells us that, in addition to being a photographer, he served
as a teacher at the American school and had remained a ‘faithful helper’ at the
mission’s Sunday school.88 In this light, the photograph of the Zhoghovaran now
becomes more distinct as an image describing Papazian’s own life (see Fig. 6.3).
Standing, inspecting the new belfry, he brought photography into his service
of the Protestant community – and indeed, in photographing his church, his
renewed church, he was paying his own act of homage as well. We might also
realize, meanwhile, how the contact sheet of portraits made by Papazian in
July 1912, far from being simply a visual record of the attendees at an ABCFM
meeting, captures the face of the person who will record the details of his death
170 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
(see Fig. 6.4). It becomes a record of his own disappearance, his absence from the
images all the more meaningful.
Thanks to the testimony of Ida Stapleton, we are left with some small detail
about Alexandre Papazian’s life, and were it not for the caravan turning off the road
fifteen miles from Erzurum, we might not have even that. Thousands of people
in the second convoy from Erzurum, and in the convoys that followed along the
same stretch of road in ensuing weeks, were channelled towards Kemah. In a
topography of genocide in which the very features of the landscape were used as
instruments of killing, the Kemah gorge was perhaps the most infamous site. The
Armenians who were led there found themselves ‘caught in a trap from which
there was no escape’.89 More than a site of mass death, it was a place of complete
disappearance, thousands of lives – and histories – being swallowed without trace
by the Euphrates. It was at Kemah and ravines like it, and then later in the Syrian
Desert, where the vanishing act of genocide was performed, and it is to those
sites that we can trace the ‘non-event’ and the ‘non-document’ of the Armenian
Genocide.90
Harput 1915
Arriving on the plain of Harput, the tattered remnants of the first Erzurum
convoy – a group of around thirty survivors – entered the town of Hussenig. It
was only upon seeing them that the townspeople fully understood the fate that
awaited them, for at that time deportations from Harput Kaghak and Mezre were
just beginning.91
It was the fact that Harput formed a transit zone for deportees from elsewhere
in the empire that led Leslie Davis, the American consul in Mezre, to describe it
as ‘the slaughterhouse province’.92 The grim appellation also serves to characterize
the particular aspect that the genocide took in Harput, for events there, even by the
standards of an horrifically violent process, possessed their own distinct brutality.
Starting in April, official searches had been conducted of the churches and schools of
Mezre, Harput Kaghak and Hussenig, followed by private homes.93 Mass arrests took
place, first of political activists and then of intellectuals and community leaders, many
teachers included, Tlgadintsi and the staff of Euphrates College amongst them.94
Askanaz Soursourian was detained ‘along with the other most prominent men’ of
Hussenig in May;95 there are suggestions that Haroutiun was among this group also.96
The men were tortured at a house in Hussenig before being sent to Mezre, most
likely to the Tirmizi Konak (‘Red Mansion’) at the western side of the city, furthest
from Hussenig, which had been converted into a prison where, at its height, 3,500
arrestees from Mezre, Harput Kaghak and Hussenig were confined.97 The place was
a ‘hell’ of nightly punishment and murder;98 Askanaz Soursourian was ‘tortured
[…] mercilessly’ there.99 Prisoners, told that their families and the wider community
would suffer if they did not produce the weapons they supposedly had hidden away,
resorted to purchasing guns from local Turks in efforts to appease the authorities.100
As had happened elsewhere, these arms were put on display as exhibitions of the
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 171
of these years taking place on American soil due to natural causes, the Koobatians
had apparently not suffered to the degree of other families.
It is during these years above all, amidst mass upheaval and convulsion, that
it becomes clear how the unsettled nature of photographs is inherently related
to the instability of the world around them. This is most readily apparent when
the photograph becomes unsettled in form, as with the hybrid objects addressed
by Geoffrey Batchen, photographs that have been added to and altered in order
to create objects more befitting to processes of memorialization.114 This is
important to the history we are dealing with here, and yet even before we can
address such practices a more immediate hybridity must be considered, one
that engulfed photographs as surely as those they represented were engulfed
by violence. It is absolutely clear that with the genocide, photographs became
memorial objects with the power to evoke the ‘uncanny sense of the enigma of
disappearance’.115 Yet for a long time, their sense of disappearance did not relate
to death, the form of ‘disappearance’ that most commonly haunts photography,
death in the form of ceasing to be, the bodily finality of death that can be attested
to and certified. It was, rather, an utter lack of information and documentation
with which most relatives had to contend during this era, the unknowns that
were born of Kemah and its partner sites, of the genocidal abyss that had been
opened up across the Ottoman Empire. The process that occurred during these
years was experienced as one of mass disappearance. There could be, for a great
174 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
many families at least, simply no certainty concerning the fates of their loved
ones. What, for example, might we say about the Vaznaian family portrait at
this stage (see Fig. 4.1)? What did that photograph mean to Mgerditch in the
USA while he actively searched, as so many Armenians did, for a trace of his
loved ones? The advert he placed in the Armenian newspaper Hairenik in 1919,
seeking information on his missing family, states that they were last seen two
years previously in Rakka in the Syrian Desert. As long as people like Mgerditch
Vaznaian held onto the possibility that loved ones might still be alive, then the
photograph could never be any sort of a static object but instead surely subject
to the hopes and fears that predominated at any given moment of viewing. Thus
photographs assume another form of hybridity, a heightened instability in which
they oscillate between states. The two lives of photographs, their two paths of
possibility, find expression in Varujan Vosganian’s The Book of Whispers:
For the Armenians of those days photographs were like a last will and testament
or like a life insurance policy. If the persons came back from the convoys of
deportees, the orphanages, the voyages in the holds of ships, the photograph was
once more put away for safekeeping, and the person resumed his place among
the living. If he did not return, then the photograph brought the deceased back
to the midst of his family when they opened the old, handsomely carved boxes
on feast days.116
Of course, the delineations were not always so clear. The expansion of the picture
plane to incorporate numerous figures inevitably meant that it could splinter in
separate directions in reflection of the divergent fates of family members. The two
Vaznaian daughters, Maritza and Victoria, were traced to Aleppo; the rest of the
family had perished.117
For an insight as to how photographs were experienced by those in the very midst
of cataclysm, we might return to almost where we began, to Trebizond via the
memoirs of Leon Surmelian. In fact, it is a literal moment of return for Surmelian,
his account detailing how, having experienced deportation and life as a fugitive in
the inland area, he was finally able to go back to his hometown in 1916 once it had
fallen under Russian occupation. He finds the place much changed, the house that
he had grown up in, the house of the fine upstairs room where the portrait of his
grandfather had hung, now plundered and empty. Seemingly the only vestiges –
found in a hoard of looted possessions stored in the nearby Armenian church – are
three photographs, one a family photograph that the writer meets with disbelief.118
‘Was that little boy in the starched white turned-down collar and flowing cravat,
holding a hoop, really myself?’ he asks, ‘I could hardly believe it as I gazed upon
my likeness at the age of seven, many thousands of years ago.’119
This is, in a sense, a common experience, one felt by all when looking at
photographs of themselves as youngsters, an unease stemming from the disjuncture
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 175
between subject and viewer, one and the same person and yet separate beings (‘we
are faced with the evidence of the being we most certainly once were, but can
never recall’, writes Brian Dillon).120 Yet the photograph here is but a few years old,
and the sense of vertigo in Surmelian is vastly accentuated by, if not completely
the product of, the traumatic gulf that his recent experiences have opened up in
his life, a great disjuncture between past and present that now makes it possible
for him to look upon a recent family photograph as if it belongs to a different
age, to another person’s life. He appears to experience it for the very first time,
through the eyes of a stranger. It returns to him not as a familiar friend but as
an object of curiosity and of revelation. Surmelian’s is a dual account of memory
and forgetting, the forms presented by the photograph corresponding inversely to
memory voids within himself, what is imprinted upon the image being no longer
imprinted upon him, or at least, he feels, no longer reliably imprinted. From this
shock encounter with a seemingly unknown and distant past there slowly emerges
recognition and a form of comfort and evidence. The family portrait proves an
important link to a past life, one that the young boy requires in order to verify what
he can no longer verify himself:
I wept bitterly over these photographs […] At last I had found something linking
me with my dream-like past. At last I had definite proof in my hands, to convince
myself that I had not been always alone, not always an orphan, that I was not just
imagining I, too, once had a mother and family, which I had begun to doubt.121
An armistice was signed between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire at Mudros
in October 1918, carrying strict provision for the occupation of the areas of the
176 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
empire of specific geopolitical and economic interest to the Allies but leaving the
eastern provinces in the hands of the Ottoman authorities until matters could be
settled at a peace conference. Armenian survivors started to return to their homes
or to emerge from hiding, chiefly in protected areas such as Cilicia, now under
French occupation, but also, in smaller numbers and at far greater risk, in parts
of the Ottoman East.123 As it always had done, geography played a huge part in
dictating the conditions in which Armenians lived, as we find in correspondence
between the Chitjian brothers and other members of their family, dispersed at this
time across numerous locales, including Harput, Zonguldak (on the Black Sea),
Constantinople and Chicago.124 Their letters continually return to the subject of
photographs, particularly those of Hampartzoum, the eldest of the four brothers,
last seen by us admiring a glimpse of ‘the light from the stars and moon’ in the
electric bulb exhibited in Mezre, who had spent the war years fugitively in the
Harput region.125 The requests for photographs that he addresses to his family
shows the medium still held up to be a point of contact between separated family
members, with all the functions established in previous bantoukhd correspondence.
Yet in these new circumstances, the correspondence takes on an even more vital
aspect, as if Hampartzoum has a sense of his fate being linked to the establishment
and sustenance of a thread of visual contact with his family. He frequently exhibits
signs of despondency and desperation, his requests for photographs seemingly as
frequent as his laments over their failure to arrive, a failure that appears to him as a
sign of his abandonment. Finally receiving a portrait from Chicago of his brothers
Bedros and Mihran, he replies with an ecstatic description of the moment: ‘upon
opening your letter, I pulled out the important object – behold, the light-filled
photograph, upon which I stared in stunned amazement […] It took several
glances for me to realize who [the subjects] were. The reason for this is that nobody
would have thought that we would ever have had this fortune to see this day.’126
Hampartzoum thrives on such visual contact, photographs cherished objects
that soothe his longings and seem to hold the promise of future rescue and
family reunion. Yet they also tap into his feelings of isolation and abandonment,
their innate muteness seeming to signal his brothers’ neglect of him: ‘Taking
your photographs in front of us, we weep a little and we laugh a little. But you
are not saying anything […] will that day ever come when you will reply to our
words?’127 In the difficult, fluctuating conditions of Harput, as his hopes for being
rescued wax and wane, his responses to photographs change accordingly, rapidly
shifting registers, joy and gratitude turning to despair and aggression. When
they do ‘speak’, seemingly innocuous studio portraits sometimes take on ugly
complexions and appear to mock him, inducing a melancholia. They aggravate
his sense, on display elsewhere in his letters, of the great contrast between his own
life and those of his brothers, so much so that he begins to suspect – and accuse
– his brothers of boasting of their good fortune through their photographs and
sneering at his own impoverished condition.128 The impression we are left with is
one of photography as an intensifier of difference. If we are to accept photography
as balm, as a bridger of distance, we might also have to accept another power, its
ability to heighten divisions and to make distance seem even greater.
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 177
do not properly summon up the world from which they hailed. They do not – and
cannot – provide all that is asked of them. That being the case, memorialization
involves – demands even – that there be some intervention into the image, a
physical rewriting. There is resonance here with the artistic employment in
later years of fictional and semi-fictional modes in response to genocide and its
denial, and Marie-Aude Baronian’s assertion that ‘fiction is not the opposite of
historical reality but the only possible imaginable answer – the only space that
(re)connects the Event and its re-presentation’.135 Memorial image-making in
the post-genocide period suggests that such forms of ‘fiction’ were long in use to
contend with the enormous losses suffered and to straddle the gulf between new
lives and the world once known. In this way, while they are forms that fit with
the wider patterns identified by Batchen, we should not lose sight of the essential
principle that photography in Armenian communities is ‘a product of its own
history’. Armenians had to contend with their own specific loss, the loss not only
of loved ones but also of homeland; they had to contend too with the violence of
those losses, and indeed the denial of that violence. With this in mind, we might
associate a certain shift seen among some makers and users of photographs away
from the repetitive meaning-making processes of the studio as a sign that, with
the widespread destruction of Armenian communities, the communal system
that studio portraiture represented and enacted no longer functioned in the same
manner. A collective approach continued, but it was tempered and interrupted
by distinctive acts of image-making related to isolated processes of memory
and mourning, and individuals seem to search for their own pictorial language,
adequate to their particular needs and circumstances.
Photographers in the new diaspora adapt themselves to these demands,
producing memorial objects in a variety of forms. Many seek simply to reproduce
existing, surviving photographs, the products of Ottoman Armenian provincial
studios. The photograph (see Fig. 0.1) with which we began, for example, was
most likely originally made in Harput by the elder Soursourians, yet in the form
in which it reaches us it carries the mark of the Zaza Photo Studio in Haverhill,
Massachusetts, a seemingly minor detail that in fact carries great weight,
proposing a sense of exile and dislocation. Another mark also becomes telling,
for with it we can read part of the process of this later image-maker, as we did
with the photographers of the original scene. At the centre of the photograph’s
upper edge, a slight recess into the image presents evidence of a print having been
pinned to the studio wall for rephotographing. To its left is a shadow, seemingly
cast by whatever has been used to keep the photograph in place, the double
loop of scissors even suggested. It is the faintest of traces but it is pregnant with
meaning. It is, in essence, the shadow of the destruction that has necessitated such
a rephotographing, the shadow of the void into which glass plates disappeared and
the shadow of the photograph’s distance from its origins.
The accepted logic, following Walter Benjamin, is that since any number of
prints can be made from a photographic negative ‘to ask for the “authentic” print
makes no sense’.136 However, in the post-genocide world most photographs lacked
their negative counterparts, necessitating the creation of new ones through acts
of rephotographing. We are thus dealing with not purely images of exile but
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 179
images in exile. Separated from their original technological source (the glass
plate) as much as from their organic source (the people and places that are their
referents), they might be thought of as pictures in exile from themselves, or a
part of themselves. Prints like this, taken from newly created copy negatives,
might indeed be themselves described as copies, second generation incarnations
of earlier iterations, ‘inauthentic’ even. Yet they were prized specifically for the
authenticity they were felt to offer. The first photographers’ largely successful
efforts to forge a still image of the family acted, unbeknownst to them, as a pre-
emptive embalming process, offering the future an ‘authentic’ lifelike presence of
those who would be absent.137
Not all the original sitters, of course, have been offered a presence in the new
photograph. At some point there has been a further intervention, either by the
later photographer or another hand entirely, the latter being the more likely as the
marks lack the neatness and order that tends to be the hallmark of the professional
photographer. Indeed, these marks do not simply lack polish but have a certain
rawness that verges on the frenzy as they endeavour to remove someone from the
left of the frame. Whereas Surmelian’s family photograph did not contain enough
for him, this photograph appears to have contained too much. It suggests the
portrait as a powerful vestige of the past, a past that someone, at least in part, did
not want to be reminded of. Indeed, there is perhaps nothing that demonstrates
the power of photographs so much as efforts to destroy them.
Elsewhere, images are built up, but building too can produce edited, simplified
versions of the past, as found in the work of K.S. Melikian, a Kharpertsi and
one-time furniture maker in Mezre.138 Like the photographer at the Zaza Photo
Studio, Melikian often reprinted scenes from Harput (the 1907 Koobatian portrait
we’ve been looking at is, in fact, one of his copy prints), while also employing
photographs as constituent parts in more complex practices, such as his depiction
of Azniv and Sarkis Deranian for which he inserts drawn figurative elements into a
landscape of Harput, one with its origins in a photograph already seen (Figure 6.7;
see also Fig. 4.2).139 The Golden Plain has been rid of its orphans and, ironically,
the only ‘original’ figures still (partially) on view are not the intended subjects of
the orphans but two men who appear to have wandered into the scene that day
(one either side of the frame, the figure on the left more discernible). The only
orphan left on display, we might say, is the photograph itself, for it is now a long
way removed from its original orbit.
The Deranians had migrated to Worcester in the 1890s, but during the First
World War Sarkis returned to the Near East where he was killed fighting with
the French Légion d’Orient (the volunteer brigade established in 1916 as a
means for Armenians outside Ottoman lands to contribute to the defeat of the
genocidal Ottoman state).140 The portrait that Azniv subsequently commissioned
from Melikian is a homecoming, bringing, with refence once again to Varujan
Vosganian, ‘the deceased back to the midst of his family’. It provides both a ‘living’
image of Sarkis and a site of mourning where none previously existed (according
180 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Figure 6.7 K.S. Melikian. Azniv and Sarkis Deranian, no date. Marderos Deranian
Collection, NAASR (National Association for Armenian Studies and Research),
Belmont, MA.
to Marderos Deranian’s telling of the story, Sarkis was left ‘without a grave on
earth’), thus acting like the post-mortem photographs that had previously allowed
migrants to participate in funeral rites despite their physical distance from the
deceased and from the community.141 More than returning the husband to his
wife, the image also returns the couple to the moment of their first meeting, a
moment in time and, importantly, also in space, for this is a memory deeply
embedded in a specific site. The place of the meeting is the Set Khassem Spring
in Hussenig; the image thus restores them to their hometown and in the process
restores that hometown itself. Hussenig can be glimpsed intact in the distance,
lying on the plain below Harput Kaghak as it always did. Directly in the centre
of the frame, beyond Azniv, can be seen Sourp Varvar. Another photograph in
Melikian’s archive shows the great church as it actually was, reduced to the meagre
remnants of a ruined wall and arch. Sourp Varvar remains a place of pilgrimage,
but one that might only be visited through photographs; the picture of Sarkis and
Azniv does for the church and the whole town of Hussenig what it does for Sarkis,
it brings them back so that they might ‘live on’ while also providing a site where
their demise might be mourned. This memory of the plain, with Sourp Varvar and
its painted dome in the distance, bring to mind the words of Vahan Totovents as
he ends a reminiscence of his family life on ‘the old Roman road’: ‘The blue canopy
of heaven has collapsed on all that; it has collapsed like the turquoise dome of an
ancient church during an earthquake.’142
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 181
In contrast to the later creative use of the vernacular described by Baronian, the
processes here are not about the public assertion of loss; they do relate, however, to
‘the very nature of the genocidal event as a sort of “private”, even secret, event’.143 The
silence of these years was the silence not only of perpetrators but of victims also. A
generation of survivors kept their experiences and their memories to themselves.
This contributed to the scenario Baronian sketches of a lack of circulating images,
for photographs, along with other vestiges of past lives and loss, were largely not
for public contemplation, and were perhaps not even for close family.
Victor Gardon begins Le vert soleil de la vie (1959) with the motif of private,
hidden images waiting to break out into the open: ‘how many times over the years
have I wished for the friendship of a stranger so that I might project in front of him
a film which nobody had seen, a film which was my life’.144 Beneath the Gardon
name was Vahram Gakavian (his choice of nom de plume, being in part a homage
to Victor Hugo, showing the Frenchman’s continued influence on the Gakavian
family), and the novel, the first in a trilogy to tell the story of the author’s early
life in Van and subsequent exile in the Caucasus, constitutes a relatively early
public account of what had befallen the Armenians earlier in the century, and
furthermore an example of the fictional mode being deployed for the purpose.145
Meanwhile, his archive reveals some of his own private memorial image practice
(Figure 6.8). Another print of Papazian’s portrait of the Gakavian family resides
there, almost identical to the
one previously addressed (see
Fig. 5.6) but with a large
section of photographic paper
missing, one corresponding
exactly with the position of his
mother Aghavni, thus excising
her entirely. It is one of those
rare photographs that, like
the photograph from the Zaza
studio, openly displays its
absences, alerting us to the fact
that something is missing from
its frame. The motives behind
the excision, however, most
likely lie in contrast to those at
work in the other photograph;
although not known for sure,
it is thought that the section
containing Gardon’s mother
might have been removed so
that it could form the basis of
its own exclusive portrait.146
The rest of the family portrait Figure 6.8 M.G. Papazian. The Gakavian Family,
now stands as a surviving Van, 2 April 1906 (altered version). Christine
remnant, a vestige of a wider Gardon collection.
182 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
process. It is an excision that seems to declare the rest of the image superfluous
(we might think of it as excess to requirements, rather than actively unwanted,
as with the Zaza photograph), and in practical terms it leaves what remains of
the print without presentational purpose. And yet something has happened in the
process, the remnant seems to have become a memorial object itself. The proof
of this seems to lie before us, in the print’s very existence and survival. It is as if
even in this bowdlerized state the photograph retained a power and a hold over
Victor Gardon – owing, we might presume, to the likenesses that it still bears,
including that of his father Haroutiun who had died from typhus in Vladikavkaz
(North Ossetia, Russia), in 1919, and was buried in the cemetery of the Armenian
church there, a long way from the family’s new home in France.147 To destroy his
image would have been unthinkable, even with that image seemingly unusable.
The fragment of the family photograph thus becomes an inadvertent memorial;
indeed, it seems to become so only in the process of becoming fragmented, of
being threatened with destruction, as if the process of removal reactivates the rest
of the picture. And because it continues to hold meaning, it continues to exist, if
only perhaps in a box or a drawer; it might not necessarily be looked at but it is
enough that, somewhere out of sight, it lives on.
The isolation of the section containing Aghavni Gakavian is an instance of
an individual portrait being constructed from a group image, a reversion to a
semblance of an earlier form of photography, to older carte de visite conventions.
To give a subject their own space, alone and secluded, within the frame seems still
to be the ultimate accolade that photography can bestow. It is not quite, of course,
the ‘default setting’, for it becomes noticeable how often memorials hinge not on
men but instead on women, mothers in particular. Amongst these we can count
the painterly renderings of the Adoian photograph, the young boy Vostanig, now
the grown man and painter Gorky, laboriously refashioning and reinventing the
image of him and his mother, a woman with whom, after the July 1915 march
from Van, he had shared a hand-to-mouth existence in Yerevan, a city of tens of
thousands of refugees where famine and disease were rife and where, in 1919,
Shushan had died of starvation.
The comparison, however, risks reducing individual loss to a pattern. As
Barthes writes of his mourning for his own mother: ‘what I have lost is not a
Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the
indispensable, but the irreplaceable.’148 It is a statement that might, in fact, help
to explain the wider interventions at work in memorial photography; they strive
for the particular, constituting efforts to contend with this quality. The repetitions
of studio photography that served Armenian communities well for so long were
not always up to the challenge; what suited communication between the living
was often inadequate in this new world of the dead. Its repetitions might have
seemed singularly incapable of communicating the uniqueness of lives lost;
they might have even seemed as though they actively generalized their subjects.
Recreations endeavoured to remove photographs from this realm of the general,
seemingly desirous of returning not to the individual portrait of the carte de visite
but something older still, to photographic portraiture’s earliest incarnations that
seemed imbued with the ‘aura’ of unique existence.149
6. Looking Forward, Looking Back 183
Bringing Gorky into this discussion about memorial photography, its excisions
and additions, returns us to Avedaghayan’s photograph (see Fig. 2.2 on page 37
and details below). Just as comparative examinations have shown how closely
numerous aspects of the Adoian portrait can be mapped onto Avedaghayan’s other
photographs, so too do they show us the way in which it deviates from the template.
Its distinct, peculiar aspects have already been remarked upon: its murkiness, lack
of detail and closeness of crop. Looking back at the photograph now, it seems
as though a process of recreation had already been embarked upon within its
frame, even before the commencement of Gorky’s paintings. The details of the
backdrop, those very similarities and overlaps that have indicated Avedaghayan
as the photographer, do not, in fact, quite match. The backdrop, as has been seen,
presents a series of arches, each with their own interior details, the smaller spaces
house buttresses while the largest presents a view of the twin-peaked mountain.
Yet none of that is visible in the Adoian portrait, neither to the left of Vostanig nor
to the right of Shushan, spaces that are largely blank.
With scrutiny, other forms and subtle details begin to emerge. A line of whiteish
hue hugs Vostanig’s side, mimicking his contours, following his form down along
the arm, inwards at the elbow and then down again along the lower portion of the
coat. A corresponding dark line can be discerned along the inside edge of the coat,
lending the garment a bold accentuated outline. These are signs of an intervention
into the picture frame, the movement of a brush across its surface. Something not
entirely dissimilar has been seen in the photograph from the Zaza Photo Studio,
yet in contrast to the rawness in evidence there, the process of mark-making here
is careful and deliberate. Indeed, it is a form of mark-making that endeavours to
remove its own traces, that aspires towards invisibility.
That a paintbrush has traced the line of his body reveals the reason for the
discrepancy with the backdrop; the architectural features and the landscape of
the design have been blocked out. We also see the way in which the frame of the
hanging backdrop disappears, with the line of its bottom edge coming to an abrupt
halt near each edge of the photographic frame, just to the left of Vostanig’s thigh
on one side and the right of Shushan’s knee on the other. The far sections of the
woven mat meet a similar fate – their progress halted at comparable points by
some invisible force. Indeed, while Vostanig casts a shadow across the middle of
the mat, Shushan’s on the right is not to be found. Each wing of the photograph
contains a ghostly void, dark on Vostanig’s side, light on Shushan’s.
Perhaps overfamiliarity with the photograph has bred blindness, or else the
insistent focus on the two figures, and particularly their expressions, has prompted
the neglect of other parts of the picture, but there seems little doubt, now that we
look closely at ‘peripheral’ forms and details, that something is missing, something
has been removed. Exactly what is another matter, but we could hazard an informed
supposition. The spectral spaces at the edge of the frame echo, to a certain extent,
the figures in the centre, carrying the suggestion that they once contained human
forms. Is it possible that these spaces relate to the absence of certain sitters, that the
erasure – now evident erasure – accounts for what we know to have been missing
all along? The more the photograph is scrutinized, the more it is examined in the
light of Avedaghayan’s other portraits, then the more it becomes apparent that it
184 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
These different lives ought to be considered, for the portrait would have
appeared differently to each of them. And that portrait too, it seems, had different
lives, with a number of physical manifestations. If the above findings are correct,
then at least one other version of the photograph exists or has existed in the past,
a version of the photograph in which Satenig and Vartoosh appear. This might
suggest to some a diminishment, conjuring notions of an ‘original’ and a ‘copy’
separated on a spectrum of ‘authenticity’. On the other hand, perhaps the Adoian
portrait becomes, in light of these observations, even more the quintessential
photographic image of the Armenian experience. With its different forms it
straddles, and reveals in the process, the wider range upon which Armenian-made
photographs exist, their different roles, their different lives, their different fates. It
is a memento from lives being lived and it is a vestige of a vanished world. It is the
mechanical product of the studio and it is the psychological product of destruction
and trauma. It is what we can look upon and what we can only imagine. It is what
has survived and it is what has been lost. Of course, we cannot truly describe the
‘other’ photograph as lost, for it is possible that it awaits rediscovery somewhere. It
is a reminder that nothing is fixed when it comes to photographs. We cannot say
‘this is lost’, for what is lost may yet return, just as we cannot say ‘this has survived’,
for what has survived might be shown to be but a fragment.
S A I L I N G A WAY F R OM A C O N C LU SIO N
Everything began to blur, everything was growing further away. A ship went
past them, hooting as it did so. Everybody knew this ship, ‘Kerlangedi’, which
belonged to ‘Seyre Sefayin’, with its characteristic hoot. The Jewish youths started
shouting in Turkish ‘May you get buried, Istanbul, get buried!’ They were beyond
reach now. A donkey, standing on the Sarai Bourni quayside, turned its head and
looked at them lengthily: it was the Turkish district saying its farewell. And there
was the ‘Armenian Island’: he had never noticed that the other side of it was so
bare and red, like a monkey’s bottom. He recalled the young girl he had loved
there and who had played so many tricks on him. He was at the ship’s stern: there
was the French flag between him and Istanbul now: later, when they lowered
this tricolour, Istanbul had vanished in the way that a fictitious coin disappears
under the conjuror’s handkerchief.
A life ended here.1
Shahan Shanour’s 1929 novel Retreat Without Song begins with the departure of an
Armenian from the post-war capital, now officially Istanbul. It is a departure that
stands in strong contrast to the oft-described romantic arrival of the Westerner in
nineteenth-century Constantinople; the city does not appear as if from a dream
but disappears like a cheap trick.
The scene marks the final exit of an Armenian photographer. With the
Armenian Genocide, photography was eviscerated in the Armenian homelands.
Many photographers, as we’ve seen, were representatives of their communities
even at the very end, dying along with scores of others, dying along with their cities
and their towns. A photographic practice survived, only elsewhere. It becomes
interesting to note the way in which Ottoman Armenian photography returned
to those very regions from which it sprang, those places Dickinson Jenkins Miller
has identified as its places of origin. Indeed, the process of re-establishment was
in motion even while the genocide was still in full flow. The ability to adapt to
new places and find new sources of income could be the difference between life
and death, and photography meant, for some, survival. Arriving in the Syrian city
188 Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World
Chapter 1
at that point returns to the theme of panoramic photography. Esra Akcan, ‘Off the
Frame’, 97.
67 Ahmet Ersoy, ‘A Sartorial Tribute to Late Tanzimat Ottomanism: The Elbise-i
‘Osmaniyye Album’, Muqarnas 20, no.1 (2003), 187–207.
68 Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan,
1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14; Eugene L. Rogan,
‘Aşiret Mektebi: Abdülhamid II’s School for Tribes (1892–1907)’, International Journal
of Middle East Studies 28, no.1 (1996), 83–107.
69 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other, 144.
70 For ‘Indian school’ photography, see Jacqueline Fear-Segal, ‘Facing the Binary:
Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens’, in Before-and-After Photography:
Histories and Contexts, ed. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2017), 153–173.
71 Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”: The Late Ottoman
Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45,
no.2 (2003), 312–313.
72 Holly Edwards, ‘A Million and One Nights: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930,’ in
Holly Edwards, Noble Dreams Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870–1930
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11–57.
73 Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review, no.108 (2002),
768–96, at 768.
74 We might connect this with the spatial reorganization of Egypt described by Timothy
Mitchell. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1988), 65–67.
75 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 20–26.
76 Said’s exact reference is to ‘Istanbul’s rule over the Arab world’, a signal perhaps that
the postcolonial turn in Ottoman scholarship would focus largely on the imperial
centre’s relationship to its Arab periphery. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, xxv.
77 Selim Deringil, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery”’.
78 Wendy M.K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the
Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley, CA & London:
University of California Press, 2003), 143.
79 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the
Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), 19.
80 Ussama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, 768.
81 Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘Ottoman Photography of the Late Nineteenth Century: An
“Innocent” Modernism?’, History of Photography 33, no.1 (2009), 80–93, at 85.
82 Ali Behdad, Camera Orientalis, 19
83 Wendy M.K. Shaw, ‘The Ottoman in Ottoman Photography’, 181.
84 Ahmet Ersoy, ‘The Sultan and His Tribe: Documenting Ottoman Roots in The
Abdülhamid II Photographic Albums’, in Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition
to the Land of Tribal Roots, ed. Özge Ertem and Bahattin Öztuncay (Istanbul:
ANAMED, 2018), 31–63, at 54.
85 The same bias traceable in wider Ottoman history – the ‘étatist inclinations’ of
scholarship that in privileging the documents of the state comes to reproduce its
viewpoint – is found at work in the history of photography. Richard E. Antaramian,
Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire: Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the
Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 10.
86 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 220–221.
Notes 195
Chapter 2
1 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 29–33; Davide Rodogno, Against
Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton,
NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012), 18–35.
2 H.J. Sarkiss, ‘The Armenian Renaissance, 1500–1863’, Journal of Modern History 9
(1937), 433–448; Robert Melson, ‘A Theoretical Inquiry into the Armenian Massacres
of 1894–1896’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24, no.3 (1982), 481–509.
3 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’: A History of the
Armenian Genocide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 78–79.
4 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 38–44.
5 Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian and Ali Sipahi, ‘Ottoman Historiography’s
Black Hole’, in The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century: Societies, Identities,
Politics, ed. Yaşar Tolga Cora, Dzovinar Derderian and Ali Sipahi (London & New
York, NY: I.B.Tauris, 2016), 1–15.
Notes 197
Mother, c.1926–c.1942 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). See Michael Taylor
(ed.), Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art,
2009), pl.32–33. See also pl.26–31 for the studies.
37 Peter Balakian, Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and
Culture (Chicago, IL & London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 162–163 (my
italics).
38 Matthew Spender, From a High Place: A Life of Arshile Gorky (New York, NY: Alfred A
Knopf, 1999), 182. Kim Servart Theriault extends this, writing, ‘Non-Armenians who
engage with his works are also generally able to perceive its unresolved trauma.’ Kim
Servart Theriault, ‘Exile, Trauma, and Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother’, 53.
39 It seems pertinent that Gaïdz Minassian’s book The Armenian Experience takes one
of Gorky’s canvasses as its cover image. Gaïdz Minassian, The Armenian experience:
From Ancient Times to Independence (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2020).
40 Peter Balakian, Vise and Shadow, 163 (my italics).
41 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 2000), 96.
42 Kim S. Theriault, Rethinking Arshile Gorky (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2009).
43 See Vartan Matiossian, The Politics of Naming the Armenian Genocide: Language,
History and ‘Medz Yeghern’ (London: I.B.Tauris, 2021).
44 Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2008).
45 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The Desert but Nowhere Else’, xii-xiii; This is
related to what Robert Melson has termed the provocation thesis. Robert Melson,
Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust
(Chicago, IL & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
46 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 183–234.
47 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Writing Genocide: The Fate of the Ottoman Armenians’, in A
Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed.
Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimark (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 15–41.
48 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘Reframing Ottoman Art Histories’, 12.
49 See for example Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and
Indict”: Pictorial Documents on the Persecution and Extermination of Armenians
from 1877 to 1922’, The Armenian Review 45, nos 1–2 (1992), 53–184; Abraham D.
Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Achieving Ever-greater Precision in Attestation
and Attribution of Genocide Photographs,’ in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks,
Studies on the State Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia
Minor, 1912‒1922 and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory, ed. by Tessa Hofmann,
Matthias Bjornlund and Vasileios Meichanetsidis (New York, NY & Athens: Aristide
D. Caratzas, 2011), 389–434; Benedetta Guerzoni, Cancellare un popolo: Immagini e
documenti del genocidio armeno (Milan: Mimesis editore, 2013).
50 See for example Tessa Hofmann, Armin Wegner (Yerevan: National Academy of
Sciences of the Republic of Armenia/Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum,
1996); Guerine e Associati, Armin T. Wegner e gli Armeni in Anatolia: Immagini
e testimonianze / Armin T. Wegner and the Armenians in Anatolia: Images and
Testimonies (Guerine e Associati, Milan, 1996); Martin Tamcke, ‘Armin T. Wegners
“Die Austriebung des armenischen Volkes in die Wüste” – Einführung zum
unveröffentlichten Vortragstyposkript vom 19. März 1919 in der Urania zu Berlin’,
in Orientalische Christen zwischen Repression und Migration: Beiträge zur jüngeren
200 Notes
Geschichte und Gegenwartslage, ed. Martin Tamcke (Hamburg: Lit, 2001), 65–135;
Martin Tamcke, ‘Die Kamera als Zeuge: Armin T. Wegners Fotografien vom
Völkermord 1915/16 in Armenien’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.) Das Jahrhundert der Bilder,
1900 bis 1949 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 172–179.
51 Allan Sekula, Photography Against the Grain (Halifax, Nova Scotia: The Press of the
Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1984), 45.
52 Armin T. Wegner, Die Austreibung des armenischen Volkes in die Wüste: Ein
Lichtbildvortrag (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 88.
53 Tigran Sarukhanyan, ‘Armin T. Wegner’s WWI Media Testimonies and the Armenian
Genocide’, in Orientalische Christen und Europa: Kulturbegegnung zwischen
Interferenz, Partizipation und Antizipation, ed. Martin Tamcke (Harrassowitz Verlag,
Wiesbaden, 2012), 267–279.
54 Rebecca Jinks writes of the Western witnesses to the Armenian Genocide, notably
Wegner and Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the
First World War, that ‘are celebrated by the Armenian community, largely because
of the value of their assumed impartiality in rebutting Turkish denial’. Rebecca Jinks,
‘Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?’ (PhD diss., Royal Holloway,
University of London, 2013), 106.
55 Armin T. Wegner, Der Weg Ohne Heimkehr (Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1919),
169–170. While consulting the orignal text I rely upon the translation that appears in
Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 54. The
passage also appears in Tessa Hofmann, Armin Wegner; Peter Balakian, ‘Photography,
Visual Culture, and the Armenian Genocide’, in Humanitarian Photography: A
History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015); Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide: Who Now
Remembers the Armenians? (London: Biteback, 2015).
56 Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian state: ‘Only after successful identification
(or verification) can a historical photograph be considered a document’. Tessa
Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 56.
57 On the legal front, it is particularly interesting to note Geoffrey Robertson’s use of
Wegner’s words in his presentation of the ‘photographic evidence’ of the Armenian
Genocide. Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, 76–78.
58 Cornelia Brink, ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration
Camps’, History and Memory 12, no.1 (2000), 135–136.
59 Leshu Torchin, ‘Since We Forgot: Remembrance and Recognition of the
Armenian Genocide in Virtual Archives’, in The Image and the Witness: Trauma,
Memory and Visual Culture, ed. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas (London & New
York, NY: Wallflower Press, 2007), 82–97, at 91. For a study of the relationship
between the ‘genocidal imaginary’ and the ‘Holocaust imaginary’, see Rebecca
Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2016).
60 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), 21.
61 Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, ‘“Images that Horrify and Indict”’, 53.
62 Sybil Milton, ‘Armin T. Wegner, Polemicist for Armenian and Jewish Human Rights’,
Journal of Armenian Studies 4, nos 1–2, Special Issue: Genocide and Human Rights:
Lessons from the Armenian Experience (1992), 165–186.
63 See Geoffrey Robertson, An Inconvenient Genocide, 76.
64 Wegner’s embellishments and constructions were not publicly acknowledged and
he presented his show as proof and not, as Alloa suggests we should approach it,
Notes 201
107 Margaret Olin, Touching Photographs (Chicago, IL & London, University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 14
108 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 24.
109 Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, 510.
110 Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol.2, 40.
111 Stephan H. Astourian, ‘Afterword: Shapes, Legitimation, and Legacies of Violence
in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey’, in Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The
Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State, ed. Stephan Astourian
and Raymond Kévorkian (New York, NY & Oxford: Berghahn, 2020), 525–567.
112 According to Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘[f]or the Hamidian regime, indeed for much
of Ottoman history before and after the 1890s, the use of state violence and the
deployment of military force, whether regular or irregular, was part of the governing
regime. Occasionally the normal, everyday violence used to keep order, obtain
revenues, fight crime or rebellion metastasized into much more systematic massacre
and deportations.’ Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘The Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1897:
Disinterring a Buried History’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018),
125–134, at 126.
113 Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’, in The
Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 251–261, at
254–257.
114 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 20.
115 In the Ottoman context, this is best outlined by Mary Roberts as she writes of
portraits of the Ottoman sultan made by the Abdullah Frères, and how, once they
left the studio, they were essentially at large in the world, freed from their originally
intended narratives and open to reconfiguration, consumers now ‘at liberty to
weave all sorts of alternative narratives’ from them. Mary Roberts, ‘The Limits of
Circumscription’, 67.
116 Oliver Wendell Holmes writes of the ‘incidental truths’ with which we might find for
ourselves the ‘true center’ of a photograph. In a painting, ‘you can find nothing which
the artist has not seen before you; but in a perfect photograph there will be as many
beauties lurking, unobserved, as there are flowers that blush unseen in forests and
meadows.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’.
117 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History, 197. In this approach we hear an echo of
Benjamin, for whom photographs registered as the means by which the past achieves
an active presence that might be communed with by us. Perhaps we need only
remember his evocative description of the New Haven fishwife, ‘the woman who was
alive there, who even now is still real’.
Chapter 3
1 Sir Robert Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East: Personal Memories, 1879–1929
(London: Hutchinson & Co. 1933), 112–114.
2 Charles Issawi, ‘The Tabriz-Trabzon Trade, 1830–1900: Rise and Decline of a Route’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no.1 (1970), 18–27.
3 Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-
Century Anatolia’, Middle East Studies 34, no. 4 (1998), 1–32.
4 Sir Robert Graves, Storm Centres of the Near East, 115.
204 Notes
5 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901),
vol.2, 209.
6 Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman
to Atatürk (Santa Barbara, CA & Oxford: Praeger Security International, 2009),
202–203.
7 H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels and Studies, vol.2, 210.
8 Yaşar Tolga Cora, ‘Transforming Erzurum/Karin’, 63.
9 A-Do, Vani, Bitlisi yev Erzrumi Vilayetnere: usumnasirutean mi pordz ayd yerkri
ashkharhagrakan, vichakagrakan, irawakan ew tntesakan drutean (Yerevan: Tparan
Kultura, 1912), 161.
10 Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political
Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society’, Poetics Today 14, no.3 (1993),
507–538.
11 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin): Its Armenian History and Traditions, trans.
Nigol Schahgaldian (USA: The Garin Compatriotic Union of the United States, 1975).
12 Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society (London: Gordon Fraser, 1980), 61.
13 As Edhem Eldem has shown, specific named volumes, ‘too meaningful to be
dismissed as an accidental contribution of the photographer’, are at times deployed to
make explicit statements about sitters’ identities, but such instances are relatively rare.
Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 38.
14 Stephen Sheehi, The Arab Imago, 23.
15 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 16.
16 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 11.
17 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘Two Figures on a Bench, in a Park, Tiflis, 1914’, Jadaliyya, 20
September 2015. Available online: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32483/Two-
Figures-on-a-Bench,-in-a-Park,-Tiflis,-1914#.Vf8X80UjsKk.wordpress (accessed 26
January 2022). Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213.
18 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213.
19 Christopher Clay, ‘Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth-
Century Anatolia’, 3.
20 Owen Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’, Études
arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 97–123, at 100.
21 Amherst College Special Collections, Royal M. Cole, ‘Interior Turkey Reminiscences:
Forty Years in Kourdistan (Armenia)’, manuscript, 1910. Available online: https://
acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:20523 (accessed 20 March 2022).
22 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 200–201.
23 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 200–201.
24 Johann Strauss, ‘Language and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire’, in Imperial
Lineages and Legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean: Recording the Imprint of Roman,
Byzantine and Ottoman Rule, ed. Rhoads Murphey (London: Routledge, 2016),
115–142.
25 Benjamin C. Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, The State, and Education in the Late
Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 71.
26 Barbara J. Merguerian, ‘The American Response to the 1895 Massacre’, Journal of
Armenian Studies 4, nos 1–2, Special Issue: Genocide and Human Rights: Lessons
from the Armenian Experience (1992), 53–83.
27 Abraham Seklemian, ‘Prison Diary of Asbarez Founding Editor Abraham Seklemian’,
Asbarez, 22 April 2017. Available online: https://asbarez.com/prison-diary-of-asbarez-
founding-editor-abraham-seklemian/ (accessed 26 January 2022).
Notes 205
51 Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide, 51–57; For events in Sasun, see Owen
Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’.
52 Edip Gölbaşı, ‘The Official Conceptualization of the anti-Armenian Riots of 1895–
1897’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 33–62.
53 Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities: A Reign of Terror
(Philadelphia, PA: Edgewood Publishing Company, 1896), 412.
54 Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–
1914’, in Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times vol.II, Foreign Dominion
to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, ed. Richard G.
Hovannisian (New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, 2004), 203–238, at 222–223; On the
movement of perpetrators from massacre to massacre, Edwin Munsell Bliss writes:
‘Heroes from the Trebizond massacre, from the pillaging at Baiburt, from Erzingan
and Kemakh, and from other places had come to Erzrum as the most likely place for
another similar game.’ Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, 416.
55 Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, 420.
56 Gia Aivazian, ‘The W.L. Sachtleben Papers on Erzerum in the 1890s’, in Armenian
Karin/Erzerum, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda, 2003), 223–
260; David V. Herlihy, The Lost Cyclist (Boston & New York: Mariner Books, 2011).
57 The Times, 16 November 1895, 6.
58 Ronald Grigor Suny argues that Abdülhamid’s ‘modernizing program contained
within it a conservative restorationist agenda that sought order above all. His
personal paranoia reflected his own and more broadly social anxieties about
unregulated change, the loss of status of Muslims domestically and the empire itself
internationally, and the special position within and outside Ottoman lands of a
people, the Armenians, whose talents he and others recognized and resented.’ Ronald
Grigor Suny, ‘The Hamidian Massacres, 1894–1897: Disinterring a Buried History’,
128.
59 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York, NY: Zone Books,
2008), 18.
60 Christopher Pinney, ‘What’s Photography Got to Do with It?’, 46 (original emphasis).
61 A photograph showing the bodies of two women at the great cemetery was later
published in The Graphic with the caption, apparently supplied by Sachtleben or
based on his account: ‘When the photograph was taken a woman was standing by the
corpses weeping, and as our correspondent passed her, she, seeing that he was English
stopped her tears for a moment and cursed him: “May your house fall on your head!
You English have deceived us”.’ The Graphic, 7 December 1895, 726. Roqueferrier’s
letter, meanwhile, contains an analogous report of a curse being placed by an
Armenian woman on William Chambers, the missionary station chief. Centre des
archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet d’Erzeroum
(1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November 1895.
62 Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet
d’Erzeroum (1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November
1895. My thanks to Yaşar Tolga Cora for bringing this source to my attention. The
existence of prints produced in Erzurum runs counter to Gia Aivazian’s suggestion
that Sachtleben sent the photographs abroad for developing. Gia Aivazian, ‘The W.L.
Sachtleben Papers on Erzerum in the 1890s’, 248.
63 Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166po_E_1_871_113_73-5_Vilayet
d’Erzeroum (1895–96), Fernand Roqueferrier to Paul Cambon, 16 November 1895.
64 The Graphic, 7 December 1895, 725.
Notes 207
65 Julia Thomas, Pictorial Victorians: The Inscription of Values in Word and Image
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004).
66 Gérard Dédéyan, ‘Un aperçu des contacts arméno-languedociens (début XIVe-
début XXe siècle)’, in Exprimer le génocide des Arméniens: Connaissance, arts et
engagement, ed. Patrick Ouvier, Annick Asso and Héléna Demirdjian (Rennes:
Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016) Available online: https://doi.org/10.4000/
books.pur.46051 (accessed 22 November 2021).
67 Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
68 Quoted in David V. Herlihy, The Lost Cyclist, 273.
69 The journal was first published in French as L’Arménie and for a time in English as
Armenia. Despite existing in different versions, the journal was generally referred to
as L’Arménie, and so for clarity I retain this name. Where available, the quotations are
from Armenia, where not, I translate from L’Arménie.
70 Tcheraz’s association with the Berlin conference was prominently signalled on the
front page of each edition of L’Arménie, while Clause 61 was regularly cited both
within its pages and in the illustrated lectures.
71 L’Arménie, 15 November 1889, 1.
72 Margaret Lavinia Anderson, ‘A Responsibility to Protest? The Public, the Powers and
the Armenians in the Era of Abdülhamit II’.
73 Armenia, 1 August 1895, 1. For Dillon’s reporting from the Ottoman Empire see E.J.
Dillon, ‘The Condition of Armenia’ The Contemporary Review 68 (1895), 153–189;
and Owen Miller, ‘Rethinking the Violence in the Sasun Mountains (1893–1894)’.
74 Viscount R. Des Coursons, The Armenian Rebellion: Its Origin and Its Object (London:
Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1896), 26; In response, Tcheraz stated that ‘the dead persons
had been photographed, after the massacre, in the Armenian cemetery of Erzeroum,
by the art correspondent of the Graphic’. Armenia, 1 July 1896, 2.
75 Susan Sontag’s writes: ‘What determines the possibility of being affected morally by
photographs is the existence of a relevant political consciousness.’ Susan Sontag, On
Photography, 19.
76 Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago, IL & London: University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 73–81.
77 Edhem Eldem notes that the ‘albums were basically forgotten from their entry into
these libraries until their rediscovery in the 1980s’. Edhem Eldem, ‘The Search for an
Ottoman Vernacular Photography’, 33.
78 Oded Y. Steinberg, ‘The Confirmation of the Worst Fears: James Bryce, British
Diplomacy and the Armenian Massacres of 1894–1896’, Études arméniennes
contemporaines 11 (2018), 15–39.
79 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 214–215; H. Adjarian,
Catalog der armenischen Handschriften in der Bibliothek des Sanassarian-Institutes zu
Erzerum (Vienna: Mkhitarean Dbaran, 1900).
80 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 215.
81 Kevork A. Sarafian, History of Education in Armenia (Laverne, CA: Press of the La
Verne Leader, 1930), 233.
82 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 211.
83 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 211–212.
84 Djerdjian departed Erzurum in 1895, and it is very possible that he is one of the
students to whom Lynch is referring in winter 1894 when he writes: ‘It is desired
that the teachers should have passed through this school, and then have completed
208 Notes
their studies in Europe. A certain portion of the funds have been set aside to meet
the expenses of one or two students during their residence abroad. Two have already
proceeded to St. Petersburg, and two more are about to leave for Reichenberg in
Bohemia in order to study in a technical school.’ See H.F.B. Lynch, Armenia: Travels
and Studies, vol.2, 215.
85 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants (Yerevan:
Antares, 2015).
86 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants 46–47.
87 We might compare this to the distance and remoteness identified in the works of
photographers such as Francis Frith and Félix Bonfils, where figures are ‘psychically
detached from the architecture [and] from the cameraman who has depicted them’.
Julia Ballerini, The Stillness of Hajj Ishmael: Maxime Du Camp’s 1850 Photographic
Encounters (New York, NY & Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2010), 139.
88 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 566. Hratch A.
Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), between 186 and 187.
89 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 125, 572.
90 In Nadar’s memoirs, the photographer and pharmacist become parallel figures: ‘in the
same way that the pharmacist manipulates chemicals and drugs in his laboratory and
can either cure or poison his clients,’ he writes, ‘the photographer also manipulates
substances and chemicals and can produce either a good, lively image or a bad, deadly
one.’ Eduardo Cadava, ‘Introduction: Nadar’s Photographopolis’, in Félix Nadar, When
I Was a Photographer (Cambridge, MA & London: The MIT Press, 2015), ix–lv, at
xxx.
91 George Jerjian, Daylight after a Century/Lusardsakum Meg Tar Ants.
92 There is also reference made to a chemist by the name of Papazian. However, this is
most likely simply a misspelling of the name of another chemist, Papanian.
93 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76.
94 Clémence Cottard Hachem and Nour Salamé (eds), On Photography in Lebanon:
Stories & Essays (Beirut: Kaph Books, 2018), 369–376.
95 Gisèle Freund, Photography & Society, 61.
96 Author’s correspondence with Taline Voskeritchian; Project SAVE Armenian
Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskertchian: Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an
interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted September 1996, 13 October 1996.
97 Razmik Panossian, The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and
Commissars, 86.
98 Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Tiflis: Crucible of Ethnic Politics, 1860–1905’, in The City in Late
Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F Hamm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1986), 249–281, at 256–258.
99 Houri Berberian, ‘Nest of Revolution: The Caucasus, Iran and Armenians’, in Russians
in Iran: Diplomacy and Power in the Qajar Era and Beyond, ed. Rudi Matthee and
Elena Andreeva (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), 95–121.
100 Vigen Galstyan, ‘Pertch Proshyan’, http://www.lusarvest.org/practitioners/proshyan-
pertch/; Vigen Galstyan, ‘Grigor Isahaki Ter-Ghevondyants’, http://www.lusarvest.org/
practitioners/ter-ghevondyants-grigor/; Vigen Galstyan, ‘Hamazasp Mamikonyants’,
http://www.lusarvest.org/practitioners/mamikonyants-hamazasp/ (accessed 17
August 2020).
101 Author’s correspondence with Taline Voskeritchian; Project SAVE Armenian
Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskertchian: Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an
interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted September 1996, 13 October 1996;
Notes 209
102 Ali Behdad, ‘On Vernacular Portrait Photography in Iran’, in Imagining Everyday Life:
Engagements with Vernacular Photography, ed. Tina M. Campt, Marianne Hirsch, Gil
Hochberg and Brian Wallis (Gottingen: Steidl/Walther Collection, 2020), 127–133,
at 133.
103 It is interesting to see how, in Saroyan’s autobiography Here Comes, There Goes, You
Know Who, the photograph is labelled in contradictory fashion as being the product
of both Erzurum and Le Havre. This unrootedness perhaps says something about the
migrants’ journey as a succession of transitory spaces, each significant only as a stop
along the way to the ultimate destination. William Saroyan, Here Comes, There Goes,
You Know Who (London: Peter Davies, 1961).
104 David Gutman, ‘Travel Documents, Mobility Control, and the Ottoman State in an
Age of Global Migration, 1880–1915’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Association 3, no.2 (2016), 347–368. David Gutman, ‘Agents of Mobility: Migrant
Smuggling Networks, Transhemispheric Migration, and Time-Space Compression in
Ottoman Anatolia, 1888–1908’, Interdisciplines 1 (2012), 48–84.
105 Ellis Island database. https://www.statueofliberty.org/ellis-island/ (accessed 30
November 2021). Ship manifest SS Caroline. 16 July 1910, Frames 32–33, Line 4,
Passenger ID 101396010186. The details given for Papazian on this 1910 manifest
indicate his earlier presence in Boston, 1900–01.
106 William Saroyan, Letters from 74 rue Taitbout, or Don’t Go but if You Must Say Hello to
Everybody (New York, NY & Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1969),
24–25.
107 Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, Saroyan: A Biography (Berkeley; Los Angeles;
London: University of California Press, 1998), 172–173.
108 It seems relevant that the Papazian studio, despite having been in business since
at least the 1880s, only begins to be appear in the Annuaire Oriental from 1900.
Seemingly coinciding with Movses’s departure, the listing suggests itself to be
Alexandre’s doing, one of the changes he implemented as the new studio head.
109 I owe a debt to Hazal Özdemir and her excellent work on state photographs
of departing migrants. See Hazal Özdemir, ‘Osmanlı Ermenilerinin Göçünün
Fotoğrafını Çekmek: Terk-I Tâbiiyet ve Pasaport Politikaları’, Toplumsal Tarih no.304
(April 2019), 82–90. Hazal Özdemir, ‘Osmanlı Ermenilerinin Göçünün Fotoğrafını
Çekmek 2: Fotoğrafçılar, Arkaplanları ve Terk-i Tâbiiyet Fotoğraflarının Standartları’,
Toplumsal Tarih no.310 (October 2019), 48–59.
110 Zeynep Gürsel, ‘Portraits of Unbelonging’ (manuscript forthcoming). Some
of the work has been presented in public lectures and a podcast. Available
online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRmV6fj9KXA and https://www.
ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/gursel.html (accessed 29 November 2021).
Chapter 4
1 Stuart Hall refers to ‘that moment of “waiting” just before you step off the end of
the earth […] A liminal movement, caught between two worlds, hesitating on the
brink.’ Stuart Hall, ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement’,
254.
2 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1997).
210 Notes
(Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008); Sigrid Lien, Pictures of
Longing: Photography and the Norwegian–American Migration (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
61 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 48–51.
62 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2128.
63 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2130.
64 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673.
65 Issam Nassar, ‘Early Local photography in Jerusalem’, 324.
66 Badr al-Hajj, ‘Khalil Raad – Jerusalem Photographer’, Jerusalem Quarterly, no.12–11
(2001), 34–39.
67 Author’s correspondence with John Soursourian. As an example of A. & H.
Soursourian being referred to as brothers, see Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the
Shadow of the Fortress: The Genocide Remembered (Cambridge, MA: Zoryan Institute,
1988), 53.
68 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1909), 2128, 2130.
69 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Talanian_Ann_2/96.
70 Carol Mavor, Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J.M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue,
Marcel Proust, and D.W. Winnicott (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press,
2007), 373–383.
71 John Berger and John Mohr, A Seventh Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 16.
72 John Berger and John Mohr, A Seventh Man, 16.
73 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 104–109.
74 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph,
30.
75 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic
Albums (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).
76 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 153.
77 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 47.
78 Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 101.
79 The ‘one-way vision’ relates to the colonial desire to see without being seen. See James
R. Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire
(London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 144.
80 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 47.
81 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 108–109.
82 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 153.
83 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Bethany_V_11-96.
84 My thanks to Zeynep Gürsel for instigating this line of thought.
85 The date of 15 October 1907 is inscribed on a print of the image found in the (as yet
uncatalogued) K.S. Melikian collection, Library of Congress.
86 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 3.
87 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 71.
88 Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands, 63–65.
89 Audrey Linkman, Photography and Death (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 17–19.
90 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 673–674.
91 These followed the same pattern established by the Armenian homeland associations
of Constantinople. See Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Institutionalized Migrant Solidarity in
the Late Ottoman Empire: Armenian Homeland Associations (1800s–1920s)’, New
Perspectives on Turkey 63 (2020), 55–79.
214 Notes
92 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53; Marderos Deranian,
Hussenig, 66. Deranian also includes a group portrait of the Armenian National
School Library Committee of Hussenig, including Askanaz and Haroutiun
Soursourian: Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 69.
93 See map by B. Goulkhasian and Garo Partoian, trans. Phillip Ketchian and
redrawn by Charles Sarkisian, in Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the
Fortress, np.
94 Berin Golonu, ‘Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization’, 43–45.
95 Nazan Maksudyan, ‘Visual Representations of Protestant Missionary Achievement
in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Discourse of Civility and Before-and-After
Photographs’, in Gender, Ethnicity and the Nation-State: Anatolia and its Neighbouring
Regions, ed. Leyla Keough (Istanbul: Sabancı University, 2011), 57–60. Nazan
Maksudyan, ‘Physical Expressions of Winning Hearts and Minds: Body Politics
of the American Missionaries in ‘Asiatic Turkey”’, in Christian Missions and
Humanitarianism in the Middle East, 1850–1950, ed. Inger Marie Okkenhaug and
Karène Sanchez Summerer (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 62–89.
96 Catalogue of Euphrates College, 1911–1912 (Boston, MA: Trustees of Euphrates
College, 1911), 32.
97 Boghos Jafarian, Farewell Kharpert, 48; Robert Mirak, Torn between Two Lands,
73–74.
98 Tlgadintsi, Tlgadintsi yev ir Kordz, 269–281. See also S. Peter Cowe, ‘T’lgadints’i as
Ideologue of the Regional Movement in Armenian Literature’, 35.
99 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 392–393.
100 According to Peniamin Noorigian, for example, Tlgadintsi could be strict but
his students knew that this was the constructive ‘strictness of a father’. Peniamin
Noorigian, ‘Tlgadintsi ir Ashagerdnerun hed’, in Arti Hay Kraganutiun: Irabashd
Shrchan, 1885–1900, ed. Moushegh Ishkhan (Beirut: Hamaskaïne, 1974), 140–141.
101 John Berger, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos (London: Bloomsbury, 2005),
56–57.
Chapter 5
6 Owen Robert Miller, ‘“Back to the Homeland” (Tebi Yergir): Or, how Peasants became
Revolutionaries in Muş’, Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4,
no.2 (2017), 287–308.
7 Dzovinar Derderian, ‘Mapping the Fatherland’, 148.
8 Vahé Oshagan, ‘Modern Armenian Literature and Intellectual History from 1700 to
1915’, 171.
9 Sasuntsi Tavit (David of Sasun) is one of the work’s central characters, a warrior who
gives his name to one of the four acts, also subsequently adopted as a collective name
for the whole epic cycle.
10 Leon Surmelian, Daredevils of Sassoun: The Armenian National Epic (Denver, CO:
Alan Swallow, 1964), 17.
11 Yervant Der Mgrdichian, Kantser Vasbouragani (Dbaran ‘Paykar’ Oraterti, 1966),
368–369.
12 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere (Boston: Hairenik Dbaran, 1950), 223–224.
13 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of
Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1963), 90–95.
14 Vazken Khatchig Davidian, ‘The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople’,
132. See also Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the
Ottoman Empire: Rayahs and Revolutionaries’, in The Armenian Image in History and
Literature, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1981), 155–169.
15 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 224–225.
16 Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 102.
17 Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 224–225.
18 Akaby Nassibian, Britain and the Armenian Question 1915–1923 (London & Sydney:
Croom Helm, 1984), 8–9.
19 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 28–29.
20 Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894’, 49.
21 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 151–153.
22 Ernest Chantre, Mission scientifique de Mr Ernest Chantre, sous-directeur du Museum
de Lyon, dans la Haute Mésopotamie, le Kurdistan et le Caucase (1881). Available
online: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8451574s/f1.item (accessed 25 January
2022).
23 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la
Mésopotamie (Washington, DC: Université catholique d’Amérique, 1892), 234.
24 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la
Mésopotamie, 189–219.
25 Daniel R. Brower, ‘Urban Revolution in the Late Russian Empire’ in The City in Late
Imperial Russia, ed. Michael F. Hamm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1986), 319–353.
26 Houri Berberian, ‘Nest of Revolution’.
27 Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions
in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland, CA: University of California
Press, 2019).
28 Vasbouragan, 250.
29 Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen
Lane, 2016), 250–251.
30 A major consequence of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74, and the Treaty of
Küçük Kaynarca (1774) that brought it to a close, was the internationalization of the
216 Notes
Bosporus, allowing Russian ships – for the first time – passage from the Black Sea to
the Mediterranean. This was another manifestation of the infringement on Ottoman
sovereignty, ‘an “alien” presence in the seascape whose sight was difficult to come to
terms with’. Paolo Girardelli, ‘Power or Leisure? Remarks on the Architecture of the
European Summer Embassies on the Bosphorus Shore’, New Perspectives on Turkey 50
(2014), 29–58, at 53.
31 Daniel Beer, The House of the Dead, 250–251.
32 The island had been the subject of competing Russian and Japanese claims for most of
the nineteenth century, and Russian sovereignty had only been recognized a relatively
short time before by the Treaty of St Petersburg in 1875, making it part of the same
era of imperial expansion that saw it occupy Ottoman lands in the wake of the Russo–
Turkish war of 1877–78.
33 Bruce Grant, ‘Empire and Savagery: The Politics of Primitivism in Late Imperial
Russia’, in Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917, ed. Daniel R.
Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997),
294.
34 Vasbouragan, 250.
35 Louise Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 155–161.
36 Simon Vratzian, ‘The Armenian Revolution and the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation’, The Armenian Review 3, no.3 (1950), 13–31.
37 Vlas Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas
Doroshevich’s ‘Sakhalin’, trans. Andrew A. Gentes (London & New York, NY: Anthem
Press, 2011), 115, 209–210.
38 Vasbouragan, 250.
39 Anton Chekhov, A Journey to Sakhalin, trans. Brian Reeve (Cambridge: Ian Faulkner
Publishing, 1993), 338.
40 Anton Chekhov, A Journey to Sakhalin, 342.
41 Quoted in Michael C. Finke, Seeing Chekhov: Life and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005), 156.
42 Vasbouragan, 250.
43 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, trans. Dickran and Haig Tahta and Hasmik
Ghazarian (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2007), 49.
44 Anahide Ter Minassian, ‘The City of Van at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in
Armenian Van/Vaspurakan, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa Meza, CA: Mazda
Publishers, 2000).
45 Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the
Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (Providence, RI & Oxford: Berghahn, 1995),
131–138.
46 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 155.
47 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la
Mésopotamie, between 186 and 187.
48 Annuaire oriental du commerce (1906), 1745.
49 Oksen Teghtsoonian, From Van to Toronto: A Life in Two Worlds (New York, NY &
Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2003), 21.
50 Oksen Teghtsoonian, From Van to Toronto: A Life in Two Worlds, 21.
51 Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior: Clothing and Photographic Self-
Portraits of Armenian fedayis in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century’, in Fashioning
the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives,
ed. Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann (Würzburg: Ergon, 2012), 117–148, at 117.
Notes 217
52 Vasbouragan, 250.
53 Donald Bloxham, ‘Terrorism and Imperial Decline: The Ottoman Armenian Case’,
European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 14, no.3 (2007), 301–324.
54 Martina Baleva, ‘Revolution in the Darkroom: Nineteenth-Century Portrait
Photography as a Visual Discourse of Authenticity in Historiography’, Hungarian
Historical Review 3, no.2 (2014), 363–390.
55 Martina Baleva, ‘The Heroic Lens: Portrait Photography of Ottoman Insurgents in
the Nineteenth-Century Balkans—Types and Uses’, in The Indigenous Lens: Early
Photography in the Near and Middle East, ed. Staci Scheiwiller and Markus Ritter
(Berlin, Munich & Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), 213–233.
56 Martina Baleva, ‘Revolution in the Darkroom’.
57 Michèle Hannoosh, ‘Practices of Photography’, 13. If the camera plays a role
in Armenian lives as the ‘liberatory tool of […] self-representation’ that it was
for African Americans, as described by Leigh Raiford, then it is here in these
revolutionary images. Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare, 15.
58 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’,
169.
59 Gerard J. Libaridian, ‘The Changing Armenian Self-Image in the Ottoman Empire’,
163–164.
60 V. Valatian, ‘Sarkis Gougouniani Arshavanke’, Hairenik Amsakir / Hairenik Monthly
35, no.9 (1957), 1–9, at 3.
61 Raffi, Jalaleddin, trans. Donald Abcarian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2021); Agop
J. Hacikyan, Gabriel Basmajian, Edward S. Franchuk and Nourhan Ouzounian, The
Heritage of Armenian Literature, vol.III: From the Eighteenth Century to Modern Times
(Detroit, MA: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 94.
62 Raffi, The Fool, trans. Donald Abcarian (London: Gomidas Institute, 2021); Vahé
Oshagan, ‘Modern Armenian Literature and Intellectual History from 1700 to 1915’,
164.
63 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, trans. Ara Sarafian (London:
Gomidas Institute, 2017), 227. Vahan Papazian, Im Hushere, 267.
64 Elke Hartmann, ‘Shaping the Armenian Warrior’.
65 Scenes in front of the camera recall those on the barricades of the Paris commune,
places as much of festival and frivolity as fortifications according to Jeannene
Przyblyski, where ordinary people ‘explicitly laid claim to the theatricality that is
intrinsic to photographic reality’; ‘awakened to the expressive potential of their
own bodies, [they] acted as if they might define themselves by playing wilfully and
casually, almost thoughtlessly, to the camera’. Jeannene M. Przyblyski, ‘Revolution at a
Standstill: Photography and the Paris Commune of 1871’, Yale French Studies, no.101
(2001), 54–78.
66 Gurgen Mahari, Burning Orchards, 358.
67 Nanor Kebranian, ‘Imprisoned Communities: Punishing Politics in the Late Ottoman
Empire’ in Ottoman Armenians: Life, Culture, Society, vol.1, ed. Vahé Tachjian (Berlin:
Houshamadyan, 2014), 114–143, at 123–124.
68 Vasbouragan, 250; Hratch Dasnabedian, The History of the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation Dashnaktsutiun (1890–1924), trans. Bryan Fleming and Vahe Habeshian
(Milan: Oemme Edizioni,1989), 66.
69 P. Müller-Simonis, Du Caucase au golfe Persique à travers l’Arménie, le Kurdistan et la
Mésopotamie, 269–270.
70 I am indebted to Boris Adjemian for the initial identification of Victor Hugo.
218 Notes
Chapter 6
online: https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/revolutions_and_
rebellions_van_resistance_as_rebellion_ottoman_empiremiddle_east DOI: 10.15463/
ie1418.11268 (accessed 25 January 2022). Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘They Can Live in The
Desert but Nowhere Else’, 256.
58 Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion’.
59 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, 147–162.
60 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 251–254. For an account the
deportees, see Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, trans. Ara Stepan Melkonian, in Rita
Soulahian Kuyumjian, Teotig: The Biography (London: Gomidas Institute and Tekeyan
Cultural Association, 2010), 73–229.
61 Author’s correspondence with Christine Gardon. Nouritza Matossian, Black Angel, 69.
Matthew Spender, From a High Place, 36.
62 Anahide Ter Minassian, ‘Van 1915’, 228.
63 Quoted in Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as
Rebellion’.
64 Ermeni Âmâl ve Harekât-ı İhtilâliyyesi Tesâvir ve Vesâik vol.1, 53. The original
source for the photograph and text appears to have been the periodical Leslie’s
Illustrated Weekly (the precise edition is not known). The photograph was also
printed with the caption ‘Armenians Fighting for their Lives’ in The Literary Digest
(9 October 1915).
65 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 9.
66 Sontag continues, ‘Images of dead civilians and smashed houses may serve to quicken
hatred of the foe, as did the hourly reruns by Al Jazeera […] the destruction in the
Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. Incendiary as the footage was to the many who
watch Al Jazeera […], it did not tell them anything about the Israeli army they were
not already primed to believe.’ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 9.
67 Grigoris Balakian, Hay Koghkotan, 57–58.
68 Benedetta Guerzoni, ‘Il “nemico armeno” nell’impero ottomano: le immagini’,
Storicamente 1, no.6 (2005). Available online: https://storicamente.org/guerzoni
(accessed 7 September 2016).
69 Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent (New York, NY; London: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 140.
70 Rafael de Nogales, Four Years Beneath the Crescent, 140.
71 A-Do, Van 1915: The Great Events of Vasbouragan, 132–134.
72 Yasar Tolga Cora, ‘Revolutions and Rebellions: Van Resistance as Rebellion’.
73 Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light, 128.
74 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon by Viscount Bryce
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916), 593.
75 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 293.
76 Nubar Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzeroum, ff.52–55, report by
Atelina Mazmanian; Annuaire oriental du commerce (1913), 1539–1541.
77 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 497.
78 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 294.
79 Nubar Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, P.J.1/3, file 59, Erzeroum, report by Atelina
Mazmanian, f.54. It should be noted that the Voskertchian family retains a different
account of the fates of these men, according to notes from an interview conducted
by Kevork Hintlian with Diran Voskertchian, the son of Yervand who was a one-
year-old child at the time of the massacre and one of its few survivors. Diran’s belief
224 Notes
was that the men died at the same site as many other Erzurumtsis, the Kemah Gorge.
See Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Voskeritchian:
Kevork Hintlian, Notes on an interview with Diran Voskertchian, conducted
September 1996, 13 October 1996. However, witness accounts clearly place the family
in the first, southbound convoy. It should also be noted that, utilizing these accounts,
Raymond Kévorkian refers to the deaths of ‘Dikran Oskrchian and his sons Yervant
and Harutiun’; this appears to be a misreading of the original eyewitness account
that lists (in admittedly confusing manner) the brothers’ names followed by the
words ‘their children also’. Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295; Nubar
Library, Paris/Fonds Andonian, report by Atelina Mazmanian, f.54.
80 Ghazar-Charek, Hushamadyan Bartzr Hayki: Garinabadum, 497. Raymond
Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295.
81 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘Two Figures on a Bench, in a Park, Tiflis, 1914’.
82 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion,
2006), 8.
83 Hratch A. Tarbassian, Erzurum (Garin), 213.
84 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 93.
85 A notable exception to the destruction of negatives was the Dildilian archive, the
Dildilian family managing to carry away of their studio holdings when they left for
Greece in 1922. Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 320–331.
86 James L. Barton, ‘Turkish Atrocities’, 24.
87 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 296–297.
88 James L. Barton, ‘Turkish Atrocities’, 24–25.
89 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 309–310; Donald Bloxham, The Great
Game of Genocide, 86–87.
90 Anouche Kunth makes insightful comments about the Syrian desert as part of the
mechanism of genocide and its appearance in photographs: ‘there are only a few rare
images of these events, taken particularly in concentration camps. What is striking
in comparison to the images of Nazi or Soviet camps are the frail installations:
simple tents clumsily set up on the sandy soil. There is no material or permanent
construction that symbolises oppression in the way that barbed wire did in the
totalitarian era. Instead, the photographs give an impression of anarchy, or even
amateurism, allowing doubt to be cast on the criminal’s intention: were they really
seeking to commit mass murder with such poor means? The cogs of the genocidal
machine are therefore unclear, unless we understand that, in part, they are here before
our eyes in the infernal desert surroundings.’ Anouche Kunth, ‘Traces, Bones, Desert:
The Extermination of The Armenians through the Photographer’s Eye’, Human
Remains and Violence 1, no.2 (2015), 71–87, at 78.
91 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 295.
92 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province: An American Diplomat’s Report on the
Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917 (New Rochelle, NY: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1989).
93 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, ed. Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians
in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16: Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodon
by Viscount Bryce, Uncensored Edition (Princeton, NJ & London: Gomidas Institute,
2005), 299; Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 385.
94 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 386.
95 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53.
96 The confusion over exact family relationships is again a hinderance – in the account
published in 1916 in the British Foreign Office ‘blue book’, it is ‘brothers’ from the
Notes 225
family who are said to have been arrested. James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, ed.
Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16:
Uncensored Edition, 299.
97 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387.
98 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387.
99 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53.
100 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387. James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee,
ed. Ara Sarafian, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16:
Uncensored Edition, 299.
101 Ermeni Âmâl ve Harekât-ı İhtilâliyyesi Tesâvir ve Vesâik, vol.1, 43.
102 Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide, 387.
103 Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha, trans. Peter Balakian and Aris Sevag (New
York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 108. These photographers included the Dildilians
of Marsovan, see Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 187–253.
104 Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman Citizen”: Life and Death in the Region
of Harput-Mamüretülaziz (1908–15)’, in World War I and the End of the Ottomans:
From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide, ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem
Ötkem and Maurius Reinkowski (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 210–239, at
231.
105 Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, 147.
106 Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen Tashde, 674.
107 Bertha Nakshian Ketchian, In the Shadow of the Fortress, 53.
108 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, 79–85.
109 Moushegh Ishkhan, Arti Hay Kraganutiun: Irabashd Shrchan, 1885–1900 (Beirut:
Hamaskaïne, 1974), 134.
110 Leslie A. Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, 79.
111 For the history of Davis’s photographs, see Susan K. Blair’s introduction to Leslie A.
Davis, The Slaughterhouse Province, particularly 23–30.
112 Teotig, ‘Memorial to April 11’, 146–147. Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman
Citizen”’, 232–233.
113 Vahé Tachjian, ‘Building the “Model Ottoman Citizen”’, 233.
114 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (New York, NY:
Princeton Architectural Press; Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2004).
115 Ruth Rosengarten, ‘Arrested Development: Death in the Family Album’, in Wide
Angle: Photography as Participatory Practice, ed. Terry Kurgan and Tracy Murinik
(South Africa: Fourthwall Books). Available online: https://static1.squarespace.com/
static/5f311f75c73f5814645750d8/t/5f4e1034047eb84854e20112/1598951477263/Arr
ested+development%2C+Wide+Angle%2C+2015.pdf (accessed 25 January 2022).
116 Varujan Vosganian, The Book of Whispers, trans. Alistair Ian Blyth (New Haven &
London: Yale University Press, 2018), 111. For the role of photographs in Vosganian’s
book, see Dana Bădulescu, ‘Varujan Vosganian’s Novel of Postmemory’, Word and
Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 2, no.1 (2012), 107–125.
117 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA: Soorsoorian_
Maritza/1993.
118 The other two photographs are individual portraits: ‘I found our family picture, also
Uncle Leon’s and Brother Vertanes’s in a Turkish officer’s uniform.’ Leon Surmelian, I
Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127.
119 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127.
226 Notes
120 Brian Dillon, In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory (London: Penguin Books,
2006), 133.
121 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 127.
122 James L. Barton, The Story of Near East Relief, 1915–1930 (New York, NY: Macmillan,
1930), 220–221.
123 Vahram L. Shemmassian, ‘The Exodus of Armenian Remnants from the Interior of
Turkey, 1922–1930’, in Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Costa
Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2002).
124 Chitjian Foundation Letter Collection, all of which has been made available publicly:
https://chitjian.com/introduction-to-the-letter-collection/ (accessed 30 November 2021).
125 Hampartzoum Mardiros Chitjian, A Hair’s Breadth from Death.
126 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 88, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros and Mihran
Chitjian, 14/15 March 1920.
127 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 134, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros Chitjian, [Between
Jan. and 18 May 1921].
128 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 102, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Mihran Chitjian, 5/18
April 1920.
129 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 164, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Kaspar Chitjian, 14 June
1921.
130 Chitjian Foundation, Letter 240, Hampartzoum Chitjian to Bedros, Mihran and
Kaspar Chitjian, 27 April 1922.
131 Vahram L. Shemmassian, ‘The Exodus of Armenian Remnants from the Interior of
Turkey’, 394.
132 Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London: Thornton Butterworth,
1929), 408.
133 See for instance Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, ‘Armenian Refugee Women: The Picture
Brides, 1920–1930’, Journal of American Ethnic History 12, no.3 (1993), 3–29.
134 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, 48.
135 Marie-Aude Baronian, ‘Image, Displacement, Prosthesis’, 208–209.
136 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London:
Pimlico, 1999), 211–244, at 218.
137 Ingrid Fernandez, ‘The Lives of Corpses: Narratives of the Image in American
Memorial Photography’, Mortality 16, no.4 (2011), 343–364.
138 A photograph shows Melikian posing in his role as an apprentice in the workshop of
Mezre furniture maker Nazaret Aghamalian. Vahe Haig, Kharpert yev anor Vosgeghen
Tashde, 668. He emigrated to the USA in 1907 and went into the photography
business in Worcester.
139 Melikian is said to have been in contact with a photographer in Harput before the
war years, although that photographer is unnamed. The photographs they sent to the
USA were the means by which Melikian kept up a ‘connection with the homeland
[for] as long as he could’. Mary Christine Melikian, ‘Open Letter of Thanks’, in
Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor, ‘Mary Christine Melikian of Worcester,
Massachusetts died at the age of 89 on 22 September 2015’, Armenian News Network/
Groong, 11 October 2015, http://groong.com/orig/ak-20151011.html (accessed 2
October 2018).
140 Marderos Deranian, Hussenig, 123–147. For the French Légion d’Orient, see Susan
Paul Pattie, Armenian Legionnaires: Sacrifice and Betrayal in World War I (London
& New York: I.B.Tauris, 2018); Guévork Gotikian, ‘La Légion d’Orient et le mandat
Notes 227
Conclusion
1 Shahan Shanour, Retreat Without Song, trans. Mischa Kudian (London: Mashtots
Press, 1982), 15–16.
2 Yervant Odian, Accursed Years, 106.
3 Vasbouragan, 250.
4 Bahattin Öztuncay, The Photographers of Constantinople, 319.
5 Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 323–331.
6 Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives, Watertown, MA/Encababian: Kay
Encababian Surabian, transcript of interview conducted by Ruth Thomasian 22
November 1988.
7 Shahan Shanour, Retreat Without Song, 16.
8 Edward Said, After the Last Sky, 159.
9 Armen T. Marsoobian, Fragments of a Lost Homeland, 320–331.
10 Leon Surmelian, I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, 227.
11 Taline Voskeritchian, ‘The Valise – a Family Memoir’, American Literary Review
(2011). Available online: https://talinedv.com/2017/05/23/the-valise-a-family-memoir
(accessed 28 January 2022).
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250 Index