Domestic Spaces as Showcases: Interior Photography in the beginning of twentieth-century Istanbul

Abstract

Domestic Spaces as Showcases: Interior Photography in Early twentieth-century Istanbul Ece Zerman (bio) keywords Domestic interiors, late Ottoman Empire, photography, self-representation, visual culture At the beginning of the twentieth century, paintings, reproductions of paintings, and photographs of family members, relatives or of “great men” crowded domestic interiors. On the walls, historical scenes were intermingled with landscapes, and often combined with family photographs. The diffusion of photography and the development of new techniques allowing for the faster reproduction of images facilitated their circulation, which had, in turn, effects on the ways in which the interiors were decorated.1 Novels narrated these new trends; etiquette books gave advice on the arrangement of photographs in interiors, or on the decoration of the walls of a room. This constantly changing imagery provides clues to understand the ways in which contemporaries represented themselves in a period of profound transformation, from the late Ottoman Empire to the early Republic of Turkey. Following this path, this short paper explores through a variety of case studies the images displayed on the walls of late Ottoman domestic spaces, and considers these interiors as a space of self-representation. Complementing visual documents with textual ones helps to give insights into the ways in which the images circulated and served to display multiple identities and social affiliations within interior spaces. The principal object of this paper is both interior photography and the images exposed on the walls, as observed through this genre of photography. In other words, I focus on interior photographs to analyze what notions of self-representation the images on the walls may reveal. The “class” dimension of these photographs has to be underlined: interior photographs, compared with those produced in a studio, required the possession of a camera or a photographer [End Page 325] to come specifically to a home. This was hardly an easily affordable practice. This explains the fact that interior photographs for this period come, almost exclusively, from relatively wealthy families. With cameras being expensive and requiring long exposure times at the beginning of the twentieth century,2 we may assume that interior photographs from this period correspond to an intentional representation of a personal space.3 According to Sarah Anne Carter, “interior photographs documented a process of personalization within the home, arranging individual possessions and spaces as part of a unified, aesthetic composition.”4 We may pursue her line of argument here and assert that it was not a random part of the house that was photographed, but a space carefully defined by the photographic frame and chosen by the inhabitants or the photographer. It was probably no coincidence that these places reflected, in many cases, imagery to which the inhabitants seemed to have a personal connection. The family archives of Said Bey (1865–1928), an Ottoman high official and teacher living in Istanbul, provides my first case study.5 An undated photograph (Figure 1) shows a living room. It is framed to depict the space in its entirety. In front of the window, we see two men sitting, barely visible because of the overexposure. This is most likely Said Bey’s konak [mansion] in the old neighborhood of Aksaray. If so, the photograph must have been taken before 1913, since it was during this year that the family moved to an apartment in the fashionably modern district of Şişli. The two sides of a large open door are decorated with small rugs, and each is topped by a rectangular frame, probably bearing a calligraphic inscription. On the left, above the carpet and the calligraphy, there is a painting placed in a prominent position. We have some hard data on this painting (Figure 2) as it was in the possession of Said Bey’s great-granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana. According to her testimony, the [End Page 326] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. SALT Research, Said Bey Archive, AFMSBTH035. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Portrait on the wall in Figure 1. Oil painting on canvas. From the personal archive of Said Bey’s great granddaughter, Hatice Gonnet Bağana, donated to the Sadberk Hanım Museum, Istanbul (SHM 19554-E.50). [End Page...