Nazlı's photographic games: Said and art history in a contrapuntal mode

Abstract

ABSTRACTThrough a focus on photographic portraits commissioned in the late nineteenth century by the Ottoman-Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım, Roberts analyses the ways they tested Ottoman and western conventions. An examination of Nazlı's strategic engagement with photography in this period positions her within the often-separated domains of Egyptian nationalism, Ottoman political reform, western Orientalist art and a proto-feminist moment of Egyptian women's history. One of the striking things about the Nazlı portraits is their transgressive inventiveness. This is transgression as Edward Said defines it, with an emphasis on crossing boundaries, testing and challenging limits, and cutting across expectations. Nazlı's inventiveness is apparent through her canny experimentation with the codes of portrait photography and the ways she deploys her portraits as tokens of exchange within her culture and with her European interlocutors. Roberts argues that Nazlı Hanım's use of photography operates in a contrapuntal mode in the Saidean sense of a simultaneity of voices that sound against, as well as with, each other. Over the last three decades Said's writings have provided a crucial methodological framework for the critique of western Orientalist visual culture. Recently art historians have repositioned this corpus of western imagery in relation to art by practitioners from the region and addressed cultural exchanges. Said's seminal text Orientalism has been pivotal within these debates. Yet it is not so much this landmark book, but rather Said's writings on music, in which we can find an alternative approach to cross-cultural exchange. By transposing this model into the domain of art history, Roberts engages with his notion of reading contrapuntally. Said was interested in the broader applicability of this term, although its potential as an interpretive model for the visual arts remains unexamined. Through this case study of Nazlı Hanım's photographs, Roberts reassesses the value of Said's writings on music for understanding nineteenth-century visual culture.