Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals

Abstract

This article investigates late nineteenth-century Ottoman illustrated journals as a key site for the articulation of new, popular, and visualised forms of historical knowledge and sensibility in the imperial domain. Focusing on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a period from 1876 to 1909 marked by the beginnings of print industry and rising levels of literacy in the Ottoman world, the article situates photography within a mixed, hybrid, and highly image-based media environment that radically transformed Ottoman modes of looking and remembering. Allowing new forms of reading, viewing, and popular participation, the journals helped refashion and pluralise collective images of the empire’s material past. The article argues that the new visions of history and antiquity that emerged in the Ottoman journals were not merely an ideological package imposed by the state and passively consumed by the readers. The journals played an essential role in creating a highly visualised interface where popular and official forms of historical imagination mingled and interpenetrated.