The visual making of the harem

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, photography rapidly imposed itself as a new way of capturing real-time visions in many parts of the world. However, the photographs did not necessarily lead to a replacement or revaluation of entrenched perceptions of the temporal and spatial context in which these images were captured. This paper revisits the case of harem women photographed in the Iranian court in the nineteenth century, and the current representation of harem women in Turkey where this institution officially existed until 1926. As a group of graduate students in Turkey, our encounter with photographs of female residents of the Iranian court provoked this questioning. These women apparently did not conform to our immediate notions of the harem’s physiognomic conventions. In our complex relation with the Ottoman past, and partly because of lack of visual research, our visual codes about this institution seem to have been shaped by the long tradition of Orientalist codes and depictions.