Behdad maps an important position in debates about the political efficacy of photographs. Rightly insisting on the centrality of 'the Orient' to early practitioners, he redirects our vision to the formative role of the camera in the uneasy careers of Europe's empires. The contact zones created by the embrace of photography by local elites provide a rich counterpoint, revealing not ... Read more'resistance' but the vivid realization that the camera's 'image repertoires' were a conduit to power. This is a salutary contribution to the study of photography as a global practice, one that has always exceeded Europe and the narrow confines of nation states.
Christopher Pinney, University College London Finding that the Middle East served as an important site for the development of photography, Behdad traces the unequal gazes through which photography enabled Orientalist ways of seeing. But, surprisingly and powerfully, Camera Orientalis goes on to show that photographic encounters engender more than struggles for control of the visual field. They also yield multidirectional gazes and hybrid practices that borrow from and inspire one other, in sometimes troubling ways.
Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust I warmly welcome Behdad's book on the historical techniques and political protocols of photography in the realization of Orientalist visual culture. Can we make any argument about the impact of colonization on modernity
post-, contra-, or plural
without exploring the profound influence of the techne of the photograph on the affective and ethical networks that have made the Middle East a crucial hub of global knowledge? This excellent contribution provides us with a crucial resource for understanding the regional conditions and cosmopolitical implications of an art that reveals what is hidden and submerged while mirroring the social and psychic salience of surface and frame.
Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University Show Less