xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

Int. J. Middle East Stud. 39 (2007), 175–206. Printed in the United States of America

DOI: 10.1017.S0020743807070067

Stephen Sheehi

A S O C IA L H IS T O R Y O F E A R L Y A R A B

P H O T O G R A P H Y O R A P R O L E G O M E N O N T O A N

A R C H A E O L O G Y O F T H E L E B A N E S E IM A G O

Viewing anexhibition of civil war paintings in 1886, Lea Barakat wrote that her “country

came to mind: the splendor of its ruins, the wonders of their form like the fortress of

Baalbek, the ruins of Palmyra, and the scenes of Lebanon . . .” Native women should

paint like this, she states, and “not leave a scene [of Lebanon] unpainted . . . They

can decorate the rooms of their homes and sitting rooms with these pictures . . .” She

concludes that “since the ladies of our country are smarter and more industrious in

their handcrafts than [American] ladies,” they too can obtain a similar level of “wealth,

honorable work, admiration of the masses, and praise for the virtue of their [arts and

crafts].”1 This study is a prolegomenon to examining the topography of visual culture

and modernity to which Barakat alludes. Rather than painting, this article focuses on

photography produced by Arabs during the late Ottoman and early Mandate periods in

Lebanon. Less concerned with using photographs to document social transformations,

this study theorizes how production and deployment of the photographic image played a

part in the conceptualization of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity in Lebanon, which

is claimed not to exist in the Arab world.2

O T T O M A N TA N Z IM AT, A R A B R E F O R M , A N D S E C O N D A RY

L IT E R AT U R E

In the Ottoman Empire, photography acted forcefully in creating class and national

identities because of the scientific nature of the apparatus. If the “fever for reality was

running high” in Europe with the invention of photography, the Comptean compulsion for

rationality and objectivity was the dominant current of thought among Arab intellectuals

during al-nah. da al-Arabiyya (the Arab renaissance).3 Therefore, photography in the

Arab world was not plagued by the question of whether it was a bastard child of

painting or science, as in Europe. This is not because Arabs lacked a pictorial tradition.

Rather, framed by a discourse of scientific knowledge from the outset, photography

served, like Barakat’s hope for painting, as a resource for social, cultural, economic,

and civic progress. The majority of articles on photography in Arabic that appeared in

Stephen Sheehi is Associate Professor of Arab Culture in the Department of Languages, Literature, and

Cultures, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C. 29208, USA; e-mail: sheehi@sc.edu.

© 2007 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/07 $15.00

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

176 Stephen Sheehi

literary–scientific journals focused on technical and scientific components of the craft,

thus evincing photography’s positivist appeal.4 Buffered by the facticity of chemistry and

optics, photography assisted in instituting a new process of recognizing the commodity

as an intricate signifier of class and individual identity. Studio portraiture, amateur

photography, and advertisements combined to make relationships “natural” between

the “modern” individuals represented in the photographic image and the things that

communicated who they were or wanted to be.

Formally, native-produced photographic portraiture differed little from Western pho-

tographs. In her study of women and photography of the Middle East, Sarah Graham-

Brown states, “Styles of photography remained largely derivative, taking the norms of

composition and styles of portraiture almost entirely form European models.”5 It is true

that the photographic “patterns” found in early Lebanese and Ottoman photography

seem to have been “grafted onto alien cultures,” as Julia Hirsh states in her study of

family photography in the West.6 In his adept study of photography in India, Christo-

pher Pinney notes the difficulty in distinguishing native- from foreign-produced images,

because “early Indian photographic practitioners were part of an elite that mimicked

key colonial aesthetic forms.” Therefore, official and personal photography should be

juxtaposed, as they were differentiated by “the field of power around the camera rather

than cultural practice.”7

In contrast, in her study on popular culture in the Ottoman Empire, Suraiya Faroqhi

reminds us that “the literary figures and politicians of the Tanzimat isolated themselves

from the lower classes by their acceptance of a foreign culture.”8 Despite the similarities

and often indeterminate content, the sociohistorical and political context of these images

compels us to examine the effects of these iconographic “patterns.” The adoption of

foreign practices and technologies was not a passive act but a class act to distinguish the

new bourgeoisie from the subaltern classes. I argue that the act of “imitation” was an

ideological act by which non-Western subjects claimed ownership of modernity along

with its intellectual and capital resources and privileges.

The relationship between photography, modernity, and the East appeared almost

simultaneously with the apparatus’ debut in Europe. Egypt and Palestine were among the

first destinations for French-government daguerreotype missions to visually document

antiquities.9 Character types, landscapes, and tableau vivant genre scenes—particularly

useful for postcards and exotic tablature—soon made up a large portion of the output of

studios run by expatriate Europeans, such as the renowned French Bonfils family, based

in Beirut for almost fifty years.10 In their study of postcards, Alloula and Proschaska show

how photography evinced Orientalist discourse and acted as an apparatus of colonial

power.11 The majority of studies on photography in the Middle East have concentrated

on “Othering” representations produced by nonindigenous photographers.12 A few of

these studies have also considered native contributions to the early photographic archive.

For example, in her groundbreaking Images of Women, Sarah Graham-Brown identifies

relevant tropes found in the native and foreign photographic representation of Middle

Eastern women, such as domesticity and leisure.13

In his compendium of Palestinian photography, Walid Khalidi maps the dominant

themes of the photographic archive in Palestine before 1948 as created by foreigners

and Arab and Armenian indigenes, including Khalil Rad and his partners and in-

laws, Garabed and Johannes Krikorian.14 Subsequently, Annelies Moors, focusing on

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 177

postcards and National Geographic magazine, examines how biblical motifs, used even

by native studios for commercial reasons, robbed Palestinians of agency by freezing local

culture as a mirror of Hebrew antiquity.15 Ethnobiblical representations supplied visual

evidence that land and people had been stagnant for millennia, in contrast to the dynamic

modernity of Zionist colonialists.16 What neither Khalidi nor Graham-Brown develops

is the latter’s passing observation that photography in the Ottoman Empire “was viewed

as an embodiment of modern technology, in itself a symbol of progress, which also

offered a convenient means of documenting other kinds of ‘progress’ and reform.”’17 I

argue that Arab photography was inspired less by Orientalist imagery than by specific

ideological planks of modernity. The representation of marriage, domestic life, and

educated elite that Khalidi examines arose out of nah. da priorities that aimed to establish

a normative behavior for “the new age.” Therefore, it should be noted that photography

accentuated the potentials and identified the deficiencies of local communities as a

necessary programmatic enterprise to respond to British and Zionist ambitions.

Although reform priorities informed photography, few written sources exist regard-

ing indigenous studios, photographers, and the reception of their product. Despite this

lacuna, few scholars have studied the Arab–Ottoman context of photographic images.

Nancy Micklewright argues that photographs in the Ottoman–Turkish press pushed a

nationalist-based agenda of consumerism.18 Wolf-Deiter Lemke states in his article on

Ottoman photography that the use of photography was “an act of technological mod-

ernization.” Noting that Sultan Abd al-Hamid patronized many photographic projects,

he claims that “photography created new possibilities of long-distance control, enabling

the center to visualize through images what was actually achieved.”19 Similarly, Faroqhi

comments on Abd al-Hamid’s photographilia, noting that the sultan’s “many albums

were devoted to largely photographs showing innovations of the contemporary period,”

including railroad stations, hospitals, schools, and factories. Consequently, the camera

acted in its disciplinary capacity as a mechanism to verify that his development projects

had been completed.20

A L -N A H. D A A L - A R A B IY YA , N AT IV E IN D IV ID U A L , A N D T H E R O O T S

O F L E B A N E S E P H O T O G R A P H Y

A handful of the most famous Ottoman photographers were able to capitalize on the

West’s desire for landscapes, townscapes, images of ruins, and character types, be-

cause these photographic entrepreneurs maintained a prestigious association with the

sultan and Ottoman officials. Concurrently, native studios cultivated a growing local

market, concerning themselves largely but not exclusively with portraiture. Graham-

Brown confirms that, along with the strong presence of expatriate studios, local services

were marketed toward a local clientele. In regard to Lebanon, she writes that “it be-

came very fashionable among well-to-do Christian families to have cabinet portraits or

photographic cartes de visite made,” but she also specifies that the demand was cross-

confessional.21 By the 1890s, several native-run ateliers thrived in many of the major

cities of Southwest Asia and Egypt.22 However, we know little of Armenian and Arab

photographers such as Nasr Aoun in Beirut, Suleiman Hakim in Damascus, Lekegian in

Cairo, the Krikorians and Rad in Palestine, and Kamil al-Qareh, Muhammad al-Arabi,

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

178 Stephen Sheehi

and Wadi Nawfal in northern Lebanon.23 Even the details of the lives of photographers

as prominent as Jurji Sabunji [Georges Saboungi] (1840–1927) remain sketchy.

Some sources say that Sabunji opened his studio in Beirut in 1862, only two years

after Trancrede Dumas, the first European to do so.24 Jurji was the younger brother of

Louis Sabunji (1838–1931), a former priest and activist who was an associate of Wilfred

Blunt.25 Louis learned photography during his studies in the seminary in Rome. Tarrazi

states that he was the first “to introduce the art of photography [al-tas. wır al-shamsı] to

Beirut, which was virtually unknown in the city at that time.”26 Tarrazi claims that Louis

invented two photographic apparatuses during his stay in Manchester; one patent was

sold to the British “Stereoscopic Co.,” and his “Authomatic [sic] Apparatus” received

recognition from the French government.27 An avid photographer, Louis apparently

kept a photographic diary, which accompanied Rihalat al-nahla, his travel account of

Europe.28 It is assumed that he taught his brother Jurji the craft. Evidence also suggests

that his brothers David and the unknown “M. Sabounji” had ateliers in Beirut, Jaffa,

and Cairo.29 Due to the lack of a written record, we know more about Louis than Jurji

himself. We do know he was a skilled and accomplished photographer of high repute

and wrote at least two technical articles on the craft.30

Sabunji’s photographs are classic 19th-century portraiture. It is not coincidental that

he photographed leading Ottoman officials and Beirut intellectuals, including Ibrahim

al-Yaziji and Butrus al-Bustani. Of the most prominence, he was the official photog-

rapher for Midhat Pasha while the famous Ottoman reformer was governor of Syria.

Sabunji invented a method and received commendation for printing photographs on silk,

reproducing Midhat’s image on thirty-six foulards.31

His intimate association with the new bourgeoisie, nah. da intellectuals, and the reform-

minded ruling class gave him a central role in popularizing the visual semiotics of nah. da

ideology. His mostly male subjects are often standing relaxed, exuding confidence and

ease. Wearing native attire, subjects of studio portraits (Figure 1) project learnedness,

control, and culture. They resemble countless portraits of “pioneers of the renaissance,”

such as Salim al-Bustani and al-Yaziji, who wear shirwal, vest, and fez, the last a sign

of the Ottoman reform that began with Sultan Mahmud II (d. 1839).32 The images are

a visual compendium to the new forms of Arabic short and long fiction by writers like

Salim al-Bustani.33 These experiments narrated the cornerstone virtues of bourgeois

selfhood, specifically moral propriety, learning, culture, and moderation in the face of

modernization excesses. The portrait of al-Shaykh Effendi al-Khuri in fact could be

Shakir Khuri—doctor, Protestant convert, and minor player in the reform community

of Beirut. Perhaps it is al-Shaykh Khalil al-Khuri, founder of the newspaper Hadiqat

al-akhbar and owner of the seminal publishing house al-Matbaa al-Suriyya.34 The

carpeting, baroque chairs, and heavy molding give the impression of a Victorian room,

whereas the choice in dress is clearly a national one. Although the images are a double,

they both distinctly relay that each of their models is an individual.

If the traditionally attired subjects project a mastery of knowledge emblematic of

al-nah. da, the image in Figure 2 emanates a sense of mastery of means. Regaled in

Western garb, his coat draped over his arm, and relaxed on his walking cane, the

subject is clearly confident in his surroundings. Although these images are just a few

in Sabunji’s large oeuvre, they articulate an orthodox visual iconography of the native

subject: young, successful, “progressive,” and male; gazing forward, out of the frame;

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 179

FIGURE 1. (Left) Jurjis Sabunji, Shaykh Effendi al-Khuri, n.d., and (right) Jirjis Sabunji, n.d. Reprinted with

permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

learned and personally if not also financially secure in the modern age. The iconography

became the visual standard for the reform intellectual and modern comprador. Tarrazi’s

landmark Tarikh al-sahafa al-Arabiyya provides portraits of journalists, intellectuals,

publishers, and educators, celebrating them as the heroes of al-nah. da. The biographical

encyclopedia is an unambiguous, if not overdetermined, ideological anthology of the

modern Arab imago. Many of Sabunji’s portraits, in fact, appear in Tarrazi’s magnum

FIGURE 2. Jirjis Sabunji, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

180 Stephen Sheehi

opus. For example, the portrait of Edgar Mashaqa expresses the same airs as seen

in Figure 2. A well-groomed schoolboy with leather shoes, a suit, a bow tie, and

meticulously combed hair, the young Mashaqa stands next to a high table with his hand

on a large, open book.35 The image anticipates his ownership of al-Ittihad al-Misri, the

periodical founded by his father, Raphael, in Alexandria in 1881 and reopened by Edgar

in 1910.

Sabunji did not originate the iconography of this portraiture, just as Tarrazi did not cod-

ify it. He was a pioneer among others within the larger practice of Ottoman photography.

The dissemination of the representation of a confident, worldly, and cultured Ottoman

citizen was “relatively inconspicuous but all the more effective as a factor contributing

to the process of secularization” as well as modernization and social reform.36 Younger

than Sabunji, Iskander (d. 1911) and Joseph (d. circa 1904) Khorshid were similarly

high-profile Beiruti photographers who comfortably worked between provincial capitals

and the imperial center.37 More prominently known as the Kova Brothers, the two were

experienced painters of icons; this is the purported reason why they relocated to Beirut,

to paint in the Orthodox Cathedral of Mar Jirjis in the 1860s.38 They were “famed in

the craft of photography [fotografia] and skill in painting [tas. wır],” said al-Muqtataf,

explaining that the Kovas won ribbons at the Vienna World’s Exhibition in 1873 and the

International Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 for their images of Syrian

landmarks and costumes.39

The regularity of nah. da portraiture (Fig. 3) is its very strength. Again, each model’s

clothes are stylized, as are his body language and surroundings. His tarbush signals his

education; his Western clothes relate his success, progress, and/or affluence; and the

absence of sectarian markers signifies his nationalism. The composition is hardly distin-

guishable from Sabunji’s portraits. The project of the photographer and photographed—

the very veracity of the image—is found within this field of sameness. This repetition

forces the viewer to recognize and identify with the model as a representative of a

FIGURE 3. The Kova, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 181

FIGURE 4. Abdallah Freres, “Sufi Musician,” n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab

Image.

national class. Indeed, the al-Muqtataf article entitled “Syrian Photography” lauds these

two photographers as “sons of the nation” and therefore representative of the progress

of Syria itself. The subjects of the Kovas’ photographic portraiture are represented as

bourgeois individuals, exuding the heroic qualities of the modern Syro–Lebanese citizen:

progressive, knowledgeable, nationalistic, and secular.

The success of the Beirut-based Kovas resembles the career of the most eminent

Ottoman photographers, Vichen (d. 1902), Hovsep (d. 1900), and Kevork Abdallah

(d. 1918), otherwise known as the Abdallah Freres. Trained in miniature painting at the

Armenian Catholic seminary in Venice, the brothers bought the business of the German

chemist–photographer with whom they had apprenticed around 1860.40 In 1862, they

became court photographers to Sultan Abd al-Aziz and then to Abd al-Hamid II. The

latter was an avid collector and patron of photography who commissioned the brothers to

produce a visual photographic archive of the empire.41 Their photographs were presented

to such European royalty as Empress Augusta, the Kaiser’s wife, and used as the model

for the minted royal image. The copyright of their photographs was protected by the

sultan’s decree, and they were personally commissioned by Sultan Abd al-Aziz to take

photographs for the Ottoman Pavilion at the 1860s Paris exhibition. The theme was the

“Life of Istanbul” and the capital’s cityscapes.42

The photographers’ relations to the most powerful echelons of the ruling elite in

Istanbul and the empire permitted the Abdallah Freres to diversify their portfolio from

portraiture to landscape to character types beyond the scope of most native studios.

In Figure 4, entitled “Sufi Musician” by its archivist, the troped image of a dervish

is a character type, most probably commissioned by the sultan. Wandering in a faux

pastoral, the nomadic dervish has no town, no ethnicity, and no specific territory. The

craft (flute player, dervish) is the subject of the image, not his personal or even local

identity. Moreover, the figure’s eyes do not look out but down, reinforcing the image’s

stasis, and garments of excessive size displace his very body.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

182 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 5. Abdallah Freres, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

A series of the photographs the Abdallah Freres shot in Cairo exists. Having taken

the portrait of the khedive, they likely opened a branch of their studio in Cairo or at

least produced portraits on the side while photographing Egypt for the sultan.43 These

Cairene portraits yield an insight into Ottoman photographic portraiture in the Arab

provinces, especially when contrasted with “Sufi Musician.” For example, some images

(Figure 5) replicate those by Sabunji and the Kovas, presenting a successful and secular

native son, hat off, relaxed in a salon, looking into the future. The image is found in

bourgeois communities throughout the eastern Mediterranean, from Pera to Beirut to

Cairo. Moreover, the bust (Figure 6) is exactly what “Sufi Musician” is not: a full-headed

representation of a local gentleman who masterfully looks directly into the camera. His

FIGURE 6. Abdallah Freres, anon., n.d. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 183

disembodied shoulders and head express a corporeal and social presence absent in the

full body shot of the dervish. This type of headshot was one of agency.

The bust resembles miniatures that were popular with Europe’s ascendant bourgeoisie

immediately before the dawn of photography. Similar oil paintings and miniatures of

figures in grand regalia or military uniform were popular among Ottoman aristocracy and

state officials. John Tagg notes that, rather than being killed by “mechanical reproduc-

tion,” “the aura of the precious miniature passes over” to photographic portraiture, which

was utilized by the state and industry as a disciplinary practice to control and manage

citizens, workers, criminals, and the mentally ill.44 The observation seems accurate in

the Ottoman Empire. Lemke, Faroqhi, and Micklewright note Sultan Abd al-Hamid’s

obsession with the craft and connect his desire to visually document every ethnicity,

religious sect, profession, and territory to his control of the empire. But Istanbul’s

interest in photography preceded Abd al-Hamid, as we see in the officially patronized

Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie, written by Osman Hamdy Bey and illustrated

photographically by the well-known photographer Pascal Sebah, said by some to be of

Levantine Arab origin.45

Despite their minimalism, the Abdallah Freres’ images of the Cairene bourgeoisie

have an aura of their own, like the Beiruti portraits. The Hellenic columns, plush drapes,

baroque chairs, books, and reading tables—ubiquitously found in portraits throughout

the empire as and in the West—“exude a civilizing and civilized air.”46 The props

possessed ideological gravity in the context of al-nah. da al-Arabiyya, because they

drew from a semiotic register that signified the European Renaissance, which served

as an inspiration if not ideological justification for al-nah. da pioneers in their concep-

tualization of an enlightened Arab individual appropriate for the modern era.47 Despite

careful deployment of props, the focus of portraits in the 19th and early 20th centuries

was the individual sitter, compelling the viewer to find meaning not in national allegory

but in individual subjectivity first. This meaning was located in the personal identity of

the individual, in the “desiring-self” who finds his identity in economic and social con-

figurations that precede national identity. Lalvani, following the work of Freund, Tagg,

and Sekula, refers to this meaning production, stating that “19th century portraiture, in

functioning to bring the body of ordinary experience to visibility and to think it into a

normative order, became a disciplinary practice essential to the cultural reproduction of

the individual and the family.”48

The phenomenon of the rise of the modern individual and family was complicated by

the colonial condition. In the case of Lebanon, the 19th-century political economy was

transformed from a semifeudal to a capitalist economy that included a redistribution

of resources and surplus capital along new class and confessional lines. These changes

rearranged spatial and domestic economy as well as the economy of the self. This

selfhood could be parochial or national, inclusive or exclusive. Hence, the specifically

Lebanese-national subject appeared at the same time the Arab–Ottoman citizen was

being formulated. Whereas in the 1850s and 1860s Butrus al-Bustani theorized the

centrality of Lebanon in the political and cultural economy of Greater Syria, Nujaim

wrote La Question de Liban in 1908, positing the unique economic, cultural, and geo-

graphic characteristics of Greater Lebanon.49 These strains of thought generated various

versions of “Lebanonism,” all of which shared a belief in the “innate” individualism of

the Lebanese subject who is, at heart, a merchant and entrepreneur.50 This genesis of the

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

184 Stephen Sheehi

capitalist individual involved more than a realignment of political loyalties, communal

loyalties, and economic possibilities. It demanded a drastic reorganization of the econ-

omy of the desiring self. However, the birth of the modern consumer in Lebanon had a

unique configuration of political and subjective economies. Unlike the master narrative

of the development of the bourgeois individual in the West, sectarianism, not secularism,

combined with capitalism to define modern Lebanese identity, creating what Firro calls

“the Lebanese system.” Within this system, emergent nationalist ideologies naturalized

the concept of the eternal Lebanese subject as an “individual” whose inherent desire for

commerce, if not commodity consumption, was an outgrowth of its imagined Phoenician

heritage.

L E B A N O N A N D T H E S O C IA L H IS T O RY O F T H E IM A G E

Thus far, I have focused on mostly Beirut-based studios to define an iconography and

ideology of the photographic portrait that was informed by the intellectual and cultural

activities of al-nah. da. I argue that the later Lebanese self-image was rooted in the

19th-century reform movement. As an outgrowth of the Ottoman tanzimat, al-nah. da al-Arabiyya stressed progress, civilization, and social order, as well as interconfessional

unity and good citizenry. All desires and energies should be sublimated into pursuit of

these goals—national goals of economic, political, and cultural advancement.

One of the means to achieve these goals included buying domestically produced

goods rather than foreign ones. In the process of modernization, the empire had accu-

mulated a crippling debt, resulting in the capitulations that afforded the Great Powers

extraterritorial privileges.51 These privileges were used to extract resources from the

Arab provinces, as well as to cultivate local markets. Calling for a boycott of Euro-

pean products as early as 1870, Salim al-Bustani acknowledged the West’s economic

imperialism. He criticized the popularity of European goods in Syria and raised the

issue of double exploitation, where raw materials were taken out of the East, refined

into finished goods, and reimported to undersell local producers. Recognizing Europe’s

economic superiority, al-Bustani observed the widespread redundancy of cotton and silk

mills in Lebanon, the destruction of local commerce, and the creation of the urban and

rural poor.52

Carolyn Gates corroborates al-Bustani’s theory, showing that Lebanon never devel-

oped a manufacturing base, because it could import cheaper finished products from the

West. Consequently, the economy’s service and consumer sectors flourished in place of

manufacturing.53 By al-Bustani’s birth, the silk industry—serving mills in France—had

altered agricultural production throughout Lebanon. It was the source of cottage and

ancillary industries that enriched some rural, mostly Christian, peasants while dispos-

sessing others.54 Along with local lending houses, Credit Lyonais opened a branch in

Beirut in 1875. Indebted and pushed aside by the French in their move to patronize

Christian peasantry and artisans, the traditional feudal and old urban merchant classes

began to lose exclusive control of means of production and capital surplus.

Civil disturbances and the rise of sectarianism between 1840 and 1860 expressed

changes in the demographic, class, and power structure within and among the Maronite,

Orthodox, Sunni, and Druze communities.55 By the end of the century, large swaths of

the Christian peasantry had immigrated to the United States and South America. There,

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 185

they worked as laborers and petty merchants, sending home remittances that constituted

a large share of rural income.56 In Lebanon, much of the peasantry was transformed

into labor in the silk and tobacco industries, and new craftsmen, shopkeepers, and petty

merchants appeared. By the 1920s, Lebanon had rebounded from the deprivations of

the war years, and it began to transform itself into the liberal, laissez-faire economy

that nationalist ideologues imagined it had been eternally. Lisa Thompson and Carolyn

Gates show how the new middle class found employment in an array of public, private,

and government services created by the French Mandate government particularly but

not exclusively in Beirut.57

This broad historical overview is meant only to give an idea of Beirut’s rapid growth in

wealth, power, and population. In 1892, a joint Lebanese–French enterprise built Beirut’s

port as a modern facility, and due to the volume of traffic, the Mandate government

expanded it in 1938. This secured a virtual monopoly on the agricultural and commer-

cial imports upon which Lebanon and Syria became dependent. Thompson states that

“the Lebanese bourgeoisie profited heavily from the financial and service industries”

surrounding the Beirut port, especially firms involved in “import–export . . . banking,

shipping, and tourism,” not to mention the satellite services around this economy.58 Con-

sequently, the new workforce observed different social practices: women were educated

and married, arranged marriages were becoming less acceptable, and couples bought

separate homes from their parents, as the construction of innumerable multifloored

apartment buildings in expanding Beirut attested.59 May Davie shows this indirectly

by studying the growth of the capital’s new neighborhoods, whereas Robert Saliba and

others provide the architectural morphology of their homes.60

Even if the growing urban middle class was demographically small, its consumption

patterns and social behavior were conspicuous and influential. Although not unique in

the Middle East, Lebanon was a crucible for consumptive practices that served as an

ideological statement for embourgeoisement. In the 1920s, Beirut became the city that

its earliest theorist divined as “the link in the great chain between East and West and

the past and present success.”61 From al-Jinan’s first issue, al-Bustani praised Beirut for

its economic ingenuity and ambition and criticized its inhabitants for their destructive

consumption of foreign over domestically produced products. Emigre Jurji Zaydan and

others wrote articles endorsing the consumption of nationally produced commodities

and the dangers of unchecked consumerism of foreign goods.62

Attracted by economic opportunity and political stability, Butrus Labaki shows how

education in Lebanon’s secular and parochial schools facilitated social advancement

in a new economic reality.63 Their 19th-century graduates, among others, would be

patrons of photographers like Sabunji, the Kovas, and the Abdallahs. Their portraitures

represented for decades the social, economic, gender, and political ideals of the emerging

bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and the culture they would forge.

T H E P U N C T U M ’S E V ID E N C E

Certainly, the majority of Lebanese were not middle class or bourgeoisie by the 1920s

and 1930s—to believe so would fall into the traps of Lebanese nationalist myth. The fifty

dynamic years of social and economic transformations were the soil from which a native

bourgeois culture sprouted and that it nourished in turn. Photography was keen to evince

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

186 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 7. (Left to right) Kamil al-Qareh: Jirjis Bou Zeid, Yusuf al-Saqqi, Elias al-Makari, 1920–30.

Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

this culture, which became synonymous with Lebanese modernity and nationalism.

Distinguishing between bourgeois portraits and “Sufi Musician” differentiates between

active subjects and passive objects of photography but also between bourgeois and

subaltern subjects. When we look at portraits of nonbourgeois subjects, the indexical

and representational content of the images is often quite different.

Unlike the subject of “Sufi Musician,” we know the names of the 1920s montagnards

in Figure 7 (left to right): Elias al-Makari, Yusuf al-Saqqi, and Jirjis Bou Zeid. Their

arms, costumes, and stiff frontal postures resemble “criminal” portraiture and images

of “rebels” in revolt against the French occupation.64 These photographs reproduce the

stereotypical representation of a specific typos found in nationalist discourse, that of

the mountain clansman. These “highlanders” may reflect the idealized “ruggedness”

and independence of the rural Lebanese identity that the Jesuit priest Herni Lammens

created, Amin Rihani valorized, and Christian nationalists championed.65 Simultane-

ously, the traits that they represent (tribalism, feudalism, parochialism, and ignorance)

are antithetical to the values of modernity and liberal individualism. If nothing else, the

portraits convey a sense of the rujula that Zaydan identified in the hooliganism of his

youth.66 For him, this popular machismo had little interest in the production of modern

knowledge and entrepreneurial capital, let alone social order.

Despite this stereotype, the subaltern subjectivity of the montagnards conveys a “punc-

tum,” as Roland Barthes writes, that maintains a tension with the other images we

have seen.67 It has been suggested that photography liberalized the economy of visual

representation, enabling those previously excluded, like the rural Lebanese peasant,

to participate in self-representation. Yet, Tagg has shown that although photography

offered a more “democratic” symbolic order, it also ushered the nonbourgeoisie into

a representational system that bound them securely to dominant discourses of class

hierarchy and state power.68 The colonial condition further complicates the class-state

configuration. Representing the peasant family was a matter of signifying tradition and

community, not modernity or individualism. In contrast, the photographs of Sabunji,

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A Social History of Early Arab Photography 187

the Kovas, and the Abdallahs assisted in naturalizing and disseminating the ethos of

the bourgeois self that purported the importance of individualism and the production of

private capital (whether that be intellectual or financial).

Buttressed by histories, journals, and fiction, some of which I have mentioned, the

images served a double function for bourgeois individualism, one public and the other

private. As in the West, the family in turn of the century Lebanon began to represent itself

as self-contained and apart from society, even apart from church/mosque and state.69

Such an assertion seems rife with contradictions when considering the hegemony of the

confessional system in Lebanon. However, the image is informed by secular indices.

For example, many of the photographs of the Lebanese bourgeoisie, Christian and

Muslim, are similar in more than displaying unveiled women. The secular image offered

a trajectory that was exclusively social, illustrating mobility, modernity, and al-nah. da-

informed social progress.70

FA M ILY H IS T O RY

If this secular schema resonates too closely with the photographic history of the bourgeois

family in the West, critical differences exist in Lebanon, particularly the triumph of a

“culture of sectarianism.”71 Created in the 19th century and institutionalized during the

Mandate, sectarianism, not bourgeois secularism, became a keystone of independent

Lebanon. Firro reveals a process of social and political recoding during the Mandate

wherein the “coalescence of the ‘old’ and ‘new’ (i.e., the preservation of the traditional

patterns within modern socioeconomic structures) created the ‘political field’ of the

new state.”72 He shows how zaim-client relations were recoded by French colonial

policies and ruling-class ideologies. Therefore, the timeless veneer of “traditional”

confessionalism had the modern function of perpetuating elites’ control of indigenous

modes of production and their monopoly on surplus capital.

If religious communalism served the interests of ruling elites by displacing class an-

tagonism, the photograph albums of families such as the Sursocks, Boustroses (Bistris),

Pharaons, Eddehs, al-Hosses, Baltajis, al-Solhs, and Salams provided a normative, shared

secular image through which the cross-confessional elites perceived and promoted

themselves.73 Meir Zamir comments that Mandate Lebanon was not a “corporation

of communities” but of “beys,” thereby preventing the consolidation of a unified, sec-

ular civitas.74 However, the portraiture of this corporation bound the bourgeoisie and

the petite bourgeoisie within a common representational field. This representational

field was secular, educated, publicly decorous, privately moral, and centered around the

individual and family. As the defining social unit, the Lebanese family was unable to

separate its identity from the representations, commodities, practices, and spaces that

signified it as modern.75

Critiquing the master narratives of the modern history of the family, Beshara Doumani

notes that the subject involves three interlocking “prestige zones” in Middle Eastern

studies: gender, Islam, and modernity.76 Doumani substantiates that “the family” is

historically contingent on intersecting social, cultural, and economic spheres and in-

terdependent issues of religion, gender roles, state power, morality, space, and modes

of production. Doumani posits that the family’s mobility and fragmentation were not

new conditions brought upon by capitalism and modernity but predate them. Moreover,

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

188 Stephen Sheehi

the importance of kinship relations increased during the modern period in order to

facilitate the circulation of capital and its social relations.77 These conclusions agree

with Samih Farsoun’s analysis that family networks dominated business and political

relations in Lebanon throughout the 20th century. However, they disagree with his notion

of an unchanging “kinship organization,” which allegedly “remained fundamentally the

same . . . during the Mandate era.”78

Akram Khater challenges Farsoun’s static family, showing that “between 1890 and

1920 the Lebanese expatriate community constructed a new set of relations that were

neither modern nor traditional, neither Eastern nor Western. Rather, these new identities

were peculiar to their individual, familial, and communal historical experiences.”79

Indeed, the North American immigrant communities were not removed from social

developments in the homeland. The modern family that was proposed to the immigrant

was predicated on “a love that develops between a young man and a young woman

without interference from their families. The purity of this love (juxtaposed with the

oppressive ‘horror’ of arranged marriages) was expected to spawn a new and separate

household made up of wife, husband, and children.”80 The Lebanese subject, however,

did not have to emigrate to discover this paradigm.

The idea of romantic love between individuals with free will was propagated by

Lebanese intellectuals for decades, from Salim al-Bustani and Niqula al-Haddad to

Gibran and Tawfiq Awad. This ideal relationship was predicated upon an a priori

extracommunal individual, a self-contained subject with incumbent rights and personal

desires in and of himself or herself. Adib Ishaq (1856–85), Francis Marrash (1836–73),

and many of the aforementioned authors contemplated this universal, humanist subject.81

Therefore, reform literature and thought served a key ideological service that photog-

raphy animated. I am suggesting that these cultural productions reified the “individual”

as the primordial unit of the socius. Even if one had to subordinate personal desires to

national interests, the nation was composed of individuals (afrad).82 This individualist

core of the national subject emerges as a tour de force in nascent exclusionary Lebanese

nationalists such as Naum Mukarzil, the editor of The Syrian Business Journal, who

imagined capitalistic individualism as a national trait.83 The bourgeois, individualist

notions of love, marriage, and family that Khater’s immigrant encountered in al-mahjar

had been introduced to the print media and popularized by photography in Lebanon by

the turn of the century.

T H E L E B A N E S E IM A G O

Faroqhi states that by the late Ottoman Empire, Muslim upper-class family portraits

“were already a part of everyday life. Women, particularly younger women, of that class,

including the Sultan’s daughters, liked to be photographed without veils and in European

dress . . . pictured at the grand piano or holding a violin.”84 The handful of nontechnical

articles on photography in turn of the century journals weave through issues of gender,

domesticity, consumption, and visual representation, appearing in columns with such

names as “Organizing the Home.” A subsection of one such commentary, “Arrangement

of Pictures,” states that photographs should be plentiful in the home, put in albums, and

exhibited in the home’s salon (ghurfat al-istiqbal). The pictures “should be gathered

in frames which you can make for little expense” from cardboard and dressed in satin,

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 189

FIGURE 8. M. Saboungi: Fahoum Family in Cairo (Jirjis, Michel, Rose, Renee, and Aida), 1920. Reprinted

with permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

velvet, or some fabric. “You can gather” and arrange these photographs “above one

another so you fill the space where you receive guests. You can spread them out on a

table and stand them up in a zigzag pattern so that every picture can be seen . . .”85

The fact that the subsection is nestled in between “Education of Children” and “A

Cheerful Face Not Expensive Furniture” underscores that photography was seen as a

domestic practice, one that would make visible the social aspirations of the family.

The deployment of images in the salon advertised the visual hierarchy of the new

family to its members and outsiders. An image by an unknown Sabunji brother (M.

Saboungi) presents the ideal Lebanese comprador family. Like many Lebanese elites,

Michel Fahoum had a thriving business in Cairo and commercial and political interests

in Lebanon.86 It is very likely that the family, or at least son Jurji, returned to Beirut.

He appears there in photographs taken in the 1930s with peers from prominent cross-

sectarian families such as the Hoss and Salam families. The Fahoum studio portrait is

illustrative of bourgeois family structure, where the father was the productive head of the

pyramid and the mother was the reproductive base (Fig. 8). The father as productive head

makes clear that he was the source of the capital accumulation that made consumption

possible. Less an act of mimicry of the West, the consumption of goods from clothes

to household items was therefore an ideological statement for the Lebanese family. Its

ability to consume—as facilitated by the father’s mercantile or bureaucratic work—

identified the native family as modern.

In contrast, the middle-class mother as the family’s reproductive base differed from

the multitasking working and peasant mother. She was responsible for the family’s

ideological as much as their biological reproduction and her children’s moral and so-

cial education, which ensured the longevity of a modern society. Her public image

represented the family’s private space. In this respect, the family portrait animated the

internalization of the vision of the earliest proponents for the emancipation and education

of Lebanese women as formulated by Lebanese intellectuals across confessions from Ah-

mad Faris al-Shidyaq to the Bustanis to Abd al-Qadir al-Qabbani.87 If commentaries and

editorials in Arabic journals dictated a normative behavior, the content and deployment

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

190 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 9. Hanna al-Alam: Sad al-Alam with his children (Zeina, Najib, and Wise), 1920. Reprinted with

permission of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

of the family portrait animated this behavior. They were public statements of the inner

space of home and its relation to the individuality and identity of its occupants.

This domestic space defined the bourgeois family’s immediate identity, setting lines

of inclusion and exclusion. In Figure 9, the children of Sad al-Alam form a wall behind

the family patriarch that demarcates him as central to knowledge, order, reproduction,

and capital. Sad founded a school in northern Lebanon, al-Alamiyya, at which his son,

Najib, taught and later ran. His sisters flanking him, Najib stands at the center as his

father’s legacy. The wall of siblings blocks out those who are peripheral to the modern

vision of self and family—whether they are the extended family or the lower classes.

This exclusion divulges the bourgeoisie’s need to distance itself from “tradition.” The

need arose from middle- and ruling-class anxieties about the rural and urban underclass,

which Jens Hanssen adeptly draws out.88 He shows that the middle class—along with

their organic intellectuals, from Butrus al-Bustani to Jurji Zaydan—created a moral

and civic code of behavior based on “personal effort” that dissociated them from the

tribalism of the populari. Al-Alam’s compositional exclusion of those in the image’s

background has the effect of identifying the insular family. Simultaneously, it distances

the family from its archaic nativeness and its correlate ignorance and backwardness.

These pejorative terms were used by intellectuals and educators not unlike Sad and

Najib al-Alam to describe the “old mentality” (al-aql al-qadım) of peasants, rural

poor, and these montagnards [Figure 7],” who are from Zghorta, the same village as

al-Alam.89 The image of the “modern” individual and family was the shared goal to

which the bourgeoisie of every confession aspired in order to distinguish themselves

from feudalism and “decadence.”

In this historical vein, Graham-Brown warns that “it would be rash to assume that

the families in these portraits automatically fit into the mould of the Western bourgeois

family.”90 She is correct that these images should be examined with critical caution as

empirical documentation of emergence of a modern middle class. However, the historical

record contradicts her contention that the family portrait “rarely reflected either reality

or even expectations” of their models. If nothing else, the photographic image was a

concrete discursive phenomenon. In her words, photography represented “the family’s

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 191

self-image and aspirations.”91 As we will see, the portrait is a gestalt of the individual

and family, expressing their expected or perceived experience.

The nuclear family was not the mark of modernity in Lebanon. Rather, the native

bourgeois family, whether it was the affluent Fahoums or the educated al-Alams, por-

tended to possess the qualities of capitalist modernity (family unity, decency, success,

education, capital). The individuals of the family strove to match the imago of the

bourgeois family (the father as productive head and mother as reproductive base) as

represented by photography. For Lacan, the imago is the mirror image of the self,

reflecting back to the infant a complete ontological presence. Simultaneously, the ego

finds itself as the other in the mirror image, forming the “imaginary” basis for the ideal

ego and thereby allowing the self-entry into the symbolic social.92

The photographic imago during al-nah. da was inspiration for and justification of bour-

geois subjectivity, its desires, and socioeconomic trajectory. The young Edgar Mishaqa

assumed editorship of his father’s journal, Najib became the principal of al-Alamiyya,

and the teen Fahoum returned to Beirut to associate with the elite families responsible

for establishing an independent Lebanon. Therefore, the photographic imago not only

expressed what it meant to be a modern family and individual but also defined the role

of each member and what he/she should desire to be.

T H E K O D A K C A M E R A A N D P E R S O N A L E X P E R IE N C E

Although studio portraiture remained important throughout the 20th century in Beirut,

Kodak and Brownie cameras were the choice of many serious amateur photographers

in Lebanon, such as Hanna and Najib al-Alam, Marie el-Khazen, and Salim Abu Izz

al-din. A technological wonder of the age, Eastman’s Kodak was the perfect mechanism

to commute seamlessly between private and public spaces. Imported into the Ottoman

Empire in 1888 by Onig Diradorian, the Brownie ensured mass access to photography,

or at least middle-class access to it. Its accessibility, ease, and mobility tightly fastened

the new bourgeois individual to the commodity culture that represented him/her. Along

with the image it produced, the Kodak itself was a commodity that reproduced and

signified a personal identity and experience that was uniquely modern.

One advertisement makes this correlation between consumerism, personal identity,

and photography unequivocal. Along with a picture of the Kodak, the advertisement’s

headlines read, “Do you remember your first ride in a car? Do you remember the first time

you rode a bicycle [darraja]?”93 Although the illustrated magazine was Egyptian-owned

and edited by an expatriate Lebanese, it reminds us of less articulate advertisements

for cameras in Beirut’s numerous magazines. Iskander Makarius, another Lebanese

expatriate in Egypt and science commentator for al-Muqtataf, foreshadowed the sen-

timent of the Kodak advertisement regarding personal experience. Before establishing

his own illustrated magazine, al-Lataif al-musawwara, he wrote a brief history of

the photographic negative. In it, he claimed that the Kodak introduced a “new era” for

photography, or what he termed “the current era of the film-negative.” The size of a book

and easy to use, “tourists who visit Egypt in the winter don’t go anywhere without their

Kodak. With it, they bind onto the face of the film the images of views [manaz. ir], which

they enjoy looking at after returning to their country.”94 The article lauds the Kodak as a

tour de force of modernity. Precise and mobile, its snapshots presented a personal self,

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

192 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 10. Najib al-Alam: Mazraa [view of al-Manar in Ras Beirut], 1927. Reprinted with permission of

the Foundation for the Arab Image.

a self of experience that was both public and private. Even Kodak’s own Arab-world

manual, How to Take Perfect Photos: A Guide to Amateur Photography, disclosed the

camera’s ability to capture the ubiquity and transparency of this experience, stating, “In

the home or outside of it in public, the Kodak will give you photographs more exact than

a photograph on polished glass.”95

Likewise, the Kodak advertisement related the camera to the automobile, the increased

popularity and availability of which coincided with the first decade of the Mandate. The

two are experiential prostheses, status symbols, and technological hallmarks of the

mechanical age. Images of automobiles abound in the personal and public albums of

Lebanese, produced by ordinary middle-class citizens like the al-Alams (Figure 10) as

well as elites like the affluent, photophilic Pharaons (Figure 11), who seemed to define

style in Mandate Lebanon as much as they enjoyed taking photographs of themselves.96

A definitive social and economic statement of their age, these images document that

the car owner is distinct from his or her peasant, rural counterpart. It is not coincidental

that the automobiles in these images often appear outside the city (Figure 10), in rural

environments, in villages, on beaches, or in valleys and mountains (Figure 12). The

FIGURE 11. Yvette Pharaon, Home in Aley, anon., 1936. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for

the Arab Image.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 193

FIGURE 12. Marie el-Khazen, anon., 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab

Image.

clusters of individuals within each automobile signify social intersections among the

family, its friends, and its outside environs. A recent exhibit entitled The Vehicle confirms

what innumerable advertisements for cars in Beiruti magazines demonstrate: that the

car detached its owner from peasant origins and community, making him or her mobile,

modern subjects of experience as opposed to a subject defined by genealogy, tribe, or

sect.97 Kodak was the tool to present a gestalt of the Lebanese individual. She or he is a

familial, a class, a confessional, a gendered, and a national subject, but these overlapping

subjectivities emanated from the totality of a monadic experiential individual.

T H E IN D IV ID U A L , C O M M O D IT IE S , A N D B E Y O N D

The Kodak represented the family as one, albeit central, defining element in the totality

of the individual. Another term particular to the gestalt of the Lebanese individual was

a person’s relationship to commodity consumption. Lauded by nationalists and decried

by romantics like Rihani and Gibran, the proliferation of commodities in Beirut defined

it as an entrepot but also as a capital of consumption. Photography documented this

inventory of the things that could not be separated from Lebanese bourgeoisie identity,

things that located it within modernity.

The image of Marie el-Khazen’s nephew in Beirut (Figure 13) articulates how pho-

tography promulgated the signs of modern consumption and its role in social order but

also individual and class identity. The image exemplifies the lessons of modern child

rearing that regularly appeared in the print media of the day, intended to elevate a new

generation of mothers, fathers, and children. For example, Rose Yusuf, born Fatimah

Yusuf in Lebanon (1858–1958), who became the consummate middle-class critic, argues

in her al-Mara al-jadida that the negative effects of consumerism on men, women, and

particularly children can be counterbalanced through the correct combination of “na-

tionalistic activities, music, sports, and various kinds of beneficial play and leisure.”98

We know nothing about the boy in this image other than that he was related to Khazen

(1899–1983), a rare example of an amateur woman photographer. Khazen, a daughter

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

194 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 13. Marie el-Khazen, anon., 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab

Image.

in an aristocratic family that had managed to transform itself into a member of the new

capitalist and sectarian elite, was an active socialite. An extremely prolific amateur, her

images and the thousands of undeveloped negatives she left upon her death are untitled

and undated.99 The class identity of this boy is apparent. The parents have surrounded

him with the requisite emblems of modernity (piano, drum, ball, toy soldier, rifle, and

automobile), urbanely demonstrating the correct way to be a consumer.

Khazen’s class status comes through clearly in her images and is closely associated

with the consumerist compulsion of the 1920s. A comic in al-Musawwar, a journal

run by Zaydan’s sons Emile and Shakib, illustrates the collapse of the commodity with

bourgeois identity as well as the gendered bourgeois body. In the comic, the head and

limbs of a woman are drawn as dismembered from her jacket, skirt, and shoes; only

together do they make a complete composite picture. The caption reads, “Woman as

a woman sees her [the clothes]. Woman as man sees her [the body].”100 This article

negligently overlooks the critical fact that gender was a linchpin between consumerism,

photography, and bourgeois self-formation. However, I would like to acknowledge how

this linchpin was articulated by Khazen’s oeuvre and the cartoon’s caption. They narrate

the collapse of modern female subjectivity with her objectified body and the commodities

that delineated it and her “individuality.”

The folding of the commodity into the subject made it constitutive of bourgeois

selfhood as much as the family. The consumption of commodities—house, automo-

bile, camera, clothes, mass-produced toys, instruments, and so on—signified that the

owner was a modern desiring individual. This took on an added ideological tenor in the

Lebanese context as the Mandate government institutionalized the “open economy” of

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 195

FIGURE 14. Hanna al-Alam, “Najib, Zeina, and Wise al-Alam” at Rawcheh, 1928. Reprinted with permis-

sion of the Foundation for the Arab Image.

the republic. Nationalist ideologues such as Chiha, Samne, Corm, and Malek helped the

French and Lebanese theorize how capitalist commerce and consumption were national

traits that distinguished Lebanese from their backward Arab brethren. The photograph

condensed commodities with these national, class, and familial elements of the indi-

vidual self. For example, although residents of the rural North, Najib and his brother,

Hanna, a Paris-educated physician, frequented Beirut and represented themselves in their

photography as urban, cosmopolitan men. Therefore, by photographing themselves and

their family in front of Beirut landmarks such as al-Manara (Figure 10) and “Sakharat

Rawcheh” (Figure 14), they are clearly expressing an ideological position regarding

their own personal identities, their social and special mobility, and their representational

and class differences from their Zghortawi concitoyen. Therefore, the brothers’ album

presents a group of educated, well-dressed, “modern” Lebanese siblings, each with

shared but individual identities.

Khazen’s portfolio extends beyond the al-Alams in number and scope. Her end-

less images document her home, friends, relatives, and travels throughout Lebanon,

from Baalbek to Maamaltain to Akkar. Unmarried, independent, and reminiscent of

Gertrude Bell, her photographs of peasants and bedouin display an anthropological

impulse. These images are sensitive and anticipate the photographic oeuvre of pho-

tophilic bedouin scholars like Jibrail Jabbur. Despite this, the images have the effect

of representing subaltern classes as traditional and communal (Figure 15) in contrast

to her own bourgeois individualism. Her ethnographic photographs are compendia to

the solitary images of Khazen. Always well dressed, she poses alone at the Beirut port,

on a rocky harbor, on a beach (Figure 16), on a nameless mountain, or at a peasant’s

farm. The sartorial signifiers melt into these solitary images to communicate the liberty

and independence of Marie in the mode of Gertrude Bell. Like Bell, her photography

commutes between classes, confessionals, and provinces without disturbing her own

individual identity. If commodity consumption was an ideological statement of national

identity in the much-lauded “Switzerland of the East,” the personal experience invoked

by al-Alam’s and Khazen’s cameras was as separate from the nation as much as it was

a part of it.

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196 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 15. Marie Khazen [Rural Men Dabkeh], 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for

the Arab Image.

Photography in the early decades of the 20th century manifested an original compul-

sion to first find one’s being in the desire for things, not only in the things themselves.

It reinforced the myth narrated in contemporaneous Lebanese romantic literature, that

the subject could leave the confines of capitalist and national space and time. In this

fiction, commodities that illustrate the young lovers’ class identity disappear from sites

where they fall in love, such as gardens, mountains, streets, or fields. Lovers—usually

compradors or enlightened peasants—assert their individuality and establish lives apart

from their oppressive parents, evil uncles, wicked aunts, or covetous cousins—not to

mention tyrannical oligarchs and repressive tradition.101

The amateur snapshot acted similarly, albeit in a less conspicuous way. Like the

image of Khazen fishing on the beach, the photograph disassociated Lebanese bour-

geois subjects from necessity itself and even removed them from the very property

and commodities that gave them their national and class identity as modern subjects.102

The ability to recognize class with minimal visual and material markers signifies that

photography created a new priority for identity, that selfhood of the individual is a priori.

FIGURE 16. Marie el-Khazen, Marie on the beach at Jounieh, 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the

Foundation for the Arab Image.

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A Social History of Early Arab Photography 197

FIGURE 17. Najib al-Alam, self-portrait, 1930. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab

Image.

The body is a self-contained “zone of signification” for individual selfhood that precedes

the social relations of communal, class, and national identity.103

The photography of the al-Alams and Khazen interweaves individual experiences

with overlapping national, class, and familial identities (children, wives, siblings, and

friends, and homes and cars). The individual experience of the bourgeois Lebanese as

embodied by their self-representation found its ontology in the things of modernity, in

modes of production particular to it, and the places and spaces that are exclusive to

consumer culture. At the same time, the bourgeois individual precedes this ontology,

existing separately from society, just like Marie on the beach. Amateur photographs

such as those displayed by Najib al-Alam’s image in the mirror (Figure 17) are literally

the imago of the bourgeois self. His photograph is a distilled imago of his selfhood,

which supersedes the commodities of his toilette, in the foreground. As in all snapshot

representation, he exists as an individual, both part of and apart from his national and

class identity.

The photograph animated the disappearance of the commodity into body seamlessly.

It is instrumental in an ontological–political mystification, that is, the individual—

upon which national, confessional, and class affiliation transpires—rests on the natu-

ralness of a desiring self. Amateur photography, even more than studio photography,

shows how the private self—the individual—finds its signifiers in commodities. Upon

their naturalization, these commodities could disappear, because the desiring subject

itself became a signifier for them. In Lebanon, this gestalt of individual selfhood is

codified in its constitution, adopted in 1926. The preamble, Article 8 (personal lib-

erty), Article 13 (expression), and Article 15 (property) protected “liberty of the in-

dividual” and ensured “private initiative and the right of private property,” protecting

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

198 Stephen Sheehi

the sanctity of the home, conscience, religious belief, assembly, representation, and

education.

C O N C L U S IO N

The 1926 Lebanese Constitution expressed the consolidation of a bourgeois identity,

which begs this article to conclude on another set of images that transmitted to an

individual the subjectivity its framers assumed lay at the foundation of national identity.

Odalisque-like, Lutfiyya’s sensuous photograph (Figure 18) occupies a place among a

large photographic collection taken by her husband, Salim Abu Izz al-din (1873–1943).

If Khazen’s photographs document her life of privilege, individuality, and independence,

then Abu Izz al-din weaves a narrative of earned accomplishment. A Druze born

in Abadieh and educated at the prestigious Brummana High School, Abu Izz al-din

was an official in the Maritime Company in Istanbul, an employee of the British High

Commission in Cairo, an “Officer of the British Empire,” and, finally, Assistant Director-

General of the Egyptian Ministry of Interior. His large collection presents a public and

private gentleman couched in images of a well-dressed and dignified Lutfiyya and his

two children (Aziza and Fuad) as well as their friends, dog, houses, servants, horses,

and gardens in Lebanon and Egypt. The public face puts forth the man in his official

capacity as a state functionaire, dignified and commanding (Figure 19). The private is

a bourgeois individual, relaxed but confident, dapper, and educated (as signaled by the

tarbush; Figure 20). As a male, the two are inevitably connected.

Taken in 1902, the image of a reclining Lutfiyya contrasts with those of her properly

dressed in front of her house, in her parlor, or with her children, sisters, and friends.

It sharply conveys Lutfiyya’s agency, which is not as sexual in nature as much as it

is libidinal. Less an economy of sexual instincts, libidinal energies are projective and

find satisfaction in specific object relations.104 Lutfiyya’s body is washed in light; her

sensual eye contact with the camera held by her husband and her long, flowing hair

are statements of desire. The image announces the desires of her position as a wife,

a mother, a consumer, and as desired object. Not as passive as the manifest content

FIGURE 18. Salim Abu Izz al-din, Lutfiyya, 1902. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the Arab

Image.

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A Social History of Early Arab Photography 199

FIGURE 19. Salim Abu Izz al-din, on a boat to Istanbul from Egypt, ca. 1898. Reprinted with permission of

the Foundation for the Arab Image.

suggests, the activity of her desire is signified by her affectionate and unabashed eye

contact. Lutfiyya’s unrestrained comfort rests on the couch that serves as the backdrop

for the many images of her children and even a dog. The couch that first signifies the

family and then itself as a commodity, therefore, informs the identity of Lutfiyya, who is

visibly a desiring self that presupposes her class, confessional, and/or national identity.

As an amateur photograph, Lutfiyya’s image is rare for its age. However, by the 1920s,

its narrative had become commonplace in bourgeois photography. The constitution

summed up the imago of the self-contained Lebanese as represented in al-Alam’s

FIGURE 20. Abu Izz al-din [Salim in his garden in Egypt], 1902. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation

for the Arab Image.

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200 Stephen Sheehi

FIGURE 21. Marie el-Khazen, Sister Hoda, 1920–30. Reprinted with permission of the Foundation for the

Arab Image.

self-portrait in the mirror (Figure 17) or images of individuals in nature, such as Khazen

on the beach (Figure 16). In this way, the photograph of Khazen’s sister is a nexus of

several of the issues previously discussed (Figure 21). A wife of a Lebanese merchant

living in Egypt, her direct eye contact with the camera indicates an activity upon which

we accept her as a subject of leisure. This active agency is the source of object relations

that define her personal identity, her identity as a desiring self. In her ancestral home, her

feet rest on a crate of imported French Vegetalin, her body reclines in a wicker rocker, and

one of the two mirrors that appear in several other images of the Khazen family forms the

background. Living in Egypt, she is a member of the privileged expatriate community

that could maintain residence in Lebanon and abroad. As the wife of a merchant, she

represents commerce along with bourgeois domesticity. These qualities take on a further

nationalistic tenor when realizing that she was a daughter of an aristocrat. The image

sums up the various aforementioned tenets of the liberal constitution that undercut the

normative representational field of the bourgeois individual in Lebanon. That Khazen’s

sister is an emigre to Egypt further calls attention to the Ottoman legacy of Lebanon’s

bourgeoisie and reminds us of the economic and cultural connections between cities like

Cairo and Beirut; Lebanese compradors owned businesses and journals in Egypt and

worked in schools and the government, only later to return to Lebanon and join the new,

landed middle class.

In this less than comprehensive prolegomenon, I have regrettably ignored a nuanced

unpacking of gender’s role in photography, consumerism, and bourgeois subjectivity, nor

have I discussed how representation of peasants, proletarians, lumpen classes, soldiers,

students, and clerics played an active role in identity formation throughout Lebanon.

Rather, this article scratches at how photography in Lebanon served to reify the imago

of a bourgeois individual who was a composite totality of private and public identities.

This article begins to explain how the photographic image naturalized the discourses of

individualist, class, nationalist, and consumer desire that were germinated in the political

economy and the organic intellectual culture both preceding and during the French Man-

date. Indeed, the photographic practices of the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean—whether

Arab, Turkish, or Armenian—similarly represented the process of embourgeoisement

under way in cities such as Beirut, Cairo, Haifa, and Istanbul. Similarities aside, the

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 201

socioeconomic and cultural history of Mandate Lebanon contrasts with this history

of Palestine, Syria, or the more economically diverse, affluent, and powerful Egypt.

Photography assisted in instituting a new process of desiring capitalist production,

accumulation, and consumption in Lebanon, but beyond that, the imago of the native

individual erased the socially constructed nature of such desire.

N O T E S

Author’s note: I thank Irene Beirman, Leo Ching, Michelle Hartman, Allan Hibbard, Lareesa Isa, Samir

Khalaf, Akira Mizuta Lippit, Nancy Micklewright, Walid Raad, and Eric Zakim for their generous comments

regarding the content of this article and Akram Zaatari, Zeina Arida, and Tamara Suwaya at the Foundation

for the Arab Image in Beirut for their active support during the research process. Dr. Judith Tucker, Sylvia

Whitman, and the staff at IJMES were extremely helpful in the editing of the text, as well as hammering

out the logistical challenges of publishing an article on visual culture. Likewise, anonymous readers made

invaluable comments to improve this article. Although the images did not make it into this article, the Special

Collections staff at the Getty Research Institute helped me search through the Pierre de Gigord Ottoman

Collection, allowing me to locate early Lebanese–Arab photography in relation to its larger Ottoman context.

My research was supported by grants from the Franklin Center for International Studies at Duke University, a

Mellon Research Grant from the Center for Social and Behavior Studies, and a Faculty Research Grant from

the Provost Office at the American University of Beirut. All images and information in this article are from

the archives of the Foundation for the Arab Image (FAI) in Beirut. I add titles, dates, and/or photographers

when able to approximate that information or if provided by the archives.1Lea Barakat, “al-Taswir wa-l-tazwiq,” al-Muqtataf 11 (1886–87): 178–79.2Polemics against Arab “civil society” have intensified after 11 September 2001 by ideological hacks such

as Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami, Daniel Pipes, and Charles Krauthammer. For an example of similar neoliberal

pedantry written by Arab pundits in English, see Hazim Saghieh, ed., The Predicament of the Individual in

the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2001).3Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, 4th ed. (New York: MOMA, 1964), 12. For an ex-

amination of positivist paradigms within Arab subjectivity, see Stephen Sheehi, Foundation of Modern Arab

Identity (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2004).4The following are some examples. For how to fix an image on paper, see “al-Taswir al-fotografi” in

“Masa’il wa ajwiba” al-Muqtataf 19 (1895): 303; for Egyptian-based Lebanese photographer Louis Badwar’s

instructions on developing a photograph, see “al-Fotografiyya” in “Bab al-sina’a,” al-Muqtataf 19 (1895):

291–93; for treating paper for different tones, see “Taswid al-suwar al-fotografiyya” in al-Muqtataf 24 (1899):

366.5Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women: The Portrayal of Women in Photography of the Middle East,

1860–1950 (London: Quartet, 1988), 59.6For a discussion of these “patterns,” see Julia Hirsh, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning and Effect

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 99.7Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1997), 72, 95–96.8Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B.

Tauris, 2000), 251.9Noel Paymal Lerebours, Prix-courant des daguerreotypes (n.p., 1843), Excursions daguerriennes: Vues

et monuments les plus remarquables de globe (Paris: n.p., 1842), pl. no. 57.10For a study of the Bonfils, see Carney Gavin, The Image of the East: Photographs by Bonfils (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1982).11See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota, 1986) and David

Prochaska, “Archive of l’Algerie Imaginaire,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 373–420.12For some examples, see Paul Chevedden, The Photographic Heritage of the Near East (Malibu: Undena,

1981); Fouad Debbas, Romantic Lebanon: The European View 1700–1900 (London: British Lebanese Associ-

ation, 1986), Our Memory (Beirut: Naufal, 1986); Michel Fani, Liban 1848–1914: L’Atelier photographique

de Ghazir (Paris: Editions de l’Escalier, 1995); Carney Gavin, Legacy of Light: Photographs from the Last

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

202 Stephen Sheehi

Century (Araya, Liban, Impieties Catholique, 1983); Nancy Micklewright, A Victorian Traveler in the Middle

East (London: Ashgate, 2003); and Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885)

(New York: Abrams, 1988).13Graham-Brown, Images of Women. For the relationship between anthropology and photography, see

Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920 (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press,

1994).14Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876–1948 (Wash-

ington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1984).15Annelies Moors, “Presenting Palestine’s Population Premonitions of the Nakba,” MIT Electronic Journal

of Middle East Studies 1 (May 2001): 1–12, http://web.mit.edu/cis/www.mitejmes.16Ibid., 5.17Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 56.18Nancy Micklewright, “Personal, Public, and Political (Re)Constructions: Photographs and Consump-

tion,” in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, Donald Quataert, ed.

(Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000), 261–88.19Wolf-Deiter Lemke, “Ottoman Photography: Recording and Contributing to Modernity,” in The Empire

in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman Empire (Beirut: Ergon Verlag Wurzburg, 2002),

237–38.20Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258–59.21Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 57.22The French prohibited Arabs and Berbers in North Africa from many professions, including those in

the visual arts. For the change in this policy toward Lyautey’s “nativist” approach regarding indigenes and

the beaux arts, see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,

2003), 200–203.23Miller provides important information from Armenian sources about Arab-Armenian photographers.

See Dickenson Jenkins Miller, “The Craftman’s Art: Armenians and the Growth of Photography in the Near

East (1856–1981)” (master’s thesis, American University of Beirut, 1981). Muhsin al-Yamin researches many

unknown Lebanese photographers; see Muhsin al-Yamin, “Yawmiyyat Wadi’ Nawfal 1854–74,” al-Mustaqbal,

27 April 2000. Badr el-Hage provides scattered information regarding Damascus; see Des Photographes a

Damas 1840–1918 (Paris: Marval, 2000).24Phillippe Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa al-Arabiyya, vol. III (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Adabiyya, 1913), 214.

For information about Dumas, see Carney Gavin, Legacy of Light: 4.25See Leon Zolondek, “Sabunji in England” Middle East Studies 14 (1978): 102–15. For his activity

supporting Egyptian independence, see Wilfred Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt

(London: Unwin, 1907).26Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa, 72.27Ibid., 72.28Engin Cizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Haset Kitabevi A. S., 1987), 116.29See Muhsin Yammin, “David kharaj min al-adraj wa Louis khala thawb al-kahnut,” Mulhaq al-nahar,

10 May 1997.30See “Amal al-Maraya,” al-Muqtataf 18 (1983-84): 208, and “Talmi al-suwar,” al-Muqtataf 8 (1883–

84): 684–85, for explanations of the processes and techniques for developing and polishing photographs.31Engin Cizgen, 116–17.32See Salim’s portrait on the cover of Salim al-Bustani, ed. Michel Juha (London: Riad al-Rayyes, 1989).

Zaydan remarked how Ibrahim al-Yaziji always wore shirwal and a fez. Jurji Zaydan, Mudhakkirat Jurji

Zaydan (Beirut: Dar al-kitab al-jadid, 1968), 40. Jirousek comments on how the fez and shirwal were the

uniform for a reformed bureaucracy. Charlotte Jirousek, “The Transition of Mass Fashion System Dress

in the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Consumption Studies, 224. Brummett shows how fashion was a dynamic

site of ideological contention where traditional clothes symbolized both nationalism and backwardness, just

as European dress signified progress and immorality. Palmira Brummett, Image and Imperialism in the

Ottoman Revolutionary Press 1908–1911 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2000), 221–

58.33For examples, see Salim al-Bustani’s romantic novel al-Huyam fi jinan al-sham in al-Jinan, vol. 1 (1870),

and Niqula Bistrus’ short story, “Riwayat Fuad” in al-Muqtataf 12 (1887): 127–28. For a discussion of the

Salim al-Bustani and romance novels, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 76–106.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

A Social History of Early Arab Photography 203

34For his memories about the emerging bourgeoisie of Beirut, see Shakir al-Khuri, Majma al-Masarrat

(Beirut: Dar al-Ittihad, 1908). Khalil al-Khuri wrote Asr al-jadid (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Suriyya, 1863) and

al-Nashaid al-fuadiyya (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Suriyya, n.d).35Tarrazi, Tarikh al-sahafa, vol. III, 61.36Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258. Faroqhi asserts that visual culture in the Balkans and Asia Minor

was linked to the development of secularism in Turkey.37For some of their works, see Gilbert Beauge and Engin Cizgen, Images d’empire: Aux origins de la

photographie en Turquie: Collection of Pierre de Gigord (Istanbul: Institut d’etudes francaises d’Istanbul,

[1993?]). The Gigord Collection is housed at Getty Research Institute. Numbering more than 6,000 images, it

contains albums of photographs by the Abdallah Freres, Pascal Sebah, Legekian, and European photographers,

many patronized by the sultan.38Muhsin al-Yamin, “Thalatha imtahanou al-shughal bi-l-shamas wa zhalaliha,” Mulhaq al-nahar, 30

August 1999, 14–15.39“Al-Fotografiyya al-suriyya,” al-Muqtataf 1 (1876–77): 685.40Miller, “The Craftman’s Art,” 15. Perez, Focus East, 124.41Miller, “The Craftman’s Art,” 18. Ozendes’ biography in Turkish reproduces many of Abdallah’s pho-

tographs; see Engin Ozendes, Abdullah Freres: Osmanli Sarayinin Fotografcilari (Istanbul: YKY, 1998).42Cizgen, Photography in the Ottoman Empire, 94.43Doubtful that they relocated, the nominal converts were court employees, far from Hamidian massacres

of the Armenians between 1894 and 1896. The Cairene photographs probably originate from their tours for

the Sultan’s albums.44John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on the Photographies and Histories (Amherst, Mass.:

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 37.45A catalogue of the dress of the Ottoman people was presented at the Universal Exposition at Vienna;

see Osman Hamdy Bey, Les Costume Populaires de La Turquie en 1873 (Constantinople: Levant Times &

Shipping Gazette, 1873). Pascal Sebah was one of the most prominent Ottoman photographers, with strong

ties to the ruling elite and nascent bourgeoisie. He traveled throughout the Levant and Egypt and maintained

a prolific studio in Istanbul’s Pera district and in Cairo. His son, Jean, continued the studio’s great success

after his father’s death, which seems to have been between 1886 and 1890. Like the Kovas, Pascal Sebah won

several awards in exhibitions in Europe, including a medal at the Exposition Universelle in 1878. Despite the

prominence of his oeuvre, his life remains enigmatic, and the few studies on him fail to provide significant

source material for their assertions. See Perez, Focus East, 222, and Engin Ozendes, From Sebah & Jouillier

to Foto Sebah (Istanbul: YKY, 2000).46Tagg,Burden of Representation, 68.47Hirsh, Family Photographs, 85.48Suren Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production of Modern Bodies (Albany, N.Y.: State University

of New York Press, 1996), 59. For additional discussions on photography’s role in the representation of the

body and capitalist forms of social discipline, see Gisele Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: David

Godine, 1980); Alan Sekula, “The Body and Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning, ed. Richard Bolton

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 343–89.49Al-Bustani states that Lebanon is “the link in the great global chain” connecting East and West. Butrus

al-Bustani, Nafir suriyya (Beirut: Dar Fikr li-l-Abhath wa-l-Nashr, 1990), ix, 50–51.50I borrow the term “Lebanonism” from Asad AbuKhalil and his blog http://www.angryarab.blogspot.com.

Nujaim’s book influenced many schools of Libanism; see Bulous Nujaim, La Question du Liban (Jounieh:

Biban, 1961 [1908]). See also Kais Firro, “Lebanese Nationalism vs. Arabism: From Bulum Nujaym to Michel

Chiha,” Middle East Studies 40:5 (Sept. 2004):1–27. Stressing mercantile “Phoenician” identity, Michel Chiha

was the ideologue for Lebanon’s “special role” in the Arab world. Unlike exclusionist Charles Corm, George

Samnah, and Emile Eddeh, he saw Lebanon as minorities united by interdependence and “willing interaction.”

See Michelle Hartman and Alessandro Olsaretti, “ ‘The First Boat and the First Oar’: Inventions of Lebanon in

the Writing of Michel Chiha,” Radical History Review 86 (Spring 2003): 37–65. For a critique of Nujaim, see

Ahmed Beydoun, Identiteconfessionelle et temps social chez les historiens libanais contemporains (Beirut:

UniversiteLibanaise, 1984).51For an overview of various aspects of economic history of the empire, see Donald Quataert et al.,

An Economic History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. II 1600–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994). In addition, for a social history of the bourgeoisie in the empire, see Muge Gocek, Rise of the

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204 Stephen Sheehi

Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1996).52Salim al-Bustani, “al-Sinaah,” in al-Jinan, vol. I, 1870, 49–51. For one discussion of the changing

practices in consumption, see Elizabeth B. Frierson’s “Cheap and Easy: The Creation of Consumer Culture in

Late Ottoman Society,” in Consumption Studies, 243–87.53Gates, The Merchant Republic, 28–29.54See Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon 1870–1920

(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001). For 19th-century economic history of Lebanon, see

Dominique Chevallier, La Societedu Mont Liban a l’epoque de la Revolution Industrielle en Europe (Paris:

Paul Geunther, 1971), and Butrus Labaki, Introduction a l’histoire economique du Liban: soie et commerce

exterieur en fin de periode ottomane (1840–1914) (Beirut: UniversiteLibanaise, 1984).55See Leila Fawaz’s Merchants and Migration in 19th-Century Beirut (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1983); also see Fawaz’s An Occasion for War: Civil Conflict in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860

(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1994).56See Khater, Inventing Home; Moise Berenstein, The Levant under French Mandate and Problems of the

Emigration and Immigration (Geneva: International Labor Review, 1936), and Nadim Shehadi and Albert

Hourani, ed., Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993).57Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 62. Carolyn

Gates, The Merchant Republic: The Rise of an Open Economy (London: Tauris and Centre for Lebanese

Studies, 1998).58Thompson, Colonial Citizens, 80.59Ibid., 36–37.60See May Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs (Beirut: CERMOC, 1997) and Beyrouth 1825–1975 (Beirut:

Ordre de Ingeniuere Architects, 2001); Robert Saliba, Beirut 1920–1940: Domestic Architecture between

Tradition and Modernity (Beirut: Order of Engineers and Architects, 1998). Anne Mollenhauer, “The Central

Hall House: Regional Commonalities and Local Specificities,” in The Empire in the City.61See Butrus al-Bustani, “Fi madinat Beirut,” in Amal al-jamiyya al-ilmiyya al-suriyya li-l-funun wa-

l-ulum 1868–1879, compiled by Yusuf Qizma Khuri (Beirut: Dar al-Hamra, 1990), 167–73; and Salim

al-Bustani, “Asbab taqaddum Bayrut wa numuha al-sari” (Reasons for the progress of Beirut and its rapid

growth), al-Jinan 60 (1884): 449–51.62Zaydan compares true progress to its superficial trappings, where debt and social ills (promiscuity, gam-

bling, drinking, consumerism) stopped advancement and caused “the foreign intervention into the country’s

administration” (“al-Nahda al-Masriyya al-akhira,” in al-Hilal 1 (1892), 124. Prominent in the 1870s, one

short story narrates the marriage of the protagonist, who is bankrupted by the ostentatious wedding. Salim

al-Bustani, “Zifaf Farid,” in al-Jinan II (1871), 447–53.63See Butrus Labaki, Education et mobilitesociale dan la societemulticommunautaire du Liban (Frankfurt:

Deutsche Institute, 1988).64Photographs depicting the apprehension of “criminal leaders” and their “gangs,” such as Milham Qasim

by French Mandate authorities appear 1924–1925; see al-Marid 1921–1932 (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2001), for

example those dating from July through August 1925, p. 20. Note similar images, such as those of Druze leader

Fawzi al-Qawaqji (January–March 1927, p. 20) and a bandoleer-festooned woman named Rashida al-Zaybaq

(September–October 1926, p. 20). In the original publication, see “several pictures in the courtroom in the

Justice Ministry during the trial of Mahmoud al-Rifa‘ah and his gang,” al-Marid, 21 Tashrin I, 1923, no.

251:1). Contrast the portraits of dignitaries, intellectuals, and politicians to those photographs of the leaders

of “bandits” (i.e., warriors revolting against the French occupation) in al-Suwaida and Mount Lebanon that

were published throughout the 1927 edition of al-Asrar al-musawwara (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 2002).65Rihani states that “the freedom of the individual is still the supreme end with the Oriental.” Ameen

(Amin) Rihani, The Path of Vision: Pocket Essays of East and West (New York: White & Co., 1921), 173,

158. Sawda argued for the Maronite origins of the “Marada.” Yusuf Sawdah, Fi sabil Lubnan (Beirut: Dar

al-Arz, 1921). For a historiographic critique of Lammens’ “mountain refuge,” see Kamal Salibi, A House

of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press,

1988), 130–50.66Zaydan, Mudhakkirat, 12. Makdisi discusses how the Ottoman center constructed the ahal Jabal Lubnan

as “pre-modern” savages antithetical to the civilization of the empire. Ussama Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman

Imperialism: Modernity, Violence, and the Cultural Logic of Ottoman Reform,” in The Empire in the City.

xxx mes39206 February 23, 2007 22:19

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67The “punctum” is the “accident” of the photograph that divulges the image’s alternative history. Roland

Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Want, 1981), 27. For an example

of the punctum’s “alternative histories,” see Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology,

and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 101.68Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida; Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 1–2. For a critique of Tagg, see

Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

1997), 7, and “Photography, Power, and Representation,” in Afterimage 16 no. 4 (1988): 7–9.69Hirsh, Family Photographs, 35.70Ibid., 36.71For a meticulous examination of the development of the “culture of sectarianism” during the 19th century

and how it cannot be separated from modernity in Lebanon, see Ussama Makdisi’s rigorous The Culture of

Sectarianism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000). For a broader sociological study, see

Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).72See Kais Firro, Inventing Lebanon: Nationalism and the State under the Mandate (London: I. B. Tauris,

2003), 98.73Images of these families abound in the magazines, memoirs, and personal histories of the Mandate. For

example, see the unscholarly local history of Ras Beirut by itsmukhtar Kamal Rebeiz, Rizq Allahahidik

al-ayam . . . Ya Ras Beirut (Beirut: al-Matbaa al-Musawwara, 1986).74Meir Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest: The Road to Statehood 1926–1939 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 245.75For an article expressing the social dangers arising from new consumptive social practices, see “Shabban

al-yawm,” in al-Hilal 5:3 39.76Beshara Doumani, ed., Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany,

N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003), 2. For a gendered approach, see Suad Joseph, ed., Intimate

Selving in Arab Families (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1999).77Ibid., 5. See Philippe Fargues, “Family and Household in Mid-19th Century Cairo,” in Family History,

23–50, and Mary Ann Fay, “From Warrior-Grandees to Domesticated Bourgeoisie,” in Family History, 77–97.78Samih Farsoun, “Family Structure and Society in Modern Lebanon,” in Peoples and Cultures of the

Middle East, vol. II, Louise Sweet, ed. (New York: Natural History Press, 1970), 257–307.79Akram Khater, “‘Queen of the House?’ Making Immigrant Lebanese Families in the Mahjar,” in Family

History, 293.80Ibid., 287.81Marrash and Ishaq translated into Arabic the Enlightenment concepts of individual rights and the

fraternity of “man.” See Adib Ishaq, al-Darar (Alexandria: Matba’at al-Mahrusa, 1886), and Francis Marrash,

Ghabat al-haqq (London: Riad al-Rayyes, 1989 [1865]). Niqula al-Haddad’s novels also posited the centrality

of personal desires and freedom to the individual. See Thawrat al-awatif ([Alexandria?]: n.p., n.d.).82Al-Bustani called upon the Syro-Lebanese citizen to put aside personal desires for national unity and

concord. Al-Bustani, Nafir suriyya. See Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 55–57.83Firro, Inventing Lebanon, 18.84Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 258.85“Tadbir al-manzil,” al-Muqtataf 14 (1889-90): 484–85.86See Thomas Philipp,The Syrians in Egypt 1725–1975 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985).87Decades before Qassim Amin, women’s emancipation was a centerpiece of reform in Lebanon, as

expressed in editorials in al-Jinan, al-Muqtataf, Lisan al-hal, and Thamarat al-funun. As early as the 1850s,

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and al-Bustani championed women’s education and their increased role in society.

See Maqallat wa khutub fi-l-tarbiyya: Asr al-nahda al-haditha (Beirut: Dar al-Hamra, 1990).88Jens Hanssen, Fin de Siecle Beirut: The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005).89Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity, 15–45.90Graham-Brown, Images of Women, 95.91Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 95 (my italics), 97.92Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative in the Function of the I,” in Ecrits (New York: Norton,

1977), 2–3.93Misr al-haditha al-musawwara, March 1928 (no. 6), inside front cover.94Iskander Makarius, “al-Film aw al-ruqq,” al-Muqtataf 30 (1905): 224–25.95Kifiyyat al-husul ala suwar mutaqina: Dalil li-hiwayat al-taswir al-shamsi (Cairo: Kodak Co. 1927), 6.

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96The Pharaons were a wealthy family, intermarried with President Beshara al-Khuri and Michel Chiha,

ideological architect of the Lebanese state and co-owner of the Chiha-Pharaon Bank.97Akram Zaatari, ed., The Vehicle (Beirut: Foundation for the Arab Image, 1999). Iskander Marakius’

journal highlights how class, gender, and consumption were intertwined with photography, representing

bourgeois, personal experience. A Studebaker advertisement states, “Winter has come upon you and the

best automobile will protect your health from sickness and cold and the harshness of wind and guarantee

your comfort is Studebaker . . . protect you from the tortuous elements of winter leaving you in comfort.” The

driver, a woman, is driving away from a sketchy image of men pushing a mining car. Al-Lataif al-musawwara,

1923, 2.98Rose Yusuf, al-Mara al-jadida, 1926, 107.99Histoires intimes (Beirut: Actes Sud, n.d.), 3.

100Comic in al-Musawwir 1, no. 5 (1925): 11 (my parentheses).101The individual self, love, and spirit apart from materialism were the basis for the romantic novel, starting

with Gibran’s al-Ajnihat al-mutakassirah (New York: Mira’at al-Gharb, 1912). For the relationship between

the romance novel and national subjectivity in the 19th-century Arab world, see Sheehi, Foundations of Modern

Arab Identity, 76–106. For a noncritical discussion of the romantic aesthetic, see Joseph Abou-Rizk, Regards

sur la peinture au liban (Beirut: Dar al-Funoon, 1956), and Muhammad Abu-Zariq, Min al-tasis ila al-

hadatha f-il-fann al-tashkili al-Arab al-muasir (Beirut: al-Mu’assah al-Arabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashar,

2000).102Hirsh, Family Photographs, 64.103For an example taken from columns on personal style, health, and hygiene advising how to care for

one’s body, see “How to Extend Your Life,” al-Musawwir 1, no. 1 (1924):15. For the body as a “zone of

significance,” see Lalvani, Photography, Vision, and the Production, 66.104Libidinal desire finds its expression in the availability or prohibition of objects. Simultaneously, the

act of desiring is an act of individuation. For an extended definition of libido theory, see Sigmund Freud,

New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, James Starkey, trans. (New York: Norton, 1989), 118–38, and

Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 60–63.