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

ABSTRACT

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

KEYWORDS:

• cross-cultural exchange
• Edward Said
• Edward Said and music
• Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann
• music and nineteenth-century visual culture
• Nazlı Hanım
• Orientalism
• Ottoman painting
• photography
• reading contrapuntally
• transgressive invention

My thanks to Tim Barringer, Robert Wellington and Luke Gartlan. The research for this essay was supported by the Australian Research Council.

My thanks to Tim Barringer, Robert Wellington and Luke Gartlan. The research for this essay was supported by the Australian Research Council.

Notes

¹ Letter from Princess Nazlı Hanım to ‘My dear Mademoiselle’, Stamboul, 26 November 1872: Royal Library, Copenhagen, Jerichau-Baumann Papers.

² In his interview with W. J. T. Mitchell, Said admitted to feeling ‘somewhat tongue-tied’ about the visual arts: W. J. T. Mitchell and Edward W. Said, ‘The panic of the visual: a conversation with Edward W. Said’, Boundary 2, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, 11–33 (11).

³ Linda Nochlin, ‘The imaginary Orient’, Art in America, vol. 71, no. 5, 1983, 118–31, 187–91.

⁴ See, for example, Semra Germaner and Zeynep İnankur, Constantinople and the Orientalists, trans. from the Turkish by Joyce Matthews (Istanbul: İşbank 2002), and Zeynep Çelik, ‘Speaking back to Orientalist discourse’, in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (eds), Orientalism's Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2002), 19–41.

⁵ Edward W. Said, ‘On the transgressive elements in music’, in Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press 1991), 35–72 (55). For Said's reflections on music, see also Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (New York: Vintage Books 2004).

⁶ Said, Musical Elaborations, 102.

⁷ Edward W. Said, ‘The music itself: Glenn Gould's contrapuntal vision’, Vanity Fair, vol. 46, no. 3, 1983, 97–101, 127–8 (98). See also Edward W. Said, ‘The virtuoso as intellectual’, in Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon Books 2006), 115–33.

⁸ Said, Musical Elaborations, 105. The term was taken up in poet Mahmoud Darwish's posthumous elegy to his friend Edward Said; for an analysis, see Rebecca Dyer, ‘Poetry of politics and mourning: Mahmoud Darwish's genre-transforming tribute to Edward W. Said’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, 1447–62.

⁹ See, for example, Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage 1993).

¹⁰ This essay builds on my earlier work on Princess Nazlı and Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann: Mary Roberts, ‘Harem portraiture: Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann and the Egyptian Princess Nazlı Hanım’, in Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (eds), Local/Global: Women's Painting in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2006), 77–98; Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2007), 128–49; and Mary Roberts, ‘Karşıtlıklar: Said, Sanat Tarihi ve 19. Yüzyıl İstanbul'unda Osmanlı Kimliğini Yeniden Keşfetmek’, in Uluslararası Oryantalizm Sempozyumu (Papers of the International Orientalism Symposium) (Istanbul: İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi 2007), 269–85.

¹¹ For an account of the Khedive's family and its social and cultural ties to the Ottoman imperial capital Istanbul, see M. Baha Tanman, Nil Kıyısından Boğaziçi'ne: Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Paşa Hanedanı'nın İstanbul'daki İzleri/ From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus: Traces of Kavalalı Mehmed Ali Pasha Dynasty in İstanbul (Istanbul: Istanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Yayınları 2011).

¹² This document, which advocated constitutionalism, was widely circulated by the Young Ottomans (a group of intellectuals who were an important voice of political opposition) and it had a significant influence on political thinking among the intelligentsia in this period. Mustafa Fazıl Paşa was also a benefactor to the Young Ottomans in exile. On the question of the authorship of the document, see M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2008), 103–4; and, for an account of the document in the context of the political ideals of the Young Ottoman intellectuals, see Şerif Mardin, ‘Mustafa Fazıl Paşa: mid-nineteenth-century liberalism’, in Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1962), 276–82.

¹³ On Mustafa Fazıl Paşa, see Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 276–82.

¹⁴ Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 302.

¹⁵ Leyla (Saz) Hanımefendi, ‘The weddings of Imperial Princesses’, in Leyla (Saz) Hanımefendi, The Imperial Harem of the Sultans: Daily Life at the Çırağan Palace during the 19th Century. Memoirs of Leyla (Saz) Hanımefendi, trans. from the French by Landon Thomas (Istanbul: Peva Publications 1995), 169–208; Fanny Davis, ‘Marriage’, in Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to 1918 (New York and Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1986), 61–86; ‘Women's clothing’, in Woman in Anatolia: 9000 Years of the Anatolian Woman, exhibition catalogue, Topkapı Sarayı Museum (Istanbul: Turkish Republic Ministry of Culture 1993), 256–8; Necdet Sakaoğlu, ‘Record of a royal wedding during the Tanzimat period’, National Palaces, no. 4, 1992, 168–73.

¹⁶ Levant Herald, 25 October 1872, 174, and ‘The talk of the day’, Levant Herald, 14 December 1872, 254.

¹⁷ ‘The talk of the day’, Levant Herald, 14 December 1872, 254.

¹⁸ Roderic H. Davison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa: the influence of Paris and the West on an Ottoman diplomat’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi/ The Journal of Ottoman Studies, vol. 6, 1986, 47–65 (61).

¹⁹ Francis Haskell, ‘A Turk and his pictures in nineteenth-century Paris’, in Francis Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste: Selected Essays (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1987), 175–85; Zeynep İnankur, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa’, P Dergisi, no. 2, Summer 1996, 71–80; Michèle Haddad, Khalil-Bey: un homme, une collection (Paris: Les Éditions de l'Amateur 2000).

²⁰ In France he was referred to as Khalil Bey (he was promoted in rank from Bey to Paşa in 1871). For an account of his involvement in the Parisian art world and notoriety in Second Empire Paris, see Haskell, ‘A Turk and his pictures in nineteenth-century Paris’. Davison provides a comprehensive account of Halil Şerif Paşa's political career in his two articles: Roderic H. Davison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa, Ottoman diplomat and statesman’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları Dergisi/ Journal of Ottoman Studies, vol. 2, 1981, 203–21; and Davison, ‘Halil Şerif Paşa’.

²¹ H. de Villemessant, Mémoires d'un journaliste: sixième série, mes voyages et mes prisons (Paris: E. Dentu 1878), 106.

²² Mustafa Fazıl Paşa owned a number of large homes in the Ottoman capital in Kandilli, Beyazıt, Çamlıca and Paşabahçe Sultan Tepe. For a photograph and floor plan of his yalı in Kandilli, built for his daughters Nazlı and Azize, see Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 159 and 161.

²³ The Danish Royal Collections: Amalienborg Christian VIII's Palace (Copenhagen: De Danske Kronologiske Samling 1994).

²⁴ Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder (Copenhagen: Forlagsbureauet 1881), 21. Enid Layard writes about her regular visits to Nazlı in her yalı in Kandilli in Enid Layard, Twixt Pera and Therapia: The Constantinople Diaries of Lady Layard, ed. Sinan Kuneralp (Istanbul: Isis Press 2010).

²⁵ On the rule of the Muhammad Ali Pasha dynasty, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, A Short History of Modern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985); Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984); and Ehud R. Toledano, State and Society in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).

²⁶ Nazlı had many friends within foreign diplomatic circles. Enid Layard's diaries reveal how close Nazlı was to her and her husband Henry Layard when he was the British ambassador in Istanbul from 1877 to 1880. See Layard, Twixt Pera and Therapia.

²⁷ Ronald Storrs describes her home as follows: ‘Every table was loaded with photographs glazed but not framed, and so was the old concert grand complete with pianola attachment. There must have been near a thousand photographs in the room; as well as richly framed pictures of the British Royal Family, The Sultan Abd al-Hamid, Lord Kitchener, Lord Grenfell and Lord Cromer. Not only the numerous gilt screens, but every inch of the four walls of the vast apartment, were covered with pasted pages of the illustrated papers, enabling you when bored with your neighbour to con the history of the past twenty years over his shoulder’: Ronald Storrs, The Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs (New York: Arno Press 1972), 98. Amédée Baillot de Guerville describes it as follows: ‘We took tea in the large salon, where the furniture, tables and the walls are covered with photographs of relations, friends, Sovereigns, and celebrities, of whom the Princess whilst smoking uninterruptedly, cigarette after cigarette, spoke volubly, sometimes in English, sometimes in French’: Amédée Baillot de Guerville, New Egypt, revd edn (London: William Heinemann 1906), 137.

²⁸ Jerichau-Baumann, Brogede Rejsebilleder, 25.

²⁹ Sema Öner, ‘Tanzimat Sonrası Osmanlı Saray Çevresinde Resim Etkinliği’, Ph.D. dissertation, Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, 1991; Sema Öner, ‘The role of the Ottoman palace in the development of Turkish painting following the reforms of 1839’, National Palaces, no. 4, 1992, 58–77. For an account of the Istanbul exhibitions, see Mustafa Cezar, Sanatta Batı'ya açılış ve Osman Hamdi, 2 vols (Istanbul: Erol Kerim Aksoy Kültür, Eğitim, Spor ve Sağlık vakfı yayınları 1995), II, 422–45, and Mary Roberts, ‘Genealogies of display: cross-cultural networks at the 1880s Istanbul exhibitions’, in Zeynep İnankur, Reina Lewis and Mary Roberts (eds), The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Istanbul: Pera Museum 2011), 127–42.

³⁰ For analysis of this painting in the context of Jerichau-Baumann's other Orientalist work, see Peter Nørgaard Larsen, ‘Fra nationalromantisk bondeliv til Orientens haremsmystik: Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann i dansk og europæisk 1800-tals kunst’, in Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann, exhibition catalogue, Øregaard Museum and Fyns Kunstmuseum (Hellerup: Øregaard Museum and Odense: Fyns Kunstmuseum 1997), 8–23, and Birgitte von Folsach, By the Light of the Crescent Moon: Images of the Near East in Danish Art and Literature, 1800–1875 (Copenhagen: David Collection 1996), 86.

³¹ Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egyptian Relations (London: John Murray 1968), 95.

³² See, for example, Roger Allen, ‘Writings of members of “the Nazlı circle”’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, vol. 8, 1969–70, 79–84; Michelle Raccagni, ‘Origins of Feminism in Egypt and Tunisia’, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983, 81–3; and Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995).

³³ al-Muqtataf, vol. 21, 1897. Princess Nazlı is also mentioned in Horace R. Humbold, Recollections of a Diplomatist, 2 vols (London: Edward Arnold 1902), II, 331–2.

³⁴ This photograph is reproduced in Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 306.

³⁵ For a more extended analysis of the Staffordshire photographs, see Mary Roberts, ‘Oriental dreams’, in Roberts, Intimate Outsiders, 143–9. For an analysis of other Ottoman photographic parodies of the western stereotype of the harem, see Nancy Micklewright, ‘Harem/house/set: domestic interiors in photography from the late Ottoman world’, in Marilyn Booth (ed.), Harem Histories: Envisioning Places and Living Spaces (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2010), 239–60.

³⁶ Karl Blind, ‘Young Turkey’, Fortnightly Review, vol. 66 (Old Series), 1896, 830–43 (837) (reprinted in Living Age, vol. 212, no. 2741, 16 January 1897, 163–73 (168)). Documents in the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul (Y.PRK.EŞA 30/43, HR.SYS 192/62, Y.A.HUS. 282/112 and Y.PRK.ZB.12/42) reveal that in this decade Nazlı's activities were intermittently monitored by Sultan Abdülhamid's authorities because of her political associations.

³⁷ See Tanman, From the Shores of the Nile to the Bosphorus, 302 and 306.

³⁸ Edhem Eldem, ‘Culture et signature: quelques remarques sur les signatures de clients de la Banque Impériale Ottomane au début du XXe siècle’, Études turques et ottomanes: documents de travail, no. 2, 1993, 63–74.

³⁹ See Hanioğlu's analysis of ‘The political ideas of the Young Turks’, in M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), 200–12.

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Mary Roberts

Mary Roberts is the John Schaeffer Associate Professor of British Art at the University of Sydney, and the author of Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke University Press 2007). She has co-edited four books: The Poetics and Politics of Place: Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Pera/University of Washington Press 2011), Edges of Empire (Blackwell 2005), Orientalism's Interlocutors (Duke University Press 2002) and Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power Publications 2000, 2012). Her latest book, Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture, is forthcoming from University of California Press. Email: [email protected]