The Constantinople of the late 19th century comprised a diverse cosmopolis, rapidly modernizing under the reign of the Ottoman sultans Abdulaziz (1861–1876) and Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909). Improvements in rail and shipping as well as trade agreements with various European states led to increased contact and tourism. In this complex environment Pascal Sébah (1823–1886) was born, grew up, and worked. Born in 1823 to a Syrian Catholic father and an Armenian mother, his own heritage reflects the diverse, multi-ethnic reality of the Ottoman Empire.
In 1857, Sébah opened a photography studio and in 1860 he moved to a location on the fashionable Grande Rue de Péra, a neighborhood frequented by local elites, tourists, and Istanbul’s large expatriate community, estimated at the time to be fifteen percent of its population. Reflecting this diversity, Sébah hired a Frenchman, A. Laroche, to run the studio, a typical one for its day, producing portraits, cartes de visite, and landscape and genre photos for sale to tourists. Sébah and his family operated somewhat in the shadow of the more well-known Abdullah Frères who had an official appointment to the sultan. Sébah actively promoted his work, participating in an 1863 national exhibition where he showed two panoramas of Istanbul, and regularly sending off work to Paris for inclusion in photography exhibitions.
In 1873, Sébah was commissioned to make a book that showed traditional costumes from different regions and ethnicities throughout the empire. It was sent to the Universal Exhibition in Vienna that devoted an entire section to the Ottoman Empire. The world’s fairs of the nineteenth century, beginning with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, promoted commerce and tourism, and they significantly shaped the European public’s perception of colonies and foreign lands.
The commission came about because of Sébah’s acquaintance with the painter Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), who had spent a decade in France studying under the academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Following his tenure in France, he returned to Istanbul where he continued to paint but also pursued an active career as a diplomat and public official. In the following years, Sébah continued to collaborate with Bey, who would use his photographs as the basis for his paintings. Bey painted in the academic salon style popular in the late nineteenth century, but in contrast to the fantastical depictions common in Gérôme’s paintings of the Middle East, Bey showed a more subtle observation of life there, with canvases showing, for instance, two men playing chess or a woman reading the Koran.
Sébah also received commissions from Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a keen supporter of efforts to modernize the Ottoman Empire, and who was himself an amateur photographer. He commissioned various albums depicting modernization efforts with photographs of architecture, public works, schools, factories, and military installations. Eager to promote imperial interests, the sultan complained about the typical views sold to tourists: “Most of the photographs taken for sale in Europe vilify and mock Our Well-Protected Domains. It is imperative that the photographs to be taken in this instance do not insult Islamic peoples by showing them in a vulgar and demeaning light.”1
As a working commercial photographer, Sébah catered to the demands of clients with very different agendas. On the one hand he took official commissions with propagandistic aims that were meant to show progress and modernization. On the other hand, a large chunk of his business was selling pictures to European tourists who wanted to commemorate their travels with photos that showed a more static, clichéd, and undeveloped view of the Middle East. Indeed, so brisk was business that Sébah opened a second studio in Cairo.
Nevertheless, one scholar has observed, “the Sébah family created a unique style of photographing groups of people in public spaces—what I call ‘community portraits.’ This style reveals a negotiation between tourist desires for exotic images and local Ottoman self-conceptions as modern citizens, in the process subverting common European notions of a static and backward Middle East.”2
Pascal Sébah died in 1886 and his brother Cosmi took over the business, joined by his son Jean in 1888, the year that a partnership was formed with Frenchman, Policarpe Joaillier (1848–1909). The studio was thereafter “Sébah & Joaillier.”3
The Solari Foundation Collection features some two dozen photographs by Sébah and his studio, contained in two albums of photographs made for tourists. They also contain photographs by other well-known Ottoman photographers, including the Abdullah Frères. The scenes depict the architecture and peoples of the Middle East, principally Istanbul and Egypt.
This panoramic photograph of Constantinople presents the bustling city of Istanbul. Situated on both sides of the Bosporus, it pictures an historic metropolis spanning Europe and Asia. The Galata Bridge—the image is of the third one, completed in 1875—traverses the Golden Horn, and connects the old city with the European section. It is thronged with pedestrians dressed in both western and traditional styles. The photographer likely took the view from the Tower of Galata, built in 1348 on a high point that commanded an impressive prospect of the city. The typical European view of a static and pre-modern Middle East is here nowhere to be seen. Sébah depicted a modern, growing, and contemporary city, not a place of touristic fantasy, stuck in the past, but rather a vital place fully participant in the modernization and globalization of the late 19th century.
Thomas Locke Hobbs
Pascal Sébah, Vue Panoramique de Constantinople et Le Pont de Galata, c.1870s, albumen print, 20.7 x 26.7 cm, SOLARI 94.016.083L