Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation

Between past and future ruins: Post-Ottoman Niš in the album of Knez Milan Obrenović

“…At least since the 1860s, Southeast Europe was an object of—often overlapping—photographic surveys led by the Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires. Photographers, often on state-sponsored missions, embarked on surveys, tirelessly enumerating monuments of various sizes, or intruding on more “exotic” versions of people, thus mapping the geographies of national or imperial belonging (Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, 2015; Manikowska, 2020: 9). Photography was sometimes displayed directly, and sometimes used to model illustrations, such as those of the encyclopedic, state-sponsored Habsburg geographic and ethnographic study known as the Kronprinzenwerk (1886–1902).…”

“…It is itself a hybrid form, combining images and text of subtitles. Since here the compiler is the state, via the army, I read the Niš album as a form of a state-sanctioned historical narrative and national “photographic archive” (Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, 2015). Thus, I am particularly interested in the correspondences and dissonances between the visual narrative of the album, and textual accounts of late 19th-century Niš, such as those produced by a civil servant and writer Milan Đ. Milićević, or foreign observers, such as Felix Phillip Kanitz.…”

“…However, such usage, which presupposes a photograph's “objectivity,” risks concealing rather than revealing the power relations embedded in the modes and contexts of production, circulation, and preservation of photographs in the states that inherited the Ottoman Empire. As many scholars (Azoulay, 2018; Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, 2015; Çelik, 2004: 616; Hight and Sampson, 2002) emphasize, the emergence of the medium of photography itself not only coincided but was deeply implicated with the 19th-century forms of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. In the post-Ottoman context, our reading needs to be attuned to the particular and uneven power constellations that underlie photographic practices, and that interweave capitalist modernity, nationalism, and imperial competition in the borderland regions.…”