A Picture of Health: The Search for a Genre to Visualize Care in Late Ottoman Istanbul

It was August 2009, and the gold-embossed insignia of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II was still perfectly intact on the century-old photo album's crimson velvet cover. She could not possibly have known, as she turned to the first portrait, how much this album (which she will refer to as the Haseki...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Grey room 2018-09, Vol.72 (72), p.36-67
Main Author: Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Colonialism
Health care
Portrait photography
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It was August 2009, and the gold-embossed insignia of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II was still perfectly intact on the century-old photo album's crimson velvet cover. She could not possibly have known, as she turned to the first portrait, how much this album (which she will refer to as the Haseki portrait album) would teach her not only about photography and late Ottoman healthcare but about how the questions they ask as scholars shape the answers they discover. Here, Gursel tells the story of how she learned to look at these extraordinary photographs and reflect on the medical care visualized in them. In what follows, she has deliberately sought to share her processes of discovery rather than present the historical knowledge attained at the end, in the hopes of encouraging visual research that not only situates visuals in sociocultural and political contexts but renders visible the construction of what one might call "the possibility of visual history".
ISSN:1526-3819
1536-0105
DOI:10.1162/grey_a_00248