Deciphering The Ottoman Photobook Album

This project centers on an official Ottoman photobook album commissioned under Sultan Abdülhamid II and sent to the Library of Congress as part of a broader diplomatic photography initiative in the 1890s. The album contains carefully staged images of schools, hospitals, military units, industrial sites, religious buildings, and urban streets from across the Ottoman Empire. Each photograph was selected to communicate order, technological advancement, education, and imperial stability.

This project also places Sultan Abdülhamid II’s photographic albums in their full historical context. It interprets them through the theoretical lenses of Marcel Mauss, Karl Marx, and Sidney Mintz, offering both close visual analysis and broader cultural insight.

During Abdülhamid II’s reign (1876–1909), the Ottoman Empire faced growing political pressure from European powers, internal reform movements, and nationalist uprisings. In response, the Sultan adopted photography as a strategic tool of international diplomacy. More than thirty-five thousand photographs were commissioned during this period. Selected albums were sent as gifts to foreign governments, museums, and archives, including the United States. The Library of Congress album thus entered American collections not as a neutral historical record, but as a carefully designed object of political persuasion, intended to shape Western perceptions of the Ottoman Empire as modern, stable, and reform-minded.