| Abstract: | Recent theoretical work on the Mediterranean has emphasised the sea as an agent of ‘connectivity’ over a highly fragmented space, bringing peoples, goods, languages, and ideas into contact. Early photography in the Mediterranean manifests this connectivity and mixedness across the whole field of its practice: among photographers, sitters, printers, dealers, consumers, patrons, and even the photographs themselves. Focusing on the eastern Mediterranean, this article treats early photography in its ‘Mediterranean’ context: located within a space of multiple languages, ethnicities, and religions, of personal and commercial networks between cities and across borders, and of spatial and social circulation and exchange. Such an approach complicates the two prevailing scholarly narratives of Mediterranean photography: one based on place, nationality, or ethnicity; the other on Orientalism. Seen in this light, the early history of photography in the Mediterranean may have implications for understanding the ways in which modernisation took hold and operated in the region. |
