Thesis Title: Representation of Minority in Colonial Photography(Studying Ernest Chantre’s Photography Albums in Kurdish 1881)
By: Salah Ebrahimi
Supervisor: Parvin Taee
Degree: MA
Course of Study: Photography
Februrary 2018
Abstract
What we know today as colonial photography is the reflection of dominant colonial discourses in a photographic representation process, discourse that have been implicated and developed by the institution and the intellectual apparatuses within the power relations. From the very beginning, photography has entered into power relations as well and, in this way has discovered and actualized its potential capacities. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, more territories were annexed to the domain of the great colonial empires, as there was approximately no inaccessible and undiscovered geography. These territories, called colonies, were at once undergoing tremendous transformations. Photography was present and observer of those developments and played an active role in the formation of this new history. The role taken by the photography cannot be compared to any other means of representation, the image that photography demonstrates of colonialism is never a flat, one-dimensional image, but rather in relation to its context in a network of complex meanings and connections. the objective of this study is to decode the reproduction techniques in Ernest Chantre photography in Kurdistan. The finding of this study, which have been analyzed by the discourse of representation in the colonial system, show different approaches and strategies in the way Ernest Chantre photographic encounter with the Kurds. In some, a form of the anthropological photography system is dominant, and in others, the orientalist imagination. But what’s in common with these two approaches is a visual discourse of otherness in colonial photography .in addition, the problematic situation of the Kurds at the beginning of the twentieth century, which resulted from their movements and riots and, as a result, many repressions by the ruling governments, made these representation important at this critical point. And will face more difficulties and contain different levels of Kurdish socio-political life. Therefore , the identification of these events in photographs requires an interdisciplinary reading in its contexts and relations that form the basis of this thesis.
Keywords: Colonial photography, Representation, Anthropology, Ernest Chantre, Kurdistan