Modernizing nature/naturalizing modernization : late Ottoman and early Turkish republican landscape imagery, 1876-1939

Abstract

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2017.Although the concept of landscape is a shifting signifier, landscape imagery carries potency in its ability to stir very specific sentiments about progress, conservation, patriotism, nostalgia, and collective belonging. "Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization: Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Landscape Imagery, 1876-1939" looks at how landscape is framed through the perspective of changing state ideologies that took hold in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. While successive political regimes crafted differing ideologies over the course of this chronology, several constant themes emerge in the landscape imagery produced over these years. The first is the will to modernize and develop a region that was considered backward and inferior to the more industrialized nations of the world. The second interrelated aim is to harness the region's modernization, technological progress, and economic development to maintain imperial and national sovereignty during a time of political crisis. A third impulse, which can be detected in the years leading up to the Ottoman Empire's dismemberment and immediately thereafter, is the desire to present an image of territorial and social unity. A fourth impulse is to take a more active role in conserving the region's architectural heritage and material culture and, by extension, channeling these conservation efforts into the writing and rewriting of history. While my historical research shows how the lands of this region were drastically altered through their modernization and nationalization, my visual analysis of key landscape images deconstructs how modernist landscape imagery created under state sponsorship naturalized these alterations. In the first portion of my research, I look at photographic rural imagery commissioned during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1908) to illustrate how photography was used by the Ottoman state to exercise logistical power and engage in territorial governance. In the second portion of my research, I focus on the works of Seker Ahmed Pasha (1841-1907), one of the first Ottoman landscape painters working in the Western mimetic tradition. I argue that the artist's viewpoints synthesize the imperial panoptic gaze with individualized points of view. In my final chapter, I discuss how images of the Anatolian countryside and the peasantry emerged into metonyms for the new national homeland in the transition from empire to republic. Urban image makers looked to rural lands to locate new imperial and national identities. Their imagery comes together as a modernist visual geography that can be viewed as a response to the Orientalist imagination. The visual geography of Ottoman and Turkish modernity can be considered to be just as imaginary however, in its attempts to transform an ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman citizenry into the vision of a homogenous Turkish society rooted to a shared soil