1/2/2024 0 Comments Omer koc art collectionBut as a work of art, and an exercise in sober, careful truth – telling like the best of his work – it was indeed, very impressive.” ANTONY WILLIAMS R.P. That is not how everybody chooses to think of the monarch. Inevitably, his method, his close vision, revealed that that these were in fact the face and hands of an ageing woman. This was the reason no doubt why his fine portrait of the Queen caused controversy. Williams’ still lifes and portraits – like much art – underline the passing of time and mortality. One sees, more insistently perhaps than one does in life, the little marks of wear and tear, the furrows and wrinkles… “When Williams paints human faces and bodies in tempera – whether his own, or that of another sitter – he makes the viewer intensely aware of surface detail. He works almost exclusively in egg tempera which can be a painstaking and exacting medium, but which allows him to express a deep feeling about the look of the world.Īll of his work is based on direct and intense observation, can produce as a result a very heightened sense of realism, where every surface detail is given almost equal and constant consideration. This study attempts to dissolve the ethnographic focus placed upon the Abdullah brothers’ artwork to reveal the fluid movements across nationalist, capitalist, and global identities-through hybridization of Armenian, Ottoman, and European personalities-as a conscious business tactic used to promote their photographic studio to local and international clienteles.Antony Williams trained at Farnham College of Art and Portsmouth University in the UK. Despite the extensive research on the Abdullah brothers and their business, the focus on their oeuvre has centered primarily on their ethnographic representations, typically found in costume album formats. On the other hand, the brothers acted as businessmen who capitalized on a growing market for Orientalist imagery that popularized perceptions of the East as an exotic fantasy world. On the one hand, the Abdullah brothers were quasi-nationalist subjects serving the Sultans by composing and generating photographs that promoted images of an empire that had been undergoing radical social, cultural, and political modernization and reforms. These aspects include the familial and ethnic origins of the brothers, their family’s existing connection to Ottoman and European courts, and the brothers’ savvy business prowess, which ultimately facilitated their ability to shift identities based on specific clienteles. By examining the artwork produced in the Abdullah brothers’ studio, I aim to clarify the particular circumstances that facilitated their local and global successes. This paper examines the impact of the socio-political climate of the mid-nineteenth-century on the oeuvre of the Abdullah Freres photographic studio (1858-99), created by three brothers: Vicen, Hovsep, and Kevork. The journals played an essential role in creating a highly visualised interface where popular and official forms of historical imagination mingled and interpenetrated. The article argues that the new visions of history and antiquity that emerged in the Ottoman journals were not merely an ideological package imposed by the state and passively consumed by the readers. Allowing new forms of reading, viewing, and popular participation, the journals helped refashion and pluralise collective images of the empire’s material past. Focusing on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, a period from 1876 to 1909 marked by the beginnings of print industry and rising levels of literacy in the Ottoman world, the article situates photography within a mixed, hybrid, and highly image-based media environment that radically transformed Ottoman modes of looking and remembering. This article investigates late nineteenth-century Ottoman illustrated journals as a key site for the articulation of new, popular, and visualised forms of historical knowledge and sensibility in the imperial domain.
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