About
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She completed her PhD in Anthropology with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Her scholarship involves both the analysis and production of images. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry during its digitalization at the beginning of the 21st century. She is also the director of Coffee Futures, an award-winning ethnographic film that explores contemporary Turkish politics through the prism of the everyday practice of coffee fortune-telling. (www.coffeefuturesfilm.com) Recently she has been researching photography as a tool of governmentality in the late Ottoman period. Specifically she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909) from medical imagery to prison portraiture to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjects. As a NOMIS Fellow at eikones she will be working on Portraits of Unbelonging, the first in-depth exploration of the official role of photography in the history of Armenian emigration to the United States.
Project
Portraits of Unbelonging investigates the official role of photography in the history of Armenian emigration to the United States, one of the first examples of photography being used to police borders. The project is based on a collection of photographs of Ottoman Armenian families taken between 1903 and 1908. In this period, Armenian Ottoman subjects emigrated legally on the explicit condition that they renounce their nationality and never return to the empire. Assumed to posit a potential future threat to the empire, the photographs of emigrant families were anticipatory arrest warrants intended to facilitate identification in the event of an undesired and dangerous future return. How did photography shape the policing of borders and differences? What role does photography play in how a state makes and unmakes citizens?
Portraits of Unbelonging is a double-sided history of migration. Like each individual photograph, the project faces two directions: the Ottoman past and an American future. Portraits of Unbelonging traces the stories of these families over a century – in the bureaucratic files that unmake them as Ottoman subjects, on the ship manifests that track their migration routes, in the censuses and naturalization records that document their new lives as immigrants then citizens in the United States, and finally in the family albums of their descendants living today. It is a history of mass migration on an intimate scale.
This is the beginning of a long project that I envision as a public facing digital humanities project as well as a scholarly monograph. The next stage will include reaching out to the descendants and constructing visual genealogies with the stories and photographs they share. Moreover an important future goal is to build an exhibition that allows Turkish, Armenian and American audiences to encounter these images and the stories behind them. Precisely at a moment when debates about immigration and belonging dominate politics both internationally and in several national contexts, Portraits of Unbelonging aims to contribute to complex conversations about citizenship and Armenian Ottoman history by providing a rich, visual and multi-generational exploration of specific families’ migration stories.
