Jerusalem Armenian Photography in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Symposium Report
Dr. Karen Jallatyan
Postdoctoral Researcher
The Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig
Budapest was recently the site of an intriguing development. On September 20 2024, the opening ceremony of an exhibition titled "Capturing Eternity: Jerusalem Armenian Photography in the 19th and 20th Centuries" took place in the Aula Hall of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. The exhibition presents the Armenian Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, with roots going back all the way to the 4th century CE, when the Armenian kingdom adopted Christianity and Armenian pilgrims started visiting Jerusalem. The exhibition also draws attention to the fact that the Jerusalem Armenian Patriarch Yessayi Garabedian established the first local photography workshop in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem most likely in the 1860s. Prominent photographer Garabed Krikorian (1847-1920) was trained in this workshop, who later opened the first photographic studio in Jerusalem and in turn trained Khalil Raad (1854–1957), the first Arab photographer of Palestine. Eventually, a number of Armenian photographers had studios in Jerusalem during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods (1922-1948), a tradition that continues to this day. Following the opening ceremony of the exhibition, an international scholarly symposium was held on site the day after. The exhibition thus meditates on the intersections of holiness and photography through the crucible of the Armenian community of Jerusalem.
The exhibition and the symposium are made possible by the collaboration between Hungarian University of Fine Arts, an outstanding center for art education in the country and region, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPCU), in particular its Department of Armenian Studies, the largest such institution in the region, as well as the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. It is the first time that these three institutions are collaborating, something that will hopefully continue. Financial support for the exhibition and symposium are generously provided by the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the Transylvanian Armenian Roots Cultural Association, Budapest and the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia in Hungary. The exhibition is curated by Diana Ghazaryan, an Armenian Studies Doctoral Student at PPCU, with the assistance of Dr. Karen Jallatyan and Dr. Bálint Kovács. As for exhibition photographs, they were generously provided by the Armenian General Benevolent Union's (AGBU) Nubar Library, Paris, the Project Save Photograph Archive, Boston, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan, the Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and the Archive of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
The international symposium "Unraveling Jerusalem's Armenian Experience: Reflections on History, Photography and Diaspora," was held at the exhibition venue on September 21 2024. BÁLINT KOVÁCS (Leipzig/Budapest), Head of the Armenian Studies Department at PPCU and Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), launched the symposium with words of welcome. Following this, Distinguished Professor PETER COWE (Los Angeles), Narekatsi Chair of Armenian Studies at UCLA, delivered a keynote lecture, in which he reflected on the broader conditions that allowed Armenians to be prominent and pioneering practitioners of photography in the Middle East from the second half of the 19th century on, while pointing to the genre conventions of portrait paintings that were extended to the emerging craft of photography with echoes in Armenian literary production. Professor Cowe's lecture then problematized the highly exoticized image of the Orient that one encounters in Edward Saïd's influential 1978 book Orientalism, by contending that the body of work that has reached us from Armenian photographers in many ways does not conform to it. Lastly, Professor Cowe drew attention to the diasporic connectivity that made it possible for Armenian photographers to adopt this newly-emerging craft, while recognizing that due to lack of robust institutions in the diaspora, such initial developments do not find a stable environment for sustainment.
Following Professor Cowe's thought-provoking lecture, the first session of the symposium focused on Armenians in Jerusalem before the arrival of the Ottomans. It brought together two well-informed and earnest presentations. EMILIO BONFIGLIO (Hamburg), Research Associate at the University of Hamburg, traced in his talk the textual and the material evidence that indicate a scattered presence of Armenians in Jerusalem. Dr. Bonfiglio further noted how Jerusalem was a place of multicultural encounter between Ethiopians, Armenians, Georgians, other Christians and Jews, allowing for textual and visual cultural exchanges to take place. CAMILLE ROUXPETEL (Paris), Researcher at the National Scientific Research Center (CNRS), began her presentation by pointing out that early photographs of Jerusalem are useful to historians and archeologists as they show the city before aggressive modernizing transformations. Dr. Rouxpetel then developed a new perspective on the Armenians of Jeruslaem during the Middle Ages by privileging not the manuscript-based evidence, but the ones in Islamic legal documents. Housed in the Armenian Patriarchate's archive, unpublished and in need of scholarly attention, these documents suggest that Jerusalem during the Middle Ages was a competitive environment with dynamically relating Christian and Islamic groups that had shifting self-definitions and external influences, suggesting that although diasporic, the Jerusalem Armenian community nevertheless had a deeply local sense of belonging.
ANATOLII TOKMANTCEV (Budapest), Assistant Professor at PPCU, offered discussant's commentary to the first session by first wondering if there is anything to be said about the Armenian presence in Late Antique Jerusalem beyond religious frameworks. To this Dr. Bonfiglio responded affirmatively, reminding the audience that in the Late Antique period both Armenia and Jerusalem were part of the Roman Empire, a common economic and cultural space. Regarding both presentations, Dr. Tokmantcev further pointed out the possibility to treat the Armenian community of Jerusalem through a more heterogeneous lens, for example by considering Chalcedonian Armenians in Jerusalem. Dr. Rouxpetel saw this as a viable point that needs to be taken into account.
Session 2 of the symposium turned to the Ottoman Armenian photographic heritage. AIKATERINI GEGISIAN (London), Lecturer at the Metropolitan University, presented her collage work of Ottoman women's postcards, mobilizing critical concerns from strands of feminist inquiry, further enriching them with generative complications of the Orientalist gaze across photographic practices, historical and cultural contexts. In this respect, Dr. Gegisian's argument to conceive of photographs as being equally mobile and collaborative as images is remarkable for its transformative potential. As the discussant of the session, KAREN JALLATYAN (Leipzig), Postdoctoral Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), expressed the hope that more scholarly and curatorial attention will be paid to this insight to further tease out the specificity of photographic movement and collaborations, differentiating them from those of images.
ISSAM NASSAR (Doha), head of the history program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, situated Armenian photographers within the history of photography in the Middle East. Focusing largely on the Ottoman Empire, Professor Nassar's presentation provided valuable insights about the specifics of their photographic practices, particularly in relation to Palestinian photographers within the contexts of Ottoman Empire and British Mandate, but also beyond. This dialogue is crucial as, understandably, Armenian photographers contribute to the archive of Palestinian collective memory, valuable especially given the Israeli state's colonial, genocidal onslaught against Palestinians. The discussant KAREN JALLATYAN wondered to what extent and in which ways in the broader context of Palestinian memory would the diasporic nature of Jerusalem Armenian photography be registered. This might be a worthy inquiry to pursue, even as a collaboration between Armenian and Palestinian Studies.
Session 3 of the symposium begun with ARMAN KHACHATRYAN (Beersheba/Yerevan), Doctoral student in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, as well as a researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of Armenia and the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, drawing from a number of primary and secondary sources to describe in some detail the modernization processes that affected the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Turning to the period immediately following the Armenian genocide, Mr. Khachatryan argued that the Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate was the only major Armenian religious center that was largely extant in the wake of the Armenian genocide. Realizing this, in the 1920s the leadership of the Patriarachate, Patriarch Yeghishé Tourian in particular, initiated a process of educating genocide surviving orphans to become the next generation of leaders of the Armenian Church. This process was relatively successful, sealing the historical role of the Jerusalem Armenian Patriarchate as providing a lifeline between the pre-genocide and post-genocide Armenian religious life.
HANGA GEBAUER (Budapest), Photo-Curator in the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography (Budapest), gave a talk that stood out for tapping into material that has never been a subject of scholarly inquiry, putting aside the Transylvania Armenian archive which, as Bálint Kovács in particular, and a few others have explored, is an incredibly rich and important archive. Dr. Gebauer's talk offered a meticulously contextualized presentation of photographs, shedding light on the forces animating 19th century Hungarian ethnography and revealing the ways in which photography participated in it. Such archivist interventions help us understand the entanglements between Orientalism and 19th-century Hungarian imaginaries of national origin, with the latter perhaps operating from an intriguing discursive position of both identifying with the West as well as potentially with the East. In situating these photographs in broader visual cultural contexts, which Dr. Gebauer's talk already does in a fine way, these photographs could be useful for corroborating photographic evidence within Armenian Studies and beyond, as is the case of Jerusalem Armenian Patriarch Harutiun Vehabedian's portrait, for which the evidence in Dr. Gebauer's presentation suggests a more precise date.
DIANA GHAZARYAN (Budaspest), Doctoral student in the Department of Armenian Studies at PPCU, presented and reflected on the photographic and diasporic activities of Jerusalem Armenian Patriarch Yessayi Garabedian. Relying on hitherto unexplored photographic and epistolary materials from Patriarch Yessayi Garabedian, Ms. Ghazaryan's presentation was a welcome development within and beyond the presentations of the symposium. In her presentation, Ms. Ghazaryan mobilized insights from Diaspora Studies to bear upon the Jerusalem Armenian experience, further intersecting with debates from historiographic approaches that are gaining wider currency in Armenian Studies, namely, the attention paid to early-modern agency through a microhistorical lens. Ms. Ghazaryan's ongoing research will hopefully shed light on all of these approaches by attempting to bring out the specificity of the entanglement of what could profitably be called Jerusalem Armenian photography.
BÁLINT KOVÁCS, the discussant, suggested the category of confessionalism as a potential analytical lens in approaching the activities of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and welcomed the scholarly attention to Armenian themed photographs held in the Hungarian Museum of Ethnography (Budapest), wondering why most of them depicted women, as well as reminding of the existence of the large number of photographs pertaining to the Transylvanian Armenians.
KAREN JALLATYAN delivered the closing remarks to the symposium. His statements first underlined the unprecedented nature of the exhibition-symposium given its venue and the institutions that collaborated to make it possible, expressing the wish for such partnerships to continue in the future. Dr. Jallatyan further noted that the symposium was unprecedented also because many of the photographs related to the Jerusalem Armenian experience were brought together from diverse archives under the rubric of a single exhibition, as well as because of the focused and interdisciplinary scholarly discussions mobilized during the symposium. After making brief comments about each of the presentations, Dr. Jallatyan concluded by arguing that it is necessary to make photographs 'speak' by exhibiting, contextualizing and interpreting them through captions that rely on historical factuality but also venture into speculative fictionality. In doing so, it is the memory of the Armenian diaspora that is being activated, giving it new transcultural and transgenerational afterlives, an archive which is not easily historicizable given the ruptures and erasures that render the diaspora invisible.
Symposium Program:
Bálint Kovács (Leipzig/Budapest): Welcome and Introduction
Peter Cowe (Los Angeles): Keynote: "Armenians at the Intersection of Art and Technology: Early Armenian Photography Contextualized"
Session I: Armenians in Jerusalem in the Pre-Ottoman Period
Emilio Bonfiglio (Hamburg): "The Armenian Presence in Late Antique Jerusalem"
Camille Rouxpetel (Paris): "The Roots of the Armenian Presence in Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages"
Anatolii Tokmantcev (Budapest): Discussant
Session II: Archivist Interventions into the Ottoman Armenian Photographic Heritage
Aikaterini Gegisian (London): Self-Portrait as an Ottoman Woman as an Image-History: Photography as Movement and Collaboration"
Issam Nassar (Doha): "The Birth of Armenian Photography in Jerusalem"
Karen Jallatyan (Leipzig): Discussant
Session III: Institutional and Ethno-photo-graphic Histories of Armenians in Jerusalem and Beyond
Arman Khachatryan (Beersheba/Yerevan): "Srpots Zharangavorats [Armenian Theological] Seminary and its Role in the Development of the Armenian Quarter"
Hanga Gebauer (Budapest): "Armenian Photographs of the Museum of Ethnography (Budapest) from the End of the 19th and the Beginning of the 20th Centuries"
Diana Ghazaryan (Budapest): "Patriarch Yessayi Garabedian (in office 1865-1885) as an Agent of Microhistory"
Bálint Kovács (Leipzig/Budapest): Discussant
Karen Jallatyan (Leipzig): Closing Remarks to the Symposium
