Late Ottoman Photography: Reflections and Agents of an Ideal Male

“Late Ottoman Photography: Reflections and Agents of an Ideal Male Body”
Murat C. Yildiz, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, UCLA
In 1915, an Ottoman-Turkish journal ran article entitled “What is a Beautiful Body?” (Güzel
Vücut Nedir?). As the title suggests, the article focused on what it considered to be the defining
contours of a beautiful body. In the opening paragraph, the author established that the
article would “analyze beauty (güzellik) from the perspective of a physical training specialist
(terbiye-i bedeniye mütehassısı).” Such a view was “scientific” (fenni) and treated health (sıhhat)
as corporeal beauty’s defining characteristic. “When speaking of beauty (güzellik),”
according to the article, “the first characteristic that should come to one’s mind is health.”
Published during World War I, the article sheds light on the concern that many Ottoman
officials’ held about the wellbeing of Ottoman male subjects. Such anxiety was expressed
widely in Ottoman-Turkish print media during the war, reflecting the belief that an unhealthy
soldier could not properly fight and defend the nation. The article also evinces an effort to
intervene in a broader conversation about masculine corporeal beauty in late Ottoman Istanbul.
Read closely, we can discern that its argument about the centrality of health diverged from other
competing understandings of bodily beauty prevalent at the time. As the author put it, “The [true]
meaning [of beauty] is not what is used among the people (beynelhalk)[emphasis mine].” If
health was not a beautiful body’s defining characteristic, then what was? What did “the people”
consider it to be?
Vernacular photographs of young men flexing their muscles and discussions about the
importance of gymnastics and team sports for creating a beautiful body in Ottoman-Turkish,
Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, Greek, French, Ladino, English, and German publications during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provide insights in response to this question.
These images and the conversations surrounding them reveal how elite and upper middle-class
Ottoman Muslim, Christian, and Jewish subjects of Istanbul objectified the male body. This
objectification resulted in the celebration and promotion of a new masculine corporeal aesthetic,
and by consequence a condemnation of an older one. The defining characteristics of this new
body were proportionality, a slim waist, defined biceps, a straight back, and a broad and hairless
chest. The new look was beautiful and civilized; moreover, it was a defining characteristic of a
late Ottoman conception of modern, urban masculinity, which stood in stark contrast to
traditional Ottoman views on both the body and status. Whereas a corpulent physique had
historically exemplified financial prosperity and strength, with Ottoman men even embracing the
sobriquet “the fat one” (şişman), a plump belly now came to represent incompetence, lethargy,
and physical inferiority.
The emergence of this new conception of masculine beauty was connected to the dissemination
of the camera and photography “into the everyday lives and practices of Ottoman society.” The
mushrooming of photography studios throughout Istanbul, the invention of snapshot
photography, as well as greater access for men and women to have their picture taken either in a
studio or in their home resulted in the creation of various types of portraits during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, one of which was the sportsman photograph. The
sportsman photograph depicts young men posing shirtless or wearing tight-fitting athletic attire
flexing their muscles and exhibiting their bodies. These images were not confined to a single
ethno-religious community; elite and upper middle-class Muslims, Christians, and Jews of
Istanbul, who were members of athletic voluntary associations and/or physical culture
enthusiasts, equally embraced the sportsman genre and treated nakedness or semi-nakedness as
the ideal state to exhibit and express male corporeal beauty.
The sportsman genre was constitutive of a broader late Ottoman physical culture in Istanbul,
whose emergence was connected to the Ottoman state deploying a series of modern disciplinary
instruments (i.e., the army, the educational system, and medicine), and European norms, tastes,
and practices spreading throughout urban centers of the empire. Late Ottoman physical culture
consisted of a set of physical activities such as gymnastics, team sports, and scouting that were
institutionalized in government, missionary, and non-Muslim communal schools, voluntary
athletic associations, government ministries, and new public spaces in late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century Istanbul. Late Ottoman physical culture was also a discourse that Ottoman
government officials and imperial subjects created. According to this discourse, Turkish,
Armenian, Greek, and Jewish subjects had to regularly perform gymnastic exercises and/or
play team sports in order for young men (and, to a limited extent, women) to simultaneously be
ideal citizens of the Ottoman Empire and members of their own ethno-religious communities.
This paper builds on a growing body of scholarship that treats vernacular photographs and
published pictures in Ottoman journals as rich historical archives that can provide insights into
cultural and social transformations during the empire. It does so by investigating the relationship
between the development of the sportsman photograph, changes in print media, and the
construction and dissemination of a new masculine corporeal aesthetic in late Ottoman Istanbul.
The sportsman genre of photography emerged in voluntary athletic associations during the reign
of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Members of these athletic associations treated portable
and small sized photographs of themselves as expressions of their commitment to a new
conception of masculinity. The circulation of these pictures remained limited to friends,
colleagues, and family during the Hamidian era. This changed, however, after the promulgation
of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. The abolition of the Hamidian regime’s stringent
censorship policies led to the creation of a diverse print media in Istanbul, as well as other
centers of the imperial domains. These transformations played an important role in facilitating
the wider dissemination of the sportsman genre and popularizing a particular male corporeality
as a defining feature of late Ottoman urban masculinity. Tracing the intersection of the
sportsman photograph and print media, this paper examines the boundaries of societal propriety
and how young men reconfigured their identities by unveiling their bodies and treating a distinct
male physique as a markers of status.