Ahmet A. Ersoy | Bogazici University (original) (raw)
Books by Ahmet A. Ersoy
While European eclecticism is examined as a critical moment in western art history, little resear... more While European eclecticism is examined as a critical moment in
western art history, little research has been conducted in the historicist
pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they negotiated the nineteenth
century’s vast inventory of styles and embarked on a revivalist/
Orientalist program they identified as the ‘Ottoman Renaissance.’
Ersoy’s book examines the complex historicist discourse underlying
this ‘renaissance’ through a close reading of a text conceived as the
movement’s canonizing manifesto: the Usul-i Mi‘mari-i ‘Osmani.
This is the third volume of the four-volume series, a daring project of CEU Press, presenting the... more This is the third volume of the four-volume series, a daring project of CEU Press, presenting the most important texts that triggered and shaped the processes of nation-building in the many countries of Central and Southeast Europe. The aim is to confront ‘mainstream’ and seemingly successful national discourses with each other, thus creating a space for analyzing those narratives of identity which became institutionalized as “national canons.”
This is the first part of the third volume, containing 59 texts. This volume presents and illustrates the development of the ideologies of nation states, the “modern” successors of former empires. They exemplify the use modernist ideological framaeworks, from liberalism to socialism, in the context of the fundamental reconfiguration of the political system in this part of Europe between the 1860s and the 1930s. It also gives a panorama of the various solutions proposed for the national question in the region.
Why, modernism and not modernity? Modernity implies the West, while modernism was the product of the periphery. The editors use it in a stricter sense, giving it a place between romanticism and anti-modernism, spanning from the 1860s until the decade following World War I.
The last volume of the series presents 46 texts under the heading of “anti-modernism”. Formed in ... more The last volume of the series presents 46 texts under the heading of “anti-modernism”. Formed in a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the anti-modernist ideological constructions of national identification had a considerable impact on the political culture of our region. These texts rejected the linear vision of modernization as well as the liberal democratic institutional frameworks and searched instead for alternative models of politics. The Second World War and the communist takeover in most of these countries seemingly erased these ideological subcultures, who were often engaged in war-time pro-Nazi collaboration. However, their intellectual heritage proved more resilient and influenced the formation of “national communist” narratives in the 1960-70s, while after 1989 many of these references became actualized in the context of the post-communist search for ideological predecessors.
Papers by Ahmet A. Ersoy
Başka Kayda Rastlanmadı, 2023
Reşad Ekrem Koçu'nun İstanbul Ansiklopedisi projesinin 20. yüzyıl tarihyazımı çerçevesinde bir de... more Reşad Ekrem Koçu'nun İstanbul Ansiklopedisi projesinin 20. yüzyıl tarihyazımı çerçevesinde bir değerlendirmesi.
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, K. Mehmet Kentel, M. Baha Tanman, On the Spot: Panaromic Gaze on Istanbul, a History / Tam Yerinden: İstanbul’a Panaromik Bakışın Tarihi, 2023
Forensic insights on the photography of the 1870 Pera fire in Istanbul
Rachel Goshgarian, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and Ali Yaycıoğlu (eds), Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston: Academic Studies Press), 2023
The article analyzes the archival field at the Yıldız Palace during the time of Abdülhamid II (r.... more The article analyzes the archival field at the Yıldız Palace during the time of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) as a conglomerate of textual, numerical and visual documents. It investigates the spatial dynamics and the media logic of the visual component of the archive, comprising more than 36,000 photographs.
The Wire, 2023
The Boğaziçi University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of... more The Boğaziçi University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of the longest uninterrupted struggles for academic freedom and university autonomy ever to be waged.
Hundreds of Boğaziçi faculty members have been resisting the take- over of the university by the Turkish government for over two years now. As academic institutions all around the world are antagonized by authoritarian politicians or debilitated by market pressures, the Boğaziçi example stands out as a testimony to the power of collective action in defending university autonomy and imagining a better future for higher education.
Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, 2021
This article explores the lushly illustrated photographic excursion as a new intermedial genre in... more This article explores the lushly illustrated photographic excursion as a new intermedial genre in late Ottoman print space. It concentrates on the combined impact of nineteenth-century technologies of mobility (the train, the steamship) and visuality (photography, photomechanical reproduction) on late Ottoman visions of imperial space and its layered historical past. It brings into focus late Ottoman illustrated journals, harbingers of the heavily image-centered “information revolution” of the nineteenth century, as the prevailing loci for articulating new modes of seeing and of engagement with the empire and the world.
Hollows and Mounds: A Take on Göbekli Tepe, 2019
An assessment of photographic artist Sinem Dişli's works on the neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe.
Oyuklar ve Höyükler: Göbekli Tepe'ye Bir Bakış, 2019
Fotoğraf sanatçısı Sinem Dişli'nin Göbekli Tepe çalışmaları üzerine düşünceler.
This article follows the documentary traces of an official photographic expedition organized by s... more This article follows the documentary traces of an official photographic expedition organized by sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) to early Ottoman settlements such as Söğüt, Bilecik, and the first capital of the Ottoman state Bursa. It investigates the ways in which the visual technology of photography, with its forceful claim to empirical truth, blended with older forms of knowledge, like historic narrative, dynastic myth, and tribal memory. In their romantic engagement with the foundational phase of the Ottoman state, the expedition photographs served as a modern retake on the long-cherished vision of creating an empire from a clan
Tarihin Merkezine Seyahat, 2019
This article investigates late nineteenth-century Ottoman illustrated journals as a key site for ... more 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. 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. Allowing new forms of reading,
viewing, and popular participation, the journals helped refashion and pluralise
collective images of the empire’s material past. 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. The
journals played an essential role in creating a highly visualised interface where
popular and official forms of historical imagination mingled and interpenetrated.
Bu yazı Ahmed Rasim’in 1891 yılında Servet-i Fünun dergisinde yayınlanan “Fotoğrafım” adlı makale... more Bu yazı Ahmed Rasim’in 1891 yılında Servet-i Fünun dergisinde yayınlanan “Fotoğrafım” adlı makalesi üzerine yoğunlaşır. Ahmed Rasim yazısında kendi çektirdiği bir portre fotoğrafından hareketle fotoğrafın, gerçekliğe sadakatle bağlı bu yeni görsel temsil formunun kendine özgü özellikleri ve büyüselliği üzerine yorumlar yapar. Yazar için fotoğrafın çarpıcı yanı gerçekliğin birebir transkripsiyonu olması değil, münferit bir ânı zamanın akışından kurtarıp dondurabilmesi, onu incelenebilir, yeniden üretilebilir bir nesne haline getirebilmesidir. Yazıda Ahmed Rasim’in fotoğraf deneyimine dair yaptığı varoluşsal tespitler 20. Yüzyıl boyunca Walter Benjamin ve Roland Barthes gibi düşünürlerin fotoğraf, zaman ve hafıza hakkında yazdıklarınyla karşılaştırılır. Yazı, bu bağlantılar üzerinden okuyucuyu fotoğrafın geniş ölçekli küresel etkileri üzerine düşünmeye davet eder.
Review of Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port (Minneapolis and Lond... more Review of Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Biray Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz (eds), Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day (New York and London: IB Tauris, 2010), in Journal of Urban History, vol. 41 (3): 521-525.
History of Photography, 2024
Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World Photography in Erzurum Harput Van and ... more Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World Photography in Erzurum Harput Van and Beyond
Photographica, No: 8, 2024
Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van a... more Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond (London: Tauris, 2022)
Etudes Armeniénne contemporaines, 2022
While European eclecticism is examined as a critical moment in western art history, little resear... more While European eclecticism is examined as a critical moment in
western art history, little research has been conducted in the historicist
pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they negotiated the nineteenth
century’s vast inventory of styles and embarked on a revivalist/
Orientalist program they identified as the ‘Ottoman Renaissance.’
Ersoy’s book examines the complex historicist discourse underlying
this ‘renaissance’ through a close reading of a text conceived as the
movement’s canonizing manifesto: the Usul-i Mi‘mari-i ‘Osmani.
This is the third volume of the four-volume series, a daring project of CEU Press, presenting the... more This is the third volume of the four-volume series, a daring project of CEU Press, presenting the most important texts that triggered and shaped the processes of nation-building in the many countries of Central and Southeast Europe. The aim is to confront ‘mainstream’ and seemingly successful national discourses with each other, thus creating a space for analyzing those narratives of identity which became institutionalized as “national canons.”
This is the first part of the third volume, containing 59 texts. This volume presents and illustrates the development of the ideologies of nation states, the “modern” successors of former empires. They exemplify the use modernist ideological framaeworks, from liberalism to socialism, in the context of the fundamental reconfiguration of the political system in this part of Europe between the 1860s and the 1930s. It also gives a panorama of the various solutions proposed for the national question in the region.
Why, modernism and not modernity? Modernity implies the West, while modernism was the product of the periphery. The editors use it in a stricter sense, giving it a place between romanticism and anti-modernism, spanning from the 1860s until the decade following World War I.
The last volume of the series presents 46 texts under the heading of “anti-modernism”. Formed in ... more The last volume of the series presents 46 texts under the heading of “anti-modernism”. Formed in a dynamic relationship with modernism, from the 1880s to the 1940s, and especially during the interwar period, the anti-modernist ideological constructions of national identification had a considerable impact on the political culture of our region. These texts rejected the linear vision of modernization as well as the liberal democratic institutional frameworks and searched instead for alternative models of politics. The Second World War and the communist takeover in most of these countries seemingly erased these ideological subcultures, who were often engaged in war-time pro-Nazi collaboration. However, their intellectual heritage proved more resilient and influenced the formation of “national communist” narratives in the 1960-70s, while after 1989 many of these references became actualized in the context of the post-communist search for ideological predecessors.
Başka Kayda Rastlanmadı, 2023
Reşad Ekrem Koçu'nun İstanbul Ansiklopedisi projesinin 20. yüzyıl tarihyazımı çerçevesinde bir de... more Reşad Ekrem Koçu'nun İstanbul Ansiklopedisi projesinin 20. yüzyıl tarihyazımı çerçevesinde bir değerlendirmesi.
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, K. Mehmet Kentel, M. Baha Tanman, On the Spot: Panaromic Gaze on Istanbul, a History / Tam Yerinden: İstanbul’a Panaromik Bakışın Tarihi, 2023
Forensic insights on the photography of the 1870 Pera fire in Istanbul
Rachel Goshgarian, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi and Ali Yaycıoğlu (eds), Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston: Academic Studies Press), 2023
The article analyzes the archival field at the Yıldız Palace during the time of Abdülhamid II (r.... more The article analyzes the archival field at the Yıldız Palace during the time of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) as a conglomerate of textual, numerical and visual documents. It investigates the spatial dynamics and the media logic of the visual component of the archive, comprising more than 36,000 photographs.
The Wire, 2023
The Boğaziçi University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of... more The Boğaziçi University resistance is bound to acquire a unique place in history for being one of the longest uninterrupted struggles for academic freedom and university autonomy ever to be waged.
Hundreds of Boğaziçi faculty members have been resisting the take- over of the university by the Turkish government for over two years now. As academic institutions all around the world are antagonized by authoritarian politicians or debilitated by market pressures, the Boğaziçi example stands out as a testimony to the power of collective action in defending university autonomy and imagining a better future for higher education.
Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century, 2021
This article explores the lushly illustrated photographic excursion as a new intermedial genre in... more This article explores the lushly illustrated photographic excursion as a new intermedial genre in late Ottoman print space. It concentrates on the combined impact of nineteenth-century technologies of mobility (the train, the steamship) and visuality (photography, photomechanical reproduction) on late Ottoman visions of imperial space and its layered historical past. It brings into focus late Ottoman illustrated journals, harbingers of the heavily image-centered “information revolution” of the nineteenth century, as the prevailing loci for articulating new modes of seeing and of engagement with the empire and the world.
Hollows and Mounds: A Take on Göbekli Tepe, 2019
An assessment of photographic artist Sinem Dişli's works on the neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe.
Oyuklar ve Höyükler: Göbekli Tepe'ye Bir Bakış, 2019
Fotoğraf sanatçısı Sinem Dişli'nin Göbekli Tepe çalışmaları üzerine düşünceler.
This article follows the documentary traces of an official photographic expedition organized by s... more This article follows the documentary traces of an official photographic expedition organized by sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) to early Ottoman settlements such as Söğüt, Bilecik, and the first capital of the Ottoman state Bursa. It investigates the ways in which the visual technology of photography, with its forceful claim to empirical truth, blended with older forms of knowledge, like historic narrative, dynastic myth, and tribal memory. In their romantic engagement with the foundational phase of the Ottoman state, the expedition photographs served as a modern retake on the long-cherished vision of creating an empire from a clan
Tarihin Merkezine Seyahat, 2019
This article investigates late nineteenth-century Ottoman illustrated journals as a key site for ... more 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. 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. Allowing new forms of reading,
viewing, and popular participation, the journals helped refashion and pluralise
collective images of the empire’s material past. 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. The
journals played an essential role in creating a highly visualised interface where
popular and official forms of historical imagination mingled and interpenetrated.
Bu yazı Ahmed Rasim’in 1891 yılında Servet-i Fünun dergisinde yayınlanan “Fotoğrafım” adlı makale... more Bu yazı Ahmed Rasim’in 1891 yılında Servet-i Fünun dergisinde yayınlanan “Fotoğrafım” adlı makalesi üzerine yoğunlaşır. Ahmed Rasim yazısında kendi çektirdiği bir portre fotoğrafından hareketle fotoğrafın, gerçekliğe sadakatle bağlı bu yeni görsel temsil formunun kendine özgü özellikleri ve büyüselliği üzerine yorumlar yapar. Yazar için fotoğrafın çarpıcı yanı gerçekliğin birebir transkripsiyonu olması değil, münferit bir ânı zamanın akışından kurtarıp dondurabilmesi, onu incelenebilir, yeniden üretilebilir bir nesne haline getirebilmesidir. Yazıda Ahmed Rasim’in fotoğraf deneyimine dair yaptığı varoluşsal tespitler 20. Yüzyıl boyunca Walter Benjamin ve Roland Barthes gibi düşünürlerin fotoğraf, zaman ve hafıza hakkında yazdıklarınyla karşılaştırılır. Yazı, bu bağlantılar üzerinden okuyucuyu fotoğrafın geniş ölçekli küresel etkileri üzerine düşünmeye davet eder.
Review of Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port (Minneapolis and Lond... more Review of Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); and Biray Kolluoğlu and Meltem Toksöz (eds), Cities of the Mediterranean: From the Ottomans to the Present Day (New York and London: IB Tauris, 2010), in Journal of Urban History, vol. 41 (3): 521-525.
History of Photography, 2024
Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World Photography in Erzurum Harput Van and ... more Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World Photography in Erzurum Harput Van and Beyond
Photographica, No: 8, 2024
Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van a... more Review of David Low's Picturing the Ottoman Armenian World: Photography in Erzurum, Harput, Van and Beyond (London: Tauris, 2022)
Etudes Armeniénne contemporaines, 2022
Ottoman revivalism in art and architecture, a consistent “Orientalizing” trend that emerges in th... more Ottoman revivalism in art and architecture, a consistent “Orientalizing” trend that emerges in the 1860s and survives into the 1920s, has generally been relegated to the category of fashion and ephemera, with undue emphasis on its stylistic “sources of influence” in Europe. This study aims to historicize nativist tendencies in late Ottoman art with reference to the complex cultural and political realities of a modernizing multinational empire. It is argued that the Ottoman recourse to a highly “exoticized” form of local aesthetics was not only a means for articulating a sense of cultural “difference” in global scale, but also a localized defensive strategy for promoting domestic production against the influx of western taste. The attempt to revitalize and modernize Ottoman crafts and industries largely determined the course of the revivalist movement till its very demise during the early Republican era.
"The First Century of Photography: Photography as History/ Historicizing Photography in Ottoman t... more "The First Century of Photography: Photography as History/ Historicizing Photography in Ottoman territories (1839 — 1939)" workshop organized by Bogazici University Archives and Document Center, RCAC (Research Center for Anatolian Civilization), and IFEA (Institut Francais d l Études Anatoliennes), İstanbul, 19-20-21 June, 2018.
Geç Osmanlı döneminde fotoğrafın ortaya çıkışı ve bu yeni teknik medyanın arşivsel alanda yarattı... more Geç Osmanlı döneminde fotoğrafın ortaya çıkışı ve bu yeni teknik medyanın arşivsel alanda yarattığı etkiler üzerine Derya Gürses Tarbuck ile Açık Radyo Bilim Tarihi Sohbetleri programı.
Podcast: https://acikradyo.com.tr/podcast/231142
Red Thread 5, 2020
Conversation based on the article "Neo-Ottomanism in the Age of Digital Media" published in Red T... more Conversation based on the article "Neo-Ottomanism in the Age of Digital Media" published in Red Thread 5
Modern Turkey’s Discovery of the Ottoman Heritage: The Alİ Saİm Ülgen Archive The Open Archive ... more Modern Turkey’s Discovery of the Ottoman Heritage:
The Alİ Saİm Ülgen Archive
The Open Archive project aims to present a cross-section of the state of cultural assets and conservation efforts in Turkey before the 1960s, based on the world of Ali Saim Ülgen, researcher, architect, and specialist in restoration of classical Ottoman architecture.
One of the pioneering architectural restoration experts of Turkey, Ülgen carried out hundreds of restorations not only in Turkey but also in Libya, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, collecting and producing all kinds of materials that document historical works, such as construction photographs, newspaper clippings, and articles, thus creating an extensive foundation for the books he would subsequently write. Unfortunately, he passed away too soon to complete many of his planned works.
The material Ülgen collected during his travels, not only in the course of the administrative duties he assumed during the long years he worked at the General Directorate of Foundations, but also as an aficionado and an academic, has been meticulously preserved by his family.
After preliminary classification by the Foundation of Architecture Turkey, these documents are now being digitized and catalogued at SALT Research for the use of researchers. The countless documents and photographs in the Ali Saim Ülgen Archive constitute an unparalleled visual resource on our cultural heritage as well as offering very important scientific data for new restoration projects. The Archive also sheds light on the architectural history, the approaches to restoration, and the preservation policies of an era.
The Open Archive exhibition introduces Ülgen’s unmatched collection of photographs, writings, notes, plans, and building surveys, together with examples of his manuscripts, to all those interested.
Modern Turkey’s Discovery of the Ottoman Heritage: The Ali Saim Ülgen Archive
February 8 – March 24, 2013
SALT Galata, Open Archive
OTTOMAN ARCADIA: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots 3D Walk-In link: https://... more OTTOMAN ARCADIA: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots
3D Walk-In link:
https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=djDySeBkkbf
In 1886, Abdülhamid II dispatched an official expedition to the township of Söğüt (a district of modern Bilecik province) and its environs in order to make a comprehensive documentation of sites of memorial value in the region, including early Ottoman settlements like Yenişehir and the first capital of the Ottoman Empire, Bursa.
The Expedition Commission included prominent official photographers and painters who produced more than a dozen photographic albums for the Yıldız Palace Library. Each album contained images of dramatic landscapes, towns, monuments, and the native inhabitants of the region, particularly the last remaining members of the semi-nomadic Turkmen tribes (yörüks/yürüks). Three of these luxury albums were gifted by the sultan to the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Acquired from the Bismarck Library, the albums were returned to Istanbul in 2017 and are now housed in the Ömer M. Koç Collection.
Following the documentary traces of the 1886 Expedition, the exhibition investigates the ways in which the layered deposit of memories attached to the land of Ottoman origins was reclaimed and reconstituted through the agency of photography. The albums stage the topography of the region as an early Ottoman Arcadia, a picturesque relic-space charged with aesthetic power and mnemonic potential. The photographs also constitute the earliest comprehensive visual record of nomadic life in nineteenth-century western Anatolia. Instrumentalizing the strong, persuasive capacity of photography, they reassert foundational myths and authenticate the remote tribal origins of the Ottoman dynasty.
Photography, as a technologically advanced archival tool, provided an alternative mode of imaginative involvement with history. The Expedition is a telling case where the visual technology of photography, with its forceful claim to empirical truth, blended with older forms of knowledge, like historic narrative, dynastic myth, and tribal memory. In their romantic engagement with the foundational phase of the Ottoman state, the Expedition photographs served as a modern retake on the long-cherished vision of creating an empire from a clan.
Üniversitede Direniş ve Dayanışma, 2022
Barış Bildirisi dava sürecinden izlenimler / Impressions from the court case on the Peace Petition