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Portraiture is possibly the most well-known—even cliché—pictorial mode in art and material culture today and has been so for centuries. In the case of the eastern Mediterranean, recent studies on portraiture, largely focused on painting and photography, have highlighted this genre’s significance in understanding the cultural and socio-political layers of the early modern era in the Ottoman world. While it was prevalent early on within imperial and/or elite circles, the genre only truly became popular amongst a mass audience with the rise of printed imagery—engravings of drawings, paintings, and photographs—in books, periodicals, and everyday printed matter that found its way to street cafes and storefront shutters. In Beirut and Cairo, which were under varied degrees of Ottoman rule during the late 1800s, print served as the medium through which the personae of local, Arabic-speaking scholars—many of whom belonged to the empire’s religious minorities—were conceptualized, produced, and mediated within the public sphere via the printed portrait.

This talk will explore a series of portraits, printed posthumously, of Syrian intellectuals in Beirut and Cairo, with a focus on Nasif al-Yaziji (amongst others), whose work was important to the fin de siècle cultural movement known as the nahda (renaissance). In considering the importance of visuality to an understanding of authorship, publishing, and the public sphere at the turn of the twentieth century, this talk will show how the nahda’s contributions and impact were not logocentric. The printed images, which crossed, and blurred, media boundaries, typically appeared alongside texts—like biographies and epitaphs—and, together, exemplified shifting views on authorship, representation, and vision/perception. In addition to exploring how such images may have been used to conceptualize—and then popularize and canonize—the idea of the public intellectual, this talk will also briefly reflect on how the study of printed imagery makes visible the typically “invisible” labor at regional presses, with important ramifications for a translocal/transregional visual history.