Sheehi, S: The Arab Imago A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860-1910

"We have been waiting for effective global histories of photography to disturb and decenter the questions we ask--not globalized histories, radiating out in a familiar narrative of export, influence, and derivation, but histories that start elsewhere. Stephen Sheehis The Arab Imago, a social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman Arab world, is a model for this. It provincializes the history we have and irrevocably pluralizes both photographies and the interwoven modernities of which they were part."--John Tagg, Binghamton University, author of The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning