Disclosing the gaze: A counter-forensic reading of judicial photography in the Hamidian period

This thesis offers a critical reading of judicial photography in the Hamidian period by combining a counter-forensic approach with Lacanian psychoanalysis. Current literature often emphasizes the Hamidian albums' efforts to impose order and assert control over the photographic image while overlooking the agency of the subjects involved in the photographic act. Challenging this approach, the thesis aims to highlight the contradictions and ambiguities that disrupt the controlling gaze by foregrounding the subject's agency. To this end, it examines two state-sponsored albums: one containing photographs of those wounded in the Ottoman Bank Raid in 1896, and another documenting the attack plans carried out by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation in İzmir in 1905. Interpreting the forensic narratives constructed by these albums as symbolic acts aimed at resolving the collective trauma triggered by the Armenian Question, the thesis explores how these photographs sought to align the viewer with a fantasmatic, masterful gaze. Drawing on the Lacanian notion of the "Real gaze", it emphasizes how this fantasmatic identification fails at certain moments. Furthermore, it explores how the ambiguities of the traumatic Real gaze open up possibilities for understanding the experiences of the subjects who participated in the albums. The thesis argues that although these subjects were exposed to symbolic violence by the state, serving either as the object or the producer of photography without full consent, they nonetheless reclaimed their agency through subtle acts of resistance against the state's controlling gaze.