Unwritten histories of photography: Elisa Zonaro, an Italian photographer in Ottoman Istanbul

The scholarship investigating the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire has been gaining significant attention in the last decades. However, analysing the ways in which this photo-history is being written reveals a historical landscape populated by the accomplishments of male photographers, where the images produced by female photographers are left outside of the canon. Critical of this male-dominated historiography, the present study focuses on a particular case and illuminates the professional career of the Italian photographer Elisa Zonaro (1863-1945) in Istanbul to demonstrate women's active involvement in photography in the Ottoman context. Previously seen only as the wife, companion, and "muse" of Fausto Zonaro (1854-1929), the court painter to Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909), Elisa Zonaro emerges in this dissertation as a pioneering figure in the history of photography both as a studio photographer and as a street photographer. Departing from the personal documents and unpublished photographs of Elisa Zonaro preserved in the Zonaro family archive in Florence, this study has uncovered significant primary sources relevant to the subject in diverse archives and libraries in Turkey, Italy, and France, as well as in several online archives and databases. The research findings indicate that Elisa Zonaro did not simply take photographs to help her husband's paintings—as was the dominant supposition in the literature—but she was a professional photographer in her own right, who opened her studio Atelier Elsa Constantinople in ca. 1894. This study firstly problematises the invisibility of women in the history of photography and investigates women photographers in the Ottoman Empire. It moves on to evaluate Elisa Zonaro's position within the influential Italian community of the late nineteenth-century Istanbul by examining her life story, training in photography with Eugène Pirou in Paris, and her career working with diverse photographic genres ranging from portrait photography to street photography. Lastly, it examines the artistic collaborations between Elisa and Fausto Zonaro, where manifold interactions between photography and painting are analysed. Overall, by shedding light on Elisa Zonaro's photographic activities with new archival findings, this dissertation not only documents and analyses her photographs from various historical and thematic perspectives but also ensures that her works finally become part of the history of photography, from which she had been excluded for so long.