 So welcome to this session of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War New Directions program. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Dr. Mark Kondos and I am currently the director of the Sir Michael Howard Center and the convener of the seminar series. And I'm very, very happy to introduce this evening Professor William Galois from the University of Exeter. Professor Galois specializes in the history of colonial North Africa and more generally between European and the Arab Islamic worlds from the medieval period to the contemporary world. In his previous work, Professor Galois has explored the histories of colonial medicine and the Missions civilisatrices in North Africa, as well as the savage violence perpetrated by the French during their conquest of Algeria. Professor Galois most recent work, more recent work rather focuses on subaltern communities within the Maghreb and seeks to uncover and think about indigenous histories of the imperial moment. From what I understand he's currently engaged in a major project looking at the production of images across the Islamic world in the late 19th and early 20th century. And I believe the first sort of outcome of this was an exhibition entitled painters of the city art in North Africa 1880 to 1920 details of which can be can be found online. I believe you can go and check out the website. And I believe the talk that Professor Galois going to be giving us this evening is based on on some of this new work. His paper is entitled looking at images of war, seeing indigenous agency Libya and Morocco 1912. So without further ado I'm going to turn it over to Professor Galois and share our screen here because I believe he has a very spiffy PowerPoint to show you all. So please take it away Professor Galois. Oh yeah, of course I'll get down the lights. So I'm just trying to position myself so that I'm visible rather than just a t-shirt. Thank you very much, Mark for the introduction but you know more than anything else for the invitation to come here it's really wonderful not least because it's the first in-person talk that I've done in a couple of years and when I looked at war series and the kind of things that you were trying to do and the people you were inviting I'm really flattered that you've asked me to be a part of it so thank you and thank you those in the audience here and online. I would say that this is more than anything else an exploratory discussion rather than a paper with a kind of clear thesis so I hope that you might help me look at some of the images that I have today. If there is one underlying argument it's probably that the scale of evidence which exists certainly in North Africa in the second half of the 19th century right through the 20th century which would allow for more histories to be produced which acknowledged indigenous agency or which were written from subaltern or colonised positions. The scale of that evidence in the visual sphere is just colossal and so there are incredible resources out there for people I feel but there are also lots and lots of very tricky methodological, theoretical and ethical issues I think associated with the use of those kinds of images and I hope that a part of this talk will simply be talking through some of those difficulties and I'm really interested in the views of everyone in the audience as to how they might approach these things or have approached them in analogous projects on other parts of the world. What I've got here in the first slide is just an introduction to some of the key texts which I've been using and I think others are using and many of which are very recent looking at this broad area of colonial imagery starting with Malacca Lula's famous book from the mid-1980s, The Colonial Heart, which some of you may know very quickly acquired a sort of fairly totemic status in I suppose what you might call studies after Orientalism, after Edward Said and then lost that status equally quickly because in essence more than anything else it's a work of colonial porn. It's a collection of erotic photographs mainly in the form of postcards taken by French artists and publishers in the last decade of the 19th century, the first decades of the 20th century and the reason for mentioning this is not to have another go at Malacca Lula, but really to stress that one of the problems with Skag in terms of the vast amount of imagery which is out there is it's very easy to fixate on particular genres of visual production and to say well what was being produced were for example erotic images. Of course there were, there were also images of war, there were atrocity images, there were huge numbers of sub-genres, but there are genres of images associated with cafes, with bathhouses, with buildings, with every aspect of life because in this golden age in particular postcard production between about 1890 and 1920 we have no idea how many images were produced, sold, distributed and if one goes on to eBay or Del Comp or the kinds of places where you can pick these things up there are in the order of millions of images for sale. So I think a part of the work that I'm engaged in and that others engage in is really about you know trying to assess what is there because for a long time there was a fixation on sex and violence which brings me on to the second but much more recent only came out a couple of years ago a really controversial French text which in essence globalized the Malacaluda approach. It's the heaviest book that I own and it's an encyclopedia you know compendium with complete with a kind of neon sex shop type cover depicting as it says you know sex, race and colonists from across the colonial world and I include it because I think that that kind of you know sensationalization of the topic still exists and it still exists in the academy. By contrast I think one of the subtlest books on images in recent years is Steven Sheehan's The Arab Imago, a social history portrait photography 1860s, 1910 which takes as its body of evidence portrait photographs taken in Palestine and other parts of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire and tries to identify forms of agency and indigeneity that you can find in a genre which is usually associated more with I suppose modes of depiction which are to do with taking rather than offering and on this front although I have to say I'm a huge fan and two theorists Tina Kent is listening to images and Ariya Aziz is a civil contractor photography you know one has to acknowledge that their work which is essentially grounded in this idea that there's something recuperable from images from the past which may be associated with times of subjugation and violence. I mean it has great purchase in the field as does I think probably of more relevance to this particular series and center through the sometimes in particular the book regarding the pain of violence which in a sense was a continuation of her work in on photography but specifically looking at the whole series of questions pertaining to the ethics of depicting violence from Goya as the cover suggests through to photography from the Spanish Civil War up to Vietnam and into the beginning of the 21st century. So although there's this huge body of work I mean we're lucky that there is there's also a growing body of thought which helps us think through these kinds of texts and my own particular route into this came from the earlier work which Mark mentioned which looked at French cultures of violence in the early Algerian colony and in particular the way in which depictions of so-called barbaric savagery influence the practice of warfare and modes of punishment deployed by the French army in the 1830s and the 1840s and one of the underlying reasons why I think that this subject matters is because these kind of examples exist which show that the the connections between the visual and violence are of course often really intimate and unpicking these sorts of relationships in different historical contexts and it's sometimes a really important thing to do if we want to understand why for example particular modes of violence were directed towards civilian populations and in this particular case. The other route to my current work that came from this study was really a huge frustration with the field in which I was working the work I myself was doing and the fact that you know so much colonial history is about the things which were done to other people and a desire to try to follow the examples of historians and scholars who were trying to listen to the archive to identify the voices of those who may not be included in the canonical works or indeed the central archival collections which generally suffers like this so following on from the work of people like Ann Laura Stola her book along the archival grade. So just to give an example of a kind of subgenre of photography depicting violence from the period that I'm looking at here which is which is the 1910s not because I'm necessarily kind of fundamentally interested in this this subgenre but to to show how discreet these cultures could be in particular contexts. These are two postcards from Livio in 1912 and one of the reasons that they matter is that they tell us something very specific about the practice of Italian colonial violence in Livio but also they they envision something about which we know very little in other North African contexts so in the case of Tunisia and Morocco modes of destruction like this took place and we can sometimes find evidence of it in the archival record. We can't find pictures either because in the case of Algeria photography hadn't been invented or in the case of Tunisia the moral norms of war photography were such that this would not be celebrated whereas here we have this subgenre which is actually quite particular to the so-called Italo-Turkish war in in Livio of 1910, 1912 where you have keepsakes not just recorded but commercialized which are sequentials of before and there's an after so here is a bedroom camp and here are those tents once we have destroyed and I mean of course there is you know something odd I think to you know to contemporary 21st century audiences as to why why would you record these things in such a fashion and why why would you would you choose to make this into a product which was sold and in many cases these are relatively small-scale publishing outfits which are producing works for soldiers to send home to show their families what they're doing which in and of itself of course is you know is of interest because in other contexts the idea that you would want to send your relatives depictions of this kind of destruction you know may seem strange but it becomes something of a cultural norm in North Africa in the 1910s and we find it both in Morocco and in in in Livio perhaps slightly from the left field theorists who I want to mention at this point a pair of theorists is a book by Alan Roberts and Mary Neuter Roberts a saint in the city of Senegal which you know may seem a strange leap to make but if anyone is interested in this this this field of indigenous image making in the age of empire and in response to colonial violence this is the greatest of all books and its subject is the creation of imagery depicting Anna Urbamba the founder of the Muridea Sufi order in Senegal and if you've ever had the chance when you you you happen to have the chance to travel to Senegal this is an image which you can see absolutely everywhere taxes on the side of trucks on walls carved into trees and and the reason why this particular work is so important is that in an incredibly nuanced way it explores how this particular photo of what was originally a photograph and in fact it was a mug shot became the most emblematic visual text in in Senegal by some margin and how a text which was an instrumentalization of colonial power was not just subverted but completely reanimated by followers of Anna Urbamba and indeed by the saint Anna Urbamba himself so if there's one thing that you take away from today if you look at this book I'll be really happy because it's I think it's just majestic I've talked a bit about the the context the theory that the backdrop to this but now I hope that you might do some work for me this is a postcard from Morocco this period that I'm talking about around about 1910 what I'd like you to do is to to look at this image and just tell me why it might be of interest or what you take from the image let's see it the image on the wall the back there the soldier is burning down a castle is that where is this yes yes you've um you've uh uh you know slash um Mark the reason why I think this image is that um um in one sense is a kind of classic text of the invasive colonial camera lens um you know so much so that I've you know I've blocked parts of it it out but it's also an incidental record of something that the photographer um you know may or may not have wanted to capture um a form of ephemeral art which would never have been recorded by any other means and something which is hugely of interest to scholars of the period because um we struggled to find uh texts as I said which um which speaking in indigenous voices and artistic texts are particularly difficult so as Mark started us off um here is you know soldier um and they're you know they are identifiably um you know a Moroccan man um you can tell from the dress you can also tell from the rifle um and the beard and so on and so forth now the others are a bit sketchy but I wonder what do you see I mean they are hard to see I'm not staring at it the star again and actually it's it's interesting because it's it's it's a double star it's a star within a star of course here I know if you make this out it's it's a tent um with two figures two hooded figures sitting in the front of the tent and then down here we have uh battlements with a cannon being fired and then in the center in Arabic we have tenager tango tangiers the name of the place now that you know there are very few whether are no records of these kinds of texts so you know there's a degree of um of guesswork involved in in their interpretation but at the very least I think we what one can say is that it appears to be a painting cycle which is about the defense of this place and it's about the place um now the firing of the cannon from the ramparts could be you know a literal mode of military defense or it could be the firing of a cannon um at the breaking of the faster ramada um could be one or the other um the the star within the star is certainly some kind of amyletic seal um which will be worn on the body for protection and indeed um there's a sign here that this soldier is also protected in this fashion um and then the the tents in a way um you know they could be the tents that belong to the lives of those women before they were refugees driven by war to the city now that may seem you know too much of a stretch but um there was a huge refugee population in tangiers at this point had been driven from the red mountains um into the city and you know if there's a motivation as associated with the depiction of these figures and if these figures are in some way associated with these women which one would think that they probably are because there's a cloistered space um so I although I wouldn't go as far as to say that the women are the primary artists of the work I bet they are but but you know we'll probably publish and say that I mean at the very least there are kind of constant audience for this work and one of the other things which is just really telling about the piece is that it's a pictorial cycle and it's made up of five parts um and that in itself would seem to suggest that the art is a mode of protection because the five connotes the hamsa um you know the hand which you know you still see now in lots of Mediterranean cultures especially in Morocco um which again would be worn on the body or in the home um as a mode of protection um so there's a combined effect of these these images and to go back to the the kind of sole larger claim that I tried to to make at the beginning um we are just at the beginning of of of discovering these kinds of artifacts of life in these kinds of images so just by way of example um it's very different kinds of pictures these are from a Tunisian city of Paraguay the holy city which lies really historically lay only after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem in uh uh kind of a planned culture and what you have here are a whole series of murals which were painted in the 1880s and the 1890s um they're very unusual because um you can see here and here um here they are painted on a mosque and there is therefore a special set of reasons as to why you might paint the exterior of a mosque in this fashion like Tangiers it was another place which was um particularly affected by European colonial violence and in fact it was unique in the French colonial empire in North Africa because it was the only place that European tourists could visit mosques um so it was a in a sense it became a kind of human zoo um if you wanted to replicate the kind of experience you had at exhibitions in Liège or London where you saw bits of empire this city was somewhere you could go and you could visit those mosques and you could see the Mohammedans um unlike uh the picture I showed you from uh from Morocco there's very very strong kind of supplemental evidence that this image culture was protective and that it was exclusively made by women um in the main because uh the imagery is built on extensions of existing visual forms which were associated with um house painting, jewellery, leather work, the decoration of uh of sanctified objects um and one of the really incredible aspects of this painted city um is that not only were the works made by women artists but there are depictions here of a female day godmother um which draw on prehistoric forms from penic castiginic culture um and my my sense is you know there is there is lots more of this uh to be found and let's skip that in the last part talk I I want to look at um some other texts which are not photographic but which come from the same era and which again uh depict war and again I hope that you might help me uh interpret them these are Turkish postcards which which in many ways are totally unimaging um I mean if you look at at European uh the kind of world depictions of battle in popular culture at this point every single war has images like this and it obviously draws on a painterly tradition that goes back a long long way and this is a series that was devoted to key battles in uh the conflict between uh on the one side the Italians and on the other uh Ottoman Turkish and indigenous Libyan troops now there's in a sense something of a kind of question one with regard to you know the indigeneity of these texts in that we can't say that they're Libyan um but uh and this particular period is is fearsomely difficult in terms of the location of of of Libyan sources those of you who may have read the the novels and memoirs of Hesham Mata they know that uh you know it's very very difficult but at the very least um they depict those against whom Europeans were fighting one of the reasons why uh they they are of interest is that as well as their I guess one might might call their kind of generic effects um so for example the depiction of uh uh exploding shells in this fortices fashion which you get everywhere uh at this time there are also some distinctive features um which don't appear in for example images of the first one or the Balkan wars um so in this particular uh text I've blown up this finger here who is a holy figure associated with this mosque and shrine complex um up up up here and one of the reasons why they're of interest is that looking at these works and looking at these works in volume one begins to to think that there are these mixtures of you know the generic effects but also specificity specific effects and uh in the case of work from the Islamic world the notion that there is a hidden text um in a work of art um had been prevalent for a long period of time was a very important feature of uh for example Persian and Ottoman illumination and so this um uh detail if you like within this broader maelstrom may have connoted particular things both to the artist in the audience at the time um this would be more striking example for for me which is um again the battle the palms the the Zawiyah the shrine then here um amidst the fog of war as it were is this mysterious figure on horseback and um it seems likely I mean I should say that the text never referred to these subjects um that this is a representation of the so-called Mahdi the um the Avenger who will come back and restore justice to the world um I mean they're very small um but uh the more one looks at these things the more you become convinced that this is a key part of the work that they do and similarly again you see that you know the shtick is the same every time but I mean if one's looking for kind of small weird things um it seems strange that um you always get the kind of idea of cityscape up here learn up here there's a degree of kind of picture where they have ambiguity in that this is vegetation these are minarets that's probably a minarets it's not clear what these are you know they're cypresses or they're also minarets um they've also been rendered um in some kind of watercolour uh you can see the kind of spudgy spockiness of them yeah these particular postcards were made in Istanbul by a small publishing house called NJC we have absolutely no idea who the artist was um I mean I can identify other cards produced by this publisher um none of which are really kind of hugely similar to this um from the name of the publisher one can gather that they were um an Ottoman Jewish subject um but beyond that it's very very hard to say um and in a way we're lucky to know that much because um uh the kind of the culture of collection and publications about collection is strongest in Turkey is stronger in Turkey than any other part of the Islamic world I mean there are amazing collections published of postcards, cigarette papers, Fez labels, you name it um so there's an oddity here um there's also kind of roughness to them and one of the things that one might conclude is that this tent this ambiguity as to whether you're in minarets or trees in a sense it feels like a reference point to a guiding principle in the Islamic art which is the interest in uh the natural and the digital and the degree to which architecture mirrors the beauty of nature so there's a there's a discussion if you like of an age-old thing smuggled into this rather generic depiction of battle um and if that seems a stretch I'll try and provide another example in a second um this is these are my last images these are um again generically kind of relatively unremarkable um uh parodic cards again from Istanbul um in French and also Ottoman Turkish which depict um uh in the satirical fashion the manner of which the kind of ludicrous Italian forces will be bested by uh their living first now you know all conflicts in the first decades of the 20th century generated vast numbers of images like this so I mean they're of interest because um it's the non-European challenging the European but in some ways not hugely more than that although um you do get some really really kind of unbelievably wild images so this is um uh a depiction of uh metropolitan Italians uh at home uh cursing the effects of colonial war um and there's you know there's a kind of you know quasi surreal aspect to this because you know the climate is the colonial war is warping the nature of the metropolitan subject a metropolitan life which you know is the insight of you know much later theorists you know people like Ashisandian people from the subaltern studies group and you know generations of colonial historians who looked at the effects of empire making on people at home and yeah these points will be made at this time but the thing which is especially interesting in these is that again in terms of the generic effect um there's you know the theme of caricature the really silly Italian troops you know trying to find them so there he is Pippo around the back but then in the background of the picture again unlike the rest of the picture made with well no effect on watercolours you've got stones and palms and so there's this um generic distinction between the caricature and something which is different and it's rendered as different because it's made in a different way and of course water is also I mean another guiding principle in terms of Islamic life and Islamic art and the final example um you know this is contrasting techniques I think is even more striking um so on one side the silly Italian colonists who has you know established a rail line which uh you know is going nowhere but on the other the situation is just rather kind of a beautiful depiction of the life which is fools um are trying to conquer um which is the life of yeah this is the balance the lyrics the palms so yeah my kind of overall suggestion I suppose was being that uh visual sources provide this you know incredible resource for people who are interested in this particular period and that one of the things that we may have to you know to learn how to do is you know as best as we can to try to re-require the techniques to read these uh these texts like those of I showed you from Tangiers and and these from Istanbul um which are more as much about um I suppose the noticing of aesthetic difference as they are um the ostensibly subject matter thank you very much I'm just gonna stop sharing the screen uh there we go sorry I'm just going to turn the lights on yeah as well unless we want to come back to the end of this at some point um so I'm just gonna step over here from the point of blame me um so uh thank you so much that for a really fascinating and and really really rich talk um I will exert my privilege as as a chair to sort of ask you um the first question even though I have many but I'll stick to one this time and I guess the question that I had was sort of came to me sort of near the end because at the beginning you you opened with those Italian postcards but before and after destruction of the bedroom tents yeah and you explained sort of the consumption culture behind this that it's meant for soldiers to show their families back home what they're doing so I was wondering what is the culture of consumption for these um sort of Ottoman um postcards um who are they intended for as the audience is there a particular I mean you you talk that I was really fascinated by your discussion of these secret images and narratives that we can find within these images within these texts yeah and I mean you've said this is part of a wider tradition in the sort of Ottoman Persian tradition of illumination I was wondering is this a sort of culturally embedded thing where people you know it's a it's a cultural activity to to pour over an image and to see you know what are all the different sort of um narrative threads you can pull out the different symbolism um is it sort of a game in a way for people who are consuming these postcards to to spot them all out I mean this might be totally in left field here but just it kind of made me think of you know that sergeant pepper's album cover right where you know John Lennon said I want people to pour over this image for a long time and to think about all the things that put into it um so I'm just wondering is that what the artist intended you know you have this sort of generic scene happening in the foreground but as you said there's a lot going on under the surface is that you know that they attended people to to pour over them in that sense sorry that's that's my question basically in international how are these postcards meant to be consumed would I think that the yeah you're you're you're absolutely right they you know they are meant to be consumed as uh language games by people who are intimately familiar as you're suggesting Mark with um the way that these games work in uh in in in art forms from their culture um and I think that you know this is a common threat across these forms of art so it's as true of those murals which are painted on the walls of cities as it is of of postcards um none of these are art forms which are kind of you know invented from the ether um they're all you know broadly uh you know works which draw on something that you'd call the tradition um and I think one of the interesting things about you know this notion of the tradition is that um it's it's not necessarily kind of specifically Islamic um I mean it's religious it's moral um it's social but you find it as much in Jewish culture in North Africa for example as you do Muslim culture this time so for example if you look at pictures of uh the Melo the you know one other context will be called the kind of baguetto of somewhere like Casablanca um in this period very similar kinds of things are painted on walls if you look in old photographs or postcards at the interiors of Jewish houses in Fez or Tlemerson in in Algeria the kinds of pictures which people have on their walls are no different to those which in November's the neighbors would have and so yes you know a part a part of this kind of work is is saying you know what kind of visual literacy do people have and you know how can these works help us reconstruct in part also because a lot of visual literacy has been lost I mean we live you know just the boldest example we live in a world now where the kind of dominant uh strand of discussion about Islamic art both in the Islamic world and in the west is one which stresses Islam's anarchism that can't dictate to people and well you know there's you know there have always been debates about this but you know a lot of this work depicts people than haven't some of it depicts holy figures I mean there are plenty depictions of Prophet Muhammad and these kind of these kind of genres which existed this time and you know so there's there was a degree of you know sensitivity which is needed in terms of you know particularly if you're a kind of a scholar from a kind of normal Muslim heritage which I am you know not just saying well you know things were more complex and very in the past and the things that you believe now are kind of ahistorical um no there you know there is there is a kind of complexity but there's also um a context in which you know making certain circumstances like living under colonial rule where the ethical norms about depiction change I mean if I could just do one sort of quick follow-up question um I thought it was really interesting how you you sort of talked about employing you know Ann Stoller's method of reading along the archival brain and applying that to texts uh images as texts and uh it was really fascinating the first um image you had um of the you know the the nursery but this this the secret image behind it and I was wondering you know to what extent do the colonizers actually aware of the meanings and the symbolism behind these images uh you know the the the depictions on the mosque to the French and the the other Europeans uh and the Italians so they know what's going on here do they even pay attention to them in the nursery picture is this a deliberate staging of of that image in the background or is that just pure accident you know are they are they just not aware of what's going on behind them it's pure accident I'm sure of it because for example the the pictures that I showed you from caravan in Tunisia to giant murals you know some of which were in existence for 60 years in all of the kind of huge number of European texts about this place and I mean there's lots you know tourist books photos anthropological works you know the whole kind of orientalist range there's one mention of these pictures across you know 60 years and the only mention there is comes right at the beginning where two French archaeologists and our historians say these people have ruined the natural order of one of their great monuments um by painting this stuff and after that he's ignored and you know in a sense there is this argument that um you know he's those colonial authorities who tend to define you know what did constitute Islamic art because you know what what they wanted to be is non-figurative austere geometric and so on and so forth and of course these are things which exist in the tradition but the kind of rigid determination of that you know is in some sense a colonial construct yeah and the all-seeing eye of the colonial state is not as pervasive as it likes to think it is and there's all these things going on under the surface behind it which you know scholars have talked about for a long time it's interesting too because I'm just thinking like my area which I know best is it's British in here the British were absolutely obsessed to some extent about secret messages and secret images being circulated to the extent where they're reading subversion and threats into things that weren't actually there and meanwhile misinterpreting and and and overlooking the actual symbolism of the politics that the religious and cultural significance in there so it seems like the French you know and the Italians are also sort of kind of clueless in that regard um so I I will stop hogging all the questions and discussion um so I open it up to our audience um uh those of you who are joining us on zoom please type in your questions into the chat um anything from the live audience members to get us started I like to have a reaction about that question and to do with but I guess you know I'm sitting here in some admiration uh for what you're doing but also a sense of pity because the vastness of what you've just you've just you've just exposed us to seems quite remarkable and you said early on there are millions of these images so I was gonna ask you know how how true is that there are millions is that really good stuff in this period I mean like millions and then what what your what your job did seems seem to me this this explore all sorts of ways things that could be done like that 15 new research projects right if you look at images of war this agency in war you could search through all this stuff and do a do a you know an encyclopedic social history of the time you know you can do and analysis um and you can do you can do all these things it's almost there it feels like I'm sitting in this alternate universe with somebody's showing up as a story and saying yes well I was just going with the written word and you know if you look into the written word you're gonna be able to do all all these different things and that's my project you know so where on earth do you go next and that's what I'm not proposing you do this well it seems to be that is there is there some kind of big challenge here to like like preserve and characterize and catalog this stuff I mean is the age of the computer is it is is the challenge because I got the impression from you there are millions you know that that these images aren't aren't available in the archives of some policy are about many of them are on ebay or or whatever do we need to like gather this all together and you need to uh order them and you know this is the archivist in you speaking Alan is that this is the archivist in you yes I guess it is and it's kind of a boring question but but I don't know what what next well no I really appreciate the the thought and the question because um yeah the the the the the one x is definitely to do with um preserving an archive in this material um and you know that's something that I'm beginning to try to do um I mean I should clarify when I say millions I'm not what I'm not saying is that there are kind of you know millions of images which are all full of these kinds of gems I mean there are but there are other gems that I don't interpret that I can't see um uh which you know a historian address for example would would would be able to access and not the the millions is in no sense uh uh an exaggeration I mean that we have postcard collectors are different to staff collectors in the sense that some collectors have castles they know um you know which stamps were made and even if there's only one in existence you know it's there and they're sounding different to their words postcard collectors have no idea um uh you know how many images were taken and produced of a particular place for a particular topic because um the scale of production was so vast um I mean to use the example of Istanbul because I I you know I discussed a couple of publishers from there the um very recent kind of definitive um uh going to the uh publishers of postcards in Istanbul this period um has you know kind of three page discussions of probably 250 publishers who were active in the 1910s and you know these are people who are I mean they're producing a lot as well that's just in one city um so you know just in terms of scale um yeah there is a there was a huge job out there in terms of gathering digitizing cataloging establishing kind of meaningful criteria for the generation metadata for for for this kind of work um I mean the the upside is you know anyone could do this because I mean a lot of these things have very little kind of intrinsic value in the market people often kept them um but you know there it wasn't on postcard but I know I know I'm an addict I know whatever they're all worth but but you know in in in most cases you're talking about something that costs you you know two or three pounds um and you know in a sense the best resources we have are things like eBay and in particular is a collector's cycle there which is kind of even even bigger because they in effect are a giant archives of this material um I mean I think when I looked yesterday there were uh something like 380 000 Algerian postcards to say I mean you know a chunk of them will be repeats everyone will be kind of unique but but you know it's probably the case that 50 60 70 000 are you know maybe um uh Ludo would you like to go first? Um I really enjoyed this foundation as well and I find um particularly I find photography to be a really interesting subject because it's consistently fact oh there's actually people believe you're capturing something that happened and not with the belief for a very long time that all of the postcards that were circulated weren't in fact true um and I think what really fascinated me was one of the common questions of our presentation currently we're in kind of the headspace in relation to photography where we don't see this truth anymore we are inherently suspicious of any photographs we see we understand now you know in my photography course as well there's an undergrad hyper critical and hyper analyzing with respect to the photographer um and understanding that on a view and we really really discussed it with the top of the staff anymore and what I really enjoyed about your presentation is that you're kind of operating in the middle ground is that you're saying yes these images had a point you could have heard this but there is this kind of hidden authenticity in the truth within it um and I just really I don't really know if that talks to me but you see very good questions I think so it's kind of the overall decent sort of approach I really really like that. Thank you I mean I think this connection you know Mark's observation about you know often um yeah could only have a lot of knowledge producers you know didn't know what they were capturing um and so uh you know they got what they wanted from it but yeah the the artifacts which were also captured um take no part in their imagination but it's I mean I mean it's largely to our advantage now that they you know they didn't interest the thank you for that. So we had a question um from from you and then we have a question from Elizabeth on Zoom so please go ahead first. So kind of a two-part question and I think my first part would be in your estimation the recipients of these postcards how attuned you think they were to some of these hidden aspects was this something where it was maybe they would catch it maybe it was something that was normalized the point that they knew they were getting a postcard and make look you know look for the for the hidden meaning something of that nature and if they were able to to see it and sort of interpret it how do you think that may have affected not only uh you know the collective narrative or the expected storytelling history in that nature leading up to what they believe to be true about certain events. Thank you um I mean in the case of quite a lot of these images um a lot of the copies which we have were um whoever produced them um the consumers were often Europeans because because these are you know they're exotic objects um as much as anything else and so it's often you know relatively difficult to find for example um a copy of one of these images you know which has not got you know dear mum and dad um the way that he was really fought hot and it's a bit smelling on the back um and I was saying to I think uh that's a little bit actually no I think that was earlier that um some of the kinds of evidence that we have for if you like their use value um comes not in writing but in the materiality of the object so uh you can find objects where they're stained with coffee um or cigarettes um you can find objects with pin marks um and you can also find photographs of the postcards in situ for example in cafes um cafes most uh the place where I've been to observe most of these things and so in a sense there's you know the postcards have a double function they travel to Europeans because they're their postcards but actually for for local audiences they don't travel anywhere I mean they're not putting in the postal system they're not writing on them because they're they're something different they're you know either you know a votive object or um they're you know something which is nice to have a war and the the niceness to have a war speaks to the second part of your question which is you know it's not they're they're attractive not just because they're pleasing um they're they're also attractive because they're speaking to some collective sense which is shared by an audience because you know if you're going to have pictures up in a cafe or a bar then and they're going to last and stay there um that has to be a degree of appeal um and so what you'll find is for example um I mean another genre which is very popular to picks the kind of genealogies of Ottoman leaders um in lithographic form you can often see that in in bars but alongside things like those baptisms um so we have a question from Elizabeth Gardner on uh zoom who found your top very interesting uh William and uh works on this and you see in the second over uh you can see it there right yeah I'll let you just pour over for those of you who maybe can't read it as well um Elizabeth was wondering um if you had thoughts on uh given images um that were more rare they were more difficult to produce um uh and especially processing of photographs and paintings the relationship to propaganda um and and whether there's sort of a phenomenon of an early echo chamber where these I suppose I guess whether these images are responding to one another and I guess being used to mobilise people politically and I think that the um some of these images may not be propaganda I mean there's there's battle scenes I'm saying that I think that they have an interesting religious political purpose um but yeah they're also kind of propaganda objects um one and and they definitely speak to each other I mean I'm trying to show you I should work with two publishers and it's clear that there's you know there's an interchange between the artists or the publishers or the images one of the things which is which is interesting I think with regards to these questions is that there are far more images of this than there are say of you know the second role um because this fits into the so-called golden age of um postcards and also kind of uh touristic photos or at least the ones that have been saying um so it's actually I think I would suspect that it's it's more difficult to um to undertake this kind of project for you know for a later period um I mean the kind of the sweet spot happens to be probably between about 1890 and 1930 um and then you know after that postcards were out of fashion um and you know people are more reliant on you know other forms of mass reduced imagery in for example you know magazines and newspapers um you know which exists in this period but you know that that's that's a much smaller base of evidence than you find at this particular moment. Thanks um we have another question um from Tom Manger on zoom which relates a little bit to periodization um you can it's a bit of a long one uh so you can read it here and I'll scroll down I'll read it out for the rest of people um so you stated at the beginning that images from the wars in Morocco and Libya show us modes of violence in northern Africa that we do not have a photo for in the case of Algeria and Tunisia in the last case as Tom understands is that was because cultural norms regarding photography precluded such images from being taken um but by the 1910s um those cultural norms apparently changed allowing photos to be taken on a large scale and he was just wondering you know what how do we account for this this change in norms um is there a a clear shift um this has to do with different colonizers and different traditions of of photography and what's that that is about um thanks for the question is exactly what I was saying um uh I mean this goes to the point which is made about you know there's a lot of work to do here um I'd love it if someone else were to do this I I don't have any kind of answer to you know that question as to why these norms change um uh I'm sure that they do because I spent all that time looking at violence in Algeria in 1830s and 1840s and you know there was you know in general a desire to cover up acts of atrocious violence um and there was you know real hesitancy on a kind of political moral level about um for example massacred civilians um and there are you know particular scandals you know associated with this and yet by the time that you get to the 1910s um I mean the the kind of sub-genre that I that I showed was I mean amongst the least atrocious that existed so you have for example um huge numbers of photos of animals incredibly popular in both Morocco and especially Libya uh and in the Libyan case you'd also have um sequential series and these were both commercially produced and also um you know taken by individual soldiers so you could piece together a narrative of of and these are mass economies um um uh which you know it suggests an utterly different sense of you know what you can and should depict in terms of violence the same is also true of um you know the the bodies of civilians um they are relentlessly depicted in both Morocco and Libya um and and yet you know two generations earlier um pre-photography the kind of collective desire was to you know suggest that there weren't you know victims who were kind of human beings there were you know an ocean of akin to collateral damage um but I don't know what it changed. I mean it's interesting what you're saying about um you know the early conquest I mean you're the expert because you literally wrote the book on it um but you know one thing I found very interesting going through you know those records is is actually just how open and honest French soldiers are about the massacres they're committing and the brutalities they are and they write about this to you know their families back home very cheerfully they sometimes publish it and so there is this tension between you know this open acknowledgement of atrocity in a way which which of course they don't see as atrocity um and the scandals it it generates back home and uh you know I think we can see this more generally like shifting attitudes so what kinds of colonial violence are acceptable and are not you know if you look at collecting for instance you know taking uh the the skulls of the head of enemies which the French did a lot in Algeria the British did some of this um you know in in India and in parts of Africa as well um and then later sort of by the end of the 19th century this falls out of fashion because it's it's no longer really acceptable to have someone's head on your you know mantelpiece um as a as a a thing to show off but at the same time you know uh it's getting to postcards um I'm sure you're probably familiar with Michael Vann's work on postcards and beheadings in in French Indochina um because he talks about how the French were very openly you to sell these grisly grisly images of decapitated heads public hangings um as items of consumption and people would have them at the cafe or you know at home back to their families and in Michael Vann's work he talks about how these postcards are essentially um pedagogical um tools they're they're meant to instill the lessons of what colonial justice represents they're they're sort of a reaffirmation of white supremacy in in a way so it seems to me like this is again this is a comment not a real question but there's there are though these weird shifts and tensions between what kinds of violence you can openly acknowledge and display and celebrate when it becomes shameful you have to cover it up um yeah I mean there's lots of interesting questions of course raising you know what what you're talking about as well I'm a direct question you're tired of observations like and it's it's it's do you have a favorite producer because I'm just wondering you know all this again standing in front of all and I'm thinking one way is you know thinking about different producers so I'm wondering about you know how easy it is to to to identify what a producer is and whether and whether that everything's going into a particular advantage you know and like up is there is there somebody who produces um close cards or or images with a slightly different purpose that you can identify that that that gives you gives you an opportunity to be scientifically so I'm like you know like there's somebody who's ever just like a super stupid who's maybe trying to to capture violence in in a way that wasn't just or something like that do you do your favorite producer yes okay thank you for the question this is my favorite producer um this is um uh this is an Algerian series this is um uh it's on Instagram um it's also uh it was published in uh American Historical Review uh about a couple months ago um and it was exactly this my favorite producer and why their work is one of the more efficient like it um and this is um uh an Algerian producer of postcards um made by probably in some sense made by collective but the primary artist was a guy from the Hamapras who happens also to be the most famous big artist of uh 20th century Algeria who um on the slide made a huge number of uh images anonymously in postcard form um and so these are just kind of little snippet examples of I can just click on one um uh oh sorry it doesn't let me do that never mind what he would um uh in his kind of enormous persona he had a huge range and so he would um um take existing forms um these here are representations of Ali um which are very popular although Ali is now seen as a kind of sheaf figure very popular across the Islamic world in the 19th century uh and here uh he is fighting against the kind of mythical figure called Ratel all um who happens to be wearing the uniform of kind of French troops um uh and he again would play these kind of games with the kind of contemporary tradition um and here's another version of uh they've often got quite convoluted narratives which you know take a bit of unpicking but this is um this is a figure from the kind of sacred history of Islam in North Africa called Sid Siddiadela and Siddiadela is represented in various quite caught in ways in terms of costume um he's also riding a kind of hoeing polka dotted horse um but the kinds of tricks that this particular postcard artist or an artist will stop playing is that he would um have explanatory texts in both uh French and an Arabic and they'd say completely different things um so this goes back to uh you know Jen Jen's point that you know Europeans don't know what is going on um so this for example says um uh that uh in French that he's fighting with a phobia called Abdullabendwab now there is no Abdullabendwab it's just a kind of you know John Smith type way that way um uh in the Arabic it says he's fighting someone called the Lord of Balassa who's a historic figure um who was defeated as Muslim armies came from Egypt across North Africa um so this the gameplay that you talked about earlier is you know it's it's incredibly important here this is there's also there's a reappropriation of the kind of the colonial desire to capture imagery but also to often kind of insert it into debates taking place within the Islamic world um so this is um the tomb of uh Khadijah uh in uh what was becoming Saudi Arabia uh at this time photograph from 1920 is one of the last um images of the tomb complex which was built by this particular part was built by the Ottomans before the kind of nice Saudi state destroyed it in the late 1920s um and this is a detail from this Algerian artist's version of this um which again is full of um uh kind of religious commentaries and codes so here this wall which is relatively kind of inconsequential in the original is reimagined in much greater detail and color um and it functions as a means by which the names of God could be remembered so there are 99 stones here there are 99 here um and so this is my way of illustration this is my favorite um and uh yes all right well um we've pretty much come to the end of our time uh everyone so please uh join me in thanking uh Professor Gawa William again for what I thought was a brilliant talk I'm sure others will agree as well and uh this is just a reminder um that our next session um the New Directions series is going to take place on the 10th of November and we're going to be joined by Dr Gavin Brand from the University of Greenwich uh and Amandeep Madra OBE founder of the UK Punjab Heritage Association uh and they will be discussing their work on the Commonwealth Graves Commission Non-Commemoration Report uh which has been in the news as I'm sure many of you have probably read um this promise is to be a very timely and fascinating discussion so I hope many of you will join us um there for that uh and just uh once again William thank you for a great talk