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Construction of Otherness: The Establishment of Studio Photography in Sarajevo As mentioned before, in 1879, 70% of the Sarajevans were Muslims and only 20% were Christians. Islam was far more skeptical toward photography than Christianity. This could explain why, unlike in other former Ottoman cities such as Belgrade or Sofia, no major stock of private studio photographs is available in Sarajevo’s public archives. Referring to the photos on which the portrayed persons could be identified, the following picture emerges. The portrayed people belonged to notable Sarajevo families, Orthodox or Muslim merchants, and artists or intellectuals, who gradually took over political, social, or cultural functions under the Austro-Hungarian rule. These studio portraits are in the style of the prevailing middle-class photography and do not notably differ in composition, design, and format from studio photography in other European cities (ills. 166, 167). Regarding the proportion of women and men in the photographs, the relationship between townsmen and townswomen seems relatively balanced. However, the depicted women are exclusively wives, daughters, or other members of Christian families. Still, it is interesting that not a single Muslim woman can be identified by name among the photographed women. On the other hand, I want to stress that this does not necessarily mean that Muslim women were not at all photographed. Sarah Graham-Brown describes for Egypt that Muslim women found ways of having their pictures taken in studios (1988: 81). I assume that future research will prove this to be the case for Sarajevo too. In summary, it can be said that mainly portraits of the Christian population have remained in public archives. Muslim men were photographed too, but in the main public institutions in Sarajevo there are no pictures left that are unequivocally portrayed Muslim women. This supports the assumption that, before 1918, the Muslim population, especially with respect to the representation of Muslim women, had doubts about photography.'? Research on the participation of Muslim women in public and private life will shed more light on this matter. The Visualization of Muslim Women on Souvenir Cards By contrast, a great stock of archival material provides commercial visual media. It seems to be promising to have a look at these visualization strategies such as souvenir cards and picture postcards, which especially address a foreign audience and transport images of how the country and its people were intended to be seen. Analyzing these pictures is particularly interesting in the case of Sarajevo because, as mentioned before, the producers of these pictures were not local people. In comparison to the aforementioned studio portraits mostly made for private use, souvenir cards picture anonymously persons. This genre can be described as a forerunner of the modern picture postcard; the souvenir cards were produced in 2 I did not mention families of the Jewish community, who were part of the elite in Sarajevo, too. Until now I could not elicit portraits of Jewish people, but of course the Jewish community has to be considered in future analysis, too. 379
