LIZ WELLS writes, curates and lectures on photography. Her publications include Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (I.B.Tauris 2011). She edited Photography: A Critical Introduction (2009, 4th ed.) and The Photography Reader (2003), and is a co-editor for photographies, Routledge journals. In 2012 she guest curated Sense of Place, European Landscape Photography (BOZAR, Brussels). Since 2010 she has collaborated on several projects with Cypriot photographers and curators. She is Professor in Photographic Culture at the Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University and convenes the research group for Land/ Water and the Visual Arts (www.landwater-research.co.uk).

THEOPISTI STYLIANOU-LAMBERT has published on photography, museums and tourism. She is the author of Tourists Who Shoot and the co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus. She earned her PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and has received several awards and scholarships including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award and a Fulbright Scholarship. As a photographer she participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Europe and the USA. She is Assistant Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology and the coordinator of the Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab (www.vsmslab.com).

NICOS PHILIPPOU is a photographer, visual ethnographer and author of the books Off the Map and Coffee House Embellishments. He is co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus and his writings on photography and vernacular culture have been published in journals, art magazines and collective volumes. As a photographer he has participated in several exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. He holds an MA in Communications and Technology from Brunel University, UK. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia and is working towards his PhD at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Bristol.

        PHOTOGRAPHY AND CYPRUS

              TIME, PLACE AND IDENTITY

                Edited By

                Liz Wells

                Theopisti

                Stylianou-Lambert & Nicos Philippou

Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd

6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU

175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010

www.ibtauris.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright Editorial Selection and Introduction © 2014 Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Liz Wells, Nicos Philippou

Copyright Individual Chapters © 2014 Alev Adil, Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, Iro Katsaridou, Hercules Papaioannou, Haris Pellapaisiotis, Nicos Philippou, Stavros Stavrou Karayanni, Elena Stylianou, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Yiannis Toumazis, Jennifer Way

The right of Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, Liz Wells, Nicos Philippou to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art: 13

ISBN 978 1 78076 653 9

eISBN 978 0 85773 491 4

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress catalog card: available

To Peter Loizos, the ‘father’ of anthropology in Cyprus who passed away while this book was in preparation. His work, generosity of spirit and personal encouragement was vital in helping us rethink Cypriot photographic representations.

List of Illustrations

    2.1    John Thomson, ‘A group of native Cypriots, Cyprus’, 1878

    2.2    John Thomson, ‘View of Kyrenia harbour, Cyprus’, 1878

    2.3    John Thomson, ‘(Ruins at) Famagusta, Cyprus’, 1878

    3.1    Maynard Owen Williams, ‘These “ultra-modern” Cypriots were persuaded to wear outmoded costumes of Cyprus’, in July 1928 edition of The National Geographic Magazine

    3.2    Maynard Owen Williams, ‘A “forensic” style image of three Rizokarpaso girls’, in July 1928 edition of The National Geographic Magazine

    4.1    Maria Chroussaki, ‘Shepherd, Cyprus’, 1950s

    4.2    Maria Chroussaki, ‘Pentatroulos Church, Ieroskitos, Cyprus’, 1950s

    4.3    Lia Platritou, ‘Mother Cyprus I’, undated

    4.4    Adrianos Papagkikas, ‘Famagusta Gate’, 1979

    5.1    Yiannis Toumazis, ‘Road sign in the Messaoria Plain (northern part of Cyprus)’, 2010

    5.2    Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The identity card of Christou Christakis’, on display at the Istanbul Military Museum, 2007

    5.3    Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The photograph and watch of a Turkish “martyr” next to a “bloody cleaver”’, in the Cyprus-Korea section of the Istanbul Military Museum, 2010

    5.4    Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The caretaker of the Martyr’s Museum’, 2010

    5.5    Yiannis Toumazis, ‘Open letter to Christou Christakis as published in Phileleftheros newspaper on 9 December 2007’, 2007

    6.1    ‘Imam Mustafa Nuri Effendi’, from the Adiloglu family archive, 1915

    6.2    ‘Palimpsest’, a page from Imam Mustafa Nuri’s prison notebooks

    6.3    From the Adiloglu family archive, 1936

    6.4    Alev Adil, ‘Barricade’, 2006

    6.5    Alev Adil, ‘Stranded’, 2010

    7.1    Takis Demetriades, ‘1970, Kambi: Grandfather Kyriakos! Michelangelo could have copied his face for one of the prophets he carved in stone’, from The World of Cyprus 1960–74 (p. 82)

    7.2    Takis Demetriades, ‘1963: Kyrenia Harbour: A Kyrenian takes a rest, gazing at the sea. The shadows which surround him come from the North, from “the beloved sea of Kyrenia”’, from The World of Cyprus 1960–74 (p. 26)

    7.3    Nicos Philippou, from Coffee House Embellishments (p. 53)

    7.4    Nicos Philippou, from Coffee House Embellishments (p. 84)

    8.1    Cyprus Tourism Organization, ‘Can’t wait to see you again’, billboard at the entrance to Larnaca Airport, 2010

    8.2    Cyprus Tourism Organization, still images from one of the TV spots produced as part of the ‘Cyprus in your heart’ advertising campaign, 2011

8.3a    Edmund Nägele and John Hinde Studios, ‘Birthplace of Venus, Paphos, Cyprus’, c. 1969

8.3b    Elmar Ludwig and John Hinde Studios, ‘Birthplace of Aphrodite’, c. 1974

    8.4    Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, photographs and still images from ‘Contemporary Aphrodites’, 2010

    8.5    Martin Wipper, ‘Arranging “love stones” ’, photographs posted on Flickr, 2009

    9.1    William Harvey Doering, ‘Baker’s Jubilee Philadelphia PA USA’, 1898

    9.2    Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, ‘Embedded portraits’, 2010. Credit: Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

    9.3    Andreas Manolis, ‘Observation post by police barracks, embedded images from a demonstration at Ledra Palace roadblock’, late 1970s

    9.4    Andreas Manolis, ‘Observation post by police barracks, Ledra Palace roadblock’, late 1970s

    9.5    Andreas Manolis, ‘Demonstration by relatives and supporters next to Ledra Palace’, 12 July 2002

10.1    Tracey Emin, ‘Tracey Emin, Love is What you Want’, 2011

10.2    Tracey Emin, ‘Emin family in Turkey’, 1967

10.3    Tracey Emin, ‘On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984’, project for Frieze by Tracey Emin, 1994 (first published in Frieze 14, January/ February 1994)

10.4    Tracey Emin, still images from ‘Emin & Emin, Cyprus’, 1996

10.5    Tracey Emin, still images from ‘Sometimes the Dress is Worth More than the Money’, 2001

11.1    Haris Pellapaisiotis and Peter Loizos, ‘Walking Narratives/ Peter Loizos’, audiovisual projection, 2009

12.1    Haris Epaminonda, installation view of ‘Untitled #05 t/c’, 2010, as part of ‘VOL. VI exhibition’ at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London, 2010

12.2    Haris Epaminonda, installation view of ‘Untitled #01 t/ c’, 2010, framed found images (diptych), as part of ‘VOL. VI exhibition’ at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London, 2010. Photo credit: Andrew Bruce, London

12.3    Christodoulos Panayiotou, installation view of ‘The Invention of Antiquity’, 2011, black and white print, as part of ‘I. L’achat du cuivre 13 mai – 28 juillet 2012, II. Rapporter le monde au monde 1 juillet – 28 juillet 2012’, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny, Paris, France. Photo credit: Aurélien Mole, 2012

12.4    Christodoulos Panayiotou, installation view of ‘I Land’, 2010, 160 black and white slides, two synchronized slide projectors, Cubitt, London. Photo credit: David Morgan, 2010

Notes on Contributors

Alev Adil is a writer who has been widely published in academic journals, poetry anthologies and literary journals internationally. Alev reviews for The Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and the Guardian and lectures at the University of Greenwich where she teaches visual culture and creative writing and is Artist in Residence. Her photographic work, poetry and multimedia performances have been featured in magazines, used as book covers and been exhibited in galleries including Tate Britain and the Baltimore Museum of Art. She also curates www.MemoryMap.org.uk, an online digital memory project and exhibition space for film, photography, writing and music.

Elizabeth Hoak-Doering holds a BA in Anthropology, an MAed, and an MFA in Sculpture. Now a resident of Nicosia, she is a native of Philadelphia and has been working on Cypriot subjects since 1997. Primarily a visual artist, her recent solo exhibitions include the Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl (DE), Nicosia Municipal Art Centre, the Pharos Center for Contemporary Art (CY). She co-represented the Republic of Cyprus in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Her writing has been published in the Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (2012), the International Feminist Journal of Politics (2010) and The Cyprus Review (2009). She is Associate Professor of Art at the University of Nicosia.

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni is Associate Professor of English Literature and Cultural Theory at the Department of Humanities, European University Cyprus. His research interests include cultures, genders and sexualities in the Middle East. He is the author of Dancing Fear and Desire: Race, Sexuality and Imperial Politics in Middle Eastern Dance (Wilfrid Laurier UP 2004). Since 2007 he is the Managing Editor of Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus.

Iro Katsaridou is a curator at the Museum of Byzantine Culture, Thessaloniki, Greece. She studied Art History at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Museum Studies at the City University of New York. Her doctoral dissertation (Aristotle University 2010) treats the discourse on contemporary Greek photography. Her publications include a chapter on photography and the youth in Le pouvoir et les images, edited by François Soulages (Klinksieck 2011), and a chapter (co-authored with Anastasia Kontogiorgi) on photography of ancient Greek ruins in Imaging History: Photography after the fact, edited by Bruno Vandermeulen and Danny Veys (ASA Publishers 2011).

Hercules Papaioannou studied physics at Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, photography at New York University (MA) and culminated his PhD in photography at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki. He has taught photography for the past twenty years and has published hundreds of articles, critiques, and essays on photography. He has translated books on photography by Susan Sontag, Ian Jeffrey and Villem Flusser. He has curated a large number of photography exhibitions, worked for the International Thessaloniki Photography Festival Photosynkyria from 1993–2006 and was appointed as its artistic director in 2006. He is a curator at Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and the co-editor of the photographic e-magazine (www.untitledmagazine.org).

Haris Pellapaisiotis is Assistant Professor in Photography and Fine Art at the University of Nicosia and lectured in photography at Goldsmith’s College, 1991–2001. Currently he is studying for his PhD at the University of Reading. He is the founding director and coordinator of the Artalk seminars, Cyprus 2004–2009. He has contributed to the exhibition Leaps of Faith 2005 and in 2006 was invited to write for the Manifesta 6 publication Notes for an Art School as well as being selected to participate in the M6 School. He subsequently contributed to Anton Vidokle’s project Unitednationsplaza 2006–2007 Berlin.

Nicos Philippou is a photographer, visual ethnographer and author of the books Off the Map and Coffee House Embellishments. He is coeditor of Re-envisioning Cyprus and his writings on photography and vernacular culture have been published in journals, art magazines and collective volumes. As a photographer he has participated in several exhibitions in Cyprus and abroad. He holds an MA in Communications and Technology from Brunel University, UK. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia and is working towards his PhD at the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Bristol.

Elena Stylianou is Assistant Professor in Art History and Theory at European University Cyprus. She worked as a research postdoctoral fellow at the University of London, Institute of Education (2007–2009) investigating the relationship between technology and museums. She holds a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, with specialization in Art Theory (2004–2007) and a masters from the same school in Arts Education and Museum Studies (2002– 2004). She has taught in a number of well-known museums and is a recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. Her current research is on curatorial practices and museum education, photography and contemporary art.

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert has published on photography, museums and tourism. She is the author of Tourists Who Shoot and the co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus. She earned her PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and has received several awards and scholarships including an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award and a Fulbright Scholarship. As a photographer, she has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Europe and the USA. She is Assistant Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology and the coordinator of the Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab (www.vsmslab.com).

Yiannis Toumazis studied civil engineering in Athens, theatre design in Utrecht, and art theory and aesthetics at the University of Picardie in Amiens, where he received his PhD. He is Assistant Professor at Frederick University, Nicosia and director of the Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre and the Pierides Foundation. He has curated numerous contemporary art exhibitions including the Cyprus Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. He has also designed many museums in Cyprus and Greece, including the award-winning Thalassa Museum in Ayia Napa. He is co-author of Cyprus Art of the 20th Century, author and editor of several contemporary art catalogues, articles and scholarly publications.

Jennifer Way teaches and publishes on historical as well as social and cultural contexts for art after 1900. Her current book projects include Politics of Handicraft, a study of intersections of American economic and cultural diplomacy and industrial design with Southeast Asian handicrafts during the 1950s, an anthology concerning relationships of cybernetics and art.

Liz Wells writes, curates and lectures on photography. Her publications include Land Matters, Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (I.B.Tauris 2011). She is the editor of Photography: A Critical Introduction (2009, 4th edn) and The Photography Reader (2003), and is a co-editor for Photographies, Routledge journals. In 2012, she guest-curated Sense of Place, European Landscape Photography (BOZAR, Brussels). Since 2010 she has collaborated on several projects with Cypriot photographers and curators. She is Professor in Photographic Culture at the Faculty of Arts, Plymouth University and convenes the research group for Land/ Water and the Visual Arts (www.landwater-research.co.uk).

Acknowledgements

Particular thanks are due to the contributors of the book who demonstrated significant patience with our editorial requests. Their insights, care and creativity shaped the contents and tone of the book. Also thanks are due to the artists who are featured in individual chapters.

We would like to express our appreciation to the University of Nicosia, Cyprus, the Cyprus University of Technology and the Plymouth University, UK, for supporting the publication of this book. Furthermore, we would like to thank Christina McRoy for her efficient copyediting, the I.B.Tauris staff and especially our editors Philippa Brewster and Anna Coatman for their constant support.

Finally, we are very grateful for the encouragement, patience and support of our friends and family.

ONE

Introduction

Nicos Philippou, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert & Liz Wells

The perceived ‘transparency’ of photography and its ability to represent unmediated and unbiased reality has been repeatedly questioned since its beginnings but more forcefully in the past few years. The relationship between photographer, subject and viewer has been proven to be a complex and highly mediated one since it involves multiple contexts of production and consumption. This book is informed by the premise that photographs in general, and documentary and ethnographic photographs in particular, are not just documents of whatever it is they depict but also provide an insight into the producer’s perception and evaluation of his/ her subject. It also rests on the assumption that agency cannot be attributed to the camera operator only but also to the historical, political, institutional, cultural and economic contexts in which the photograph is produced, displayed and viewed (Tagg 1988).

Cyprus, a country where political and cultural conflicts as well as competing identities are at the foreground, serves as a case study through which we can explore how the photographic product of specific image-making contexts contributes but also responds to the processes of identity formation. That Cyprus is located at the furthest east point of the Mediterranean has meant that, historically, it has been viewed as a strategic staging post between Europe and the Middle East. Formerly a British colony, now the South-East frontier of the European Union, the island is divided with Turkish Cypriots congregated in the northern area and Greek Cypriots in the southern. As such, it is a country where histories of political and cultural conflicts, along with questions of identity, remain contested.

Aside from the value of investigating Cyprus historically and now through critical discussion of how the island and its people have been represented photographically, it also serves as a case study for theoretical exploration of ways in which specific image-making contexts contribute, reflect and inflect processes of identity formation. Even though the chapters in this collection focus on a specific geographical and cultural territory, the same concepts and similar debates apply when examining other places.

Cyprus is both an intriguing and elusive case. The use of photography on the island coincides with its recent history that, like its most distant past, is also marked by political turmoil and instability. The current political conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the two main communities of the island, rests on the existence of different national and cultural identities that are partly shaped, reinforced, and sometimes challenged, by photography. Furthermore, as in the case of other postcolonial countries, Cyprus is experiencing a ‘push and pull’ between the old and new, between modernity and tradition as well as between East and West. It is a place and culture that often renders straightforward cultural classification exercises futile; defining Cypriotness is ridden with complex issues and difficult challenges. As one observer put it, this is a culture that ‘forms a crossroad where ethnic, sexual, gender and race politics are complex, interwoven, and endlessly negotiated’ (Karayianni 2006: 252).

In 2010 a group of academics and photographers, who felt the need to reflect on the role of photography in shaping history, sense of place and identity, organized the First International Conference of Photography and Theory titled ‘Cypriot Photography in Context: Time, Place and Identity’ (hosted in Limassol, Cyprus, by the Cyprus University of Technology). The conference, despite its narrow, place-specific theme, attracted a variety of academics from different disciplines and parts of the world. Some papers presented were later reworked to become chapters in this book while further contributions were commissioned in order to reinforce and complete the interdisciplinary nature of the book.

The conference was instrumental in revealing that there are different ways of seeing or ‘gazes’ which contribute to photographic production and consumption. As Urry and Larsen (2011) have persuasively argued, ‘the concept of the gaze highlights that looking is a learned ability and that the pure and innocent eye is a myth’ (p. 1). Gazing can be seen as socially constructed seeing filtered through ideas, skills and expectations as well as framed by nationality, social class, education and gender (Urry & Larsen 2011). It can also be understood as a ‘way of seeing’ that reflects the way we see ourselves in relation to others (Berger 1972).

Taking into consideration the discussions that emerged from the conference that are also prominent in the existing literature, this book is separated into four main sections, each dealing with a different gaze. The authors draw from various academic fields – photography, art history, anthropology and sociology – in order to explore how different ways of seeing, categorized in terms of colonial, political, gendered, and art gazes, influence the construction of individual and national identities as well as the creation and re-creation of an imagined definition of a specific place. These are not the only gazes that influence photographic production and consumption but they have proved useful in helping us to structure this publication in terms of themes and, it follows, the various, still ongoing, debates.

The first section refers to early photographs picturing Cyprus that were taken during the British rule of the island, mainly by foreigners, turning a colonial gaze onto Cyprus and its people rendering Cyprus as idyllic, primitive and promising. Section Two addresses the political gaze and explores how politics, memory and photography are interwoven in the second part of the twentieth century. Public photographs displayed in the media and museums as well as private photographs displayed in homes and family albums influence individual and collective memories and thus personal and national identities. The gendered gaze, the third part of the book, considers propaganda pictures, popular media images and tourism imagery in order to examine how Cyprus is en-gendered, and more specifically feminized, through the use of photography. Finally, the last section, titled the art gaze, explores contemporary art practices by Cypriot artists or artists who have a special connection with Cyprus. The photographic work produced by these artists is unavoidably influenced by what it means to be Greek or Turkish Cypriot and simultaneously an artist working in an international art context. While the division of the book in four sections facilitates understanding of how different gazes influence photographic production and consumption, issues of agency, power, gender, politics, cosmopolitanism as well as the use of archives and propaganda are threads that are picked up in various chapters throughout the book.

The Colonial Gaze: Colonial Views, Postcolonial Theories

The complexity of the question of Cypriot identity makes the focus of this book a very suitable case for discussing the issues relating to the role of photography in the process of identity formation in general. As already suggested, ‘Cypriotness’ is both volatile and contested. As Papadakis (2006) mentions, Cyprus is a place that has been represented as ‘having been subjected to historical violations that turned it into a “hermaphrodite”’ (p. 241) and demanded, for its definition, the employment of categorical ambiguity. Furthermore, whilst Cypriots may assert modernity in the sense of rupture with tradition, urbanity and urban lifestyle and fashion as well as emancipation and individualism, such claims have been denied and even ridiculed by outsiders as a mere imitation that only leads to loss of character and ‘authenticity’ (Argyrou 1996: 177). As is variously indicated in several of the chapters included in this section, tropes of nineteenth-century North-Western European Romanticism continue to resonate.

Nicos Philippou (Chapter 3) discusses a July 1928 National Geographic travelogue on Cyprus which coincides with the period that, various observers agree, sees the emergence of Cypriot modernity (Argyrou 1996; Loizos 2001; Panayiotou 2006). Despite the many manifestations of modernity, both social and structural, but also material, the collection of photographs in the National Geographic work towards visually ‘purifying’ Cyprus, its people and culture, in order to fit it within a pre-existing view of the place. But it is not only Cypriot modernity that seems to be causing editorial problems for Maynard Owen Williams, the travelogue’s author and photographer. Unable to firmly place Cyprus or Cypriotness into a wider cultural category Williams resorts to constructing Cyprus as ‘half-oriental’.

This echoes the discourse of another very important traveller photographer that visited the island about half a century earlier than Williams and at the dawn of British colonialism. British photographer, John Thomson (Chapter 2), did not use such a blunt phrase as ‘half-oriental’ within his Cyprus project, but his visual and textual discourse is ridden with conflicting assessments of Cypriots and their culture. In this chapter, Hercules Papaioannou points towards the effective weaving of words and photographic image. The texts that accompany the photographs and activate their reading blend history and mythology, sights and monuments with references to wages and trade balances, investment opportunities and construction works, as well as favourable assessments on the people of Cyprus as a potential work force. Thomson’s album constitutes possibly the first such methodical application of the Western photographic vision to the depiction and interpretation of Cyprus, which emerges as a ‘fertile farm of the Levant’ awaiting its development through colonization norms. The cultural imperialism ultimately developed in Thomson’s work forebodes the current ideological domination of mass media imagery.

Both these key moments in the history of representing Cyprus and the respective chapters in this book demonstrate that Cyprus is indeed a very apt case for discussing pseudo-anthropological photographic expeditions of the colonial period. They bring into sharp relief the ideological drive and purpose of such projects, that is, the collective definition of people in the Imperial territory along racial and cultural hierarchies; east–west, modern–traditional.

The Political Gaze: Memory, Politics and the Construction of National Identities

Colonial photographers might have celebrated an idyllic, peaceful and romantic arcadia, but turmoil brewed beneath the surface. The political history of twentieth-century Cyprus is marked by intense rivalries, conflicts and political milestones including a bitter class struggle in the 1930s and 40s, an armed anti-colonial struggle in the 1950s aiming at Enosis (union with Greece), the creation of an independent state in 1960, violent intercommunal conflict in the 60s, a Greek-led coup d’état against President Makarios, the first president of the new Republic, in July 1974, the subsequent Turkish invasion less than a week later and the de facto partition of Cyprus ever since. A buffer zone monitored by United Nations troops is still located at the divide. Finally, the year 2004 saw the accession of the Republic of Cyprus to the European Union despite the continued division.

Apart from the local and international political arena, the ‘Cyprus problem’ has penetrated every facet of Cyprus life. It had an effect on educational, economic, social as well as cultural policies and thus has a profound influence on both national and personal identities. Photography plays an important role in imprinting communal or personal memories, informing national and personal identities and institutionalizing multiple, and often conflicting, histories.

Even self-declared apolitical photography can be rendered political if seen in a political context. Iro Katsaridou (Chapter 4) looks at the way photographs of Cyprus were situated in the Greek press from the 1950s until the 1980s. The general tendency of the critical discourse was to ignore photography’s aesthetics and to equate Cypriot imagery with Greece’s political aspirations, territorial claims and foreign policy in relation to the island. In line with the apolitical programme of FIAP (Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique), photography was presented as a ‘universal and sincere’ language that could convey a true image of the island, its beauties and its sufferings. Yet, as is argued in the chapter, despite the absence of specific references to historical facts, the photographic production is ‘read’ through the political situation of each period: the British colonial rule, the Enosis campaign, the Turkish invasion in 1974.

Art exhibitions might not always be consciously designed with a political message in mind but war-related museums and monuments usually are. Yiannis Toumazis (Chapter 5) examines how photographs in museums contribute to the institutionalization of collective memories that reinforce nationalist agendas. In particular, the author looks at the representation of the recent history of Cyprus at the Istanbul Military Museum, Turkey and the Athens War Museum, Greece, the two countries claiming and claimed to be the motherlands for Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots respectively. Using a museological approach, he critically assesses a number of individual exhibits in both museums which stimulate and safeguard different nationalistic attitudes. Issues related to museums and photography, as carriers of memory, trauma and history, besides the public display of death, are also discussed.

While Toumazis examines how public photography shapes national identities, Alev Adil (Chapter 6) turns her attention to how private memories enclosed in family albums shape individual identities. She explores what photographic archives erase and reveal about the evolution of Turkish Cypriot subjectivities in the century following the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878. By using auto-ethnographic techniques and her own photographic work, Adil deconstructs her family photographs in order to trace the genealogy of the mythic regimes (of Orientalism, Classicism and Modernity), which inform their aesthetic. She argues that photography was key to the performance of learning to become a modern (Turkish) Cypriot subject and the preservation of those images in family archives speaks of their continuing importance as signifiers of social and personal identity.

The Gendered Gaze: Framing Gender and Other Constructions

Since 1974, the Republic of Cyprus has seen an incredible economic recovery aided by commerce and tourism. Still, the political and cultural conflicts which dominate the debates in Cyprus often overshadow ‘other images of other narratives’ (Loizos 2010: 12). Gender is one of the narratives which is often silenced. This section of the book considers the role of photography in the politics of gender and meaning construction and how these terms implicate economics, politics, ethnicity and heterosexual desire. The authors show how images of women have been used to promote everything from tourism to the ‘Cyprus problem’. On the one hand, publicity images and tourism brochures are populated by attractive ‘contemporary Aphrodites’ and by picturesque elderly women in traditional head covers. On the other hand, away from the glossy and colourful world of tourism, another female form, that of the ‘suffering mother’, awaiting news of male relatives missing since the 1974 war, visually exemplifies the recent Cypriot histories.

Continuing the discussion on the photographic legacy of colonial travellers, Stavros Karayianni (Chapter 7) looks at how native photographers, emulating the work of colonial travellers, reproduced Cyprus through a process that often cited auto-exoticism, a self-possessed auto-ethnography, and, disturbingly, male hetero-normative notions of gender embodiment. The overarching question is pertinent to a pictorial semiotics of gender identity: how are certain images mobilized to endorse and strengthen established ideological convictions about Cypriot Greek male and female embodiment of different ages and classes? How are the various typologies of Cyprus images employed in the service of ideology in order to perpetuate obstinate master narratives about masculinity and ethnicity?

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (Chapter 8) investigates ways in which tourism has mobilized images of women at the beach in order to promote Cyprus as an attractive beach destination. Appropriately, Cyprus is promoted as the sunny island of the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. The author uses the ‘Rock of Aphrodite’, the alleged birthplace of the goddess, as a case study to explore how its socio-cultural construction, evident in photographic representations of the location, informs the projected visual identity of the island. Additionally, this chapter explores the ways these images influence tourists’ expectations and, as an effect, the way tourists themselves photograph the location.

Apart from images of young, attractive ‘contemporary Aphrodites’, another typical female form dominates the mass media in Cyprus since 1974. Elizabeth Hoak-Doering (Chapter 9) explores the female incarnation of the ‘Cyprus problem’: the ‘photographic Pietà’. The photographic Pietà is an image of a Greek Cypriot woman dressed in black holding a photograph of a son, husband or brother missing since 1974. These photographs are typically held up to photojournalists and observers as well as decorating commemorative sites and objects. This chapter explores some of the political, temporal and religious contexts in which the photographic Pietà is found in Cyprus and elsewhere. Furthermore, Hoak-Doering introduces the concepts of photographic disappearance and distortion by comparison with audio absence or re-inflection. This comparison helps extend the visual dimension of the photographic Pietà into a larger context of performance and media.

The Art Gaze: Contemporary Art Photography

This final section considers ways in which contemporary artists have related to and engaged with questions concerning the complex histories and competing identities that characterize Cyprus. Haris Pellapaisiotis (Chapter 11) notes that as a city Nicosia – as the cliché goes, the last divided capital in Europe – has specific political histories that contribute formatively within a complex urban identity. As he demonstrates through his discussion of Manifesta 6, the peripatetic art event, which took Nicosia as its host city in 2006, it is difficult for those from outside of Cyprus to comprehend the complexities of attitudes and experiences that form contemporary Cypriot tensions and identities. In asking what insights artists can bring to debates about reconciliation, he proposes the value of detailed looking, of responding phenomenologically not to what is expected but to that actually observed. If Cyprus is dis-orienting, then the purpose of art is to interrogate the sources of dis-orientation.

Elena Stylianou (Chapter 12) likewise interrogates the relation of artists to place. Taking the example of two artists, Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayiotou, she comments on their use of archives and found imagery as source material and also on the disjunction between their cosmopolitan identity as artists operating internationally and their strong sense of location as (Greek) Cypriot. In asserting the significance of subjectivity and the autobiographical within art practice she argues that being Cypriot is inevitably a formative element within their work. Jennifer Way (Chapter 10) similarly interrogates the influence of national-ethnic identity through discussion of Tracey Emin’s practice seated in her own family histories which, significantly, include her relationship with her Turkish Cypriot father who was both absent (did not live with her mother) and present (was with them some of the time). Way presents Emin’s work as in part a quest to ‘ find’ her father.

Pellapaisiotis specifically references histories as context, suggesting that naivety in relation to the particular tensions that continue to characterize Cyprus limits artistic perception. In focusing more on the work of individual artists, Way and Stylianou place more emphasis on the subjective. All, however, point to questions of method and source materials as constitutive within art practice, suggesting that what artists bring into play is an ability to interrogate phenomena (histories, locations, stories and behaviour) and to respond in ways that elucidate more detailed perceptions of Cyprus as place and Cypriotness as identity. Artists, as ‘cosmopolitan wanderers’ who are locally rooted can offer anthropological insights that benefit from comparisons drawn between ‘being’ Cypriot and experiences of living and working internationally. At its best the art gaze is subjective, historically informed, and draws upon international debates and perspectives.

Contextualizing Photography

In order to understand the complexity of photographic representations and the relationships between meaning, memory, identity, politics and knowledge, the chapters of this book attempt to de-code different aspects of how a photograph was initially produced and how it influences meaning. The chapters variously explore: how colonial photography can present a place as idyllic, primitive and promising; how politics can dictate what kinds of photographs are being circulated as well as how they are read; how a place can be en-gendered through popular media images; also how artists work with photographic images in order to engage in a personal dialogue with their local and, at the same time, cosmopolitan identities. Issues of power, agency, politics, globalization and propaganda are bound up with even the most familiar or unquestioned images.

With the passing of time, information available regarding the original context of photography and our understanding of how photographs are constructed and consumed evolves and changes. As a result, photographic interpretations, and therefore meaning-making, are historically fluid and always dependent on the viewer and the viewing context. Nevertheless, the de-coding exercises presented by the different authors have a common goal: to demonstrate that different socially constructed ways of seeing, or gazes, unavoidably influence photographic representations and their readings. Considering that photography shapes how places are seen as well as influences subjectivity, understanding such processes can contribute to revealing how we came to be who we are.

References

Argyrou, Vassos (1996). Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as a Symbolic Struggle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Berger, John (1972). Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Karayianni, Stavros S. (2006). ‘Moving identity: dance in the negotiation of sexuality and ethnicity in Cyprus’, Postcolonial Studies 9(3): 251–66.

Loizos, Peter (2001). ‘Cyprus, 1878–1955: structural change, and its contribution to changing relations of authority’, in P. Loizos (ed.), Unofficial Views/Cyprus: Society and Politics (pp. 127–40), Nicosia: Intercollege Press.

———(2010). ‘Cyprus through our own eyes’, in P. Loizos, N. Philippou & T. Stylianou-Lambert (eds), Re-envisioning Cyprus (pp. 11–21), Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

Panayiotou, Andreas (2006). ‘Lenin in the coffee-shop’, Postcolonial Studies 9(3): 267–80.

Papadakis, Yiannis (2006). ‘Aphrodite delights’, Postcolonial Studies 9(3): 237–50.

Tagg, John (1988). The Burden of Representation/Essays on Photographies and Histories, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Urry, John & Larsen, Jonas (2011). The Tourist Gaze 3.0, London: Sage.

THE COLONIAL GAZE

Colonial Views, Postcolonial Theories

TWO

John Thomson: Through Cyprus with a Camera, Between Beautiful and Bountiful Nature

Hercules Papaioannou

In the course of its centuries-long adventurous history, Cyprus, a major crossroad in the southeastern Mediterranean, was conquered by the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Persians and the Venetians amidst others, and was duly adjoined to empires, notably the Ottoman Empire for about three centuries. According to a treaty signed on 4 June 1878 the neglected province of Cyprus became a British territory in exchange for supporting the Ottomans against the Russian danger from the North (Cowan 1985). The British interest came as a result of strategic concerns. As the Suez Canal was completed in 1869 by a multi-national company founded for that reason, a military presence was deemed crucial in order to avert full French control of the canal and the sea route to the Far East, a development that could possibly threaten the Empire’s trade and political balances. The British were familiar with the region, having established since the sixteenth century the Levant Company that imported and exported products from the eastern Mediterranean. The company, which interrupted its operation in 1825, had at its peak, political power and military backing extending well beyond its commercial goals.

And yet, it was not only for trade that the British were wandering in the Mediterranean. The Grand Tour started in the eighteenth century, mainly from Britain, as a pilgrimage to the Roman monuments of southern France, northern Italy and Rome and later included southern Italy and Magna Graecia, also crossing the sea to visit the Holy Land and Egypt. The tour was considered essential training for the offsprings of British aristocracy, broadening their horizons and cultural backgrounds in preparation for a future political career or assuming the governing of a colony. It was due to the Napoleonic Wars (1797–1814) in the early nineteenth century that the trip to Italy was hindered and the Grand Tour reached Greece and the Near East, bringing together in that same journey the biblical lands and the classical past. It was in this period that the improvement of transportation, colonial expansion and evolution of sciences (such as history, anthropology, archaeology and geography) stimulated the desire for the exotic, the study of faraway people, places and ancient cultures. Although establishing trade and tourism were important they were not the only reasons to visit the eastern Mediterranean. In his multiple-volume work Foreign Travellers in Greece, Kyriakos Simopoulos notes that the strategic concern for the broader Greek region developed in the early nineteenth century due to the decline of the Ottoman Empire which brought to the area a wave of artists, writers, missionaries and adventurers of all kinds. Along with them ‘secret agents, diplomats, military officers swarm in Greece transformed to studious travelers, roaming through the country with overt and covert missions’ (Simopoulos 1970: 7). In addition, this roaming satisfied philhellenic sentiments and growing archaeophilia, not to mention the plunder of exceptional ruins. Even officials such as diplomat Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, French ambassador in Istanbul, launched missions with painter Louis François Sébastien Fauvel to find and loot Greek antiquities (Simopoulos 1975: 463).

Photography, following its inception in 1839, was used extensively in picturing antiquities, major monuments and renowned landscapes around the globe, opening windows on the perception of the world as a whole through a vast number of images distributed as prints and albums, and later in stereographs and postcards. As Joan Schwartz and James Ryan put it: ‘made practicable at a time when vision and knowledge came to be inextricably linked, the photograph offered a means of observing, describing, studying, ordering, classifying and, thereby, knowing the world’ (Schwartz & Ryan 2009: 8). Parts of the facts and information collected and classified were used, of course, to exert control and power. Given such a broad perspective of possible goals, photography seemed a precious tool in the hands of travellers.

In that context John Thomson (1837–1921), the prominent Scottish traveller, photographer, geographer and amateur archaeologist, realized quickly how strategically important Cyprus was becoming for British capital and public opinion. Just two months after the signing of the treaty he visited Cyprus at the end of summer 1878 and travelled extensively in the island. In January 1879, within five months of his arrival, he was back in London preparing his two-volume album Through Cyprus with the Camera, In the Autumn of 1878, which contained 59 photographs from the new British colony. Each photograph was viewed along with a text across the page written by him (Cowan 1985).

When Thomson visited Cyprus he was not a novice. He had already travelled in the Far East for ten years (1862–72) initially setting up a photographic studio in Singapore plus taking photographs in India, Ceylon, Sumatra and Cambodia among other places. He had also published the renowned four-volume Illustrations of China and its People (1873–4) with 200 photographs accompanied again by texts, the fruit of a five-year tour in which he wandered through immense China covering around 8,000 kilometres (1868–72). According to Naomi Rosenblum, it ‘attempted to make an arcane and exotic way of life understandable and acceptable by the British public’. Rosenblum remarks further that ‘the scenic views in China and Japan were made first by visiting Europeans who brought with them, in the wake of the rebellions and wars that opened China to Western imperialism, equipment, fortitude and traditional Western concepts of pictorial organisation’ (Rosenblum 1984: 124, 346). In much the same spirit Ialeen Cowan Gibson considers Thomson responsible for some of the most impressive, photographically illustrated, travel books of his time (Cowan 1985). However, the British art historian Ian Jeffrey added another viewpoint, arguing that Thomson’s ‘attention was held mainly by manufacturing and social arrangements. His book in fact is not a disinterested survey. It is rather more of a prospectus, designed to be of use to traders and settlers’ (Jeffrey 1986: 64).

There were other reasons though to explain why Thomson rushed to work in Cyprus. After the arrival of the British army, the island was held for a while under journalistic scrutiny: its strategic and economic features, the crops, the climate, the archaeological sites and the gothic ruins. Not all reports were exactly favourable: descriptions of large, wild and arid areas were followed by others of swamps spreading dangerous contagious diseases. Not everybody in England seemed to support enthusiastically a strong British military presence in Cyprus (Cowan 1985: xvi). Therefore, Thomson’s tour seems to be an attempt to smoothen the unflattering impressions diffused to the public. The hypothesis becomes more valid if one considers the case of Roger Fenton, another distinguished Victorian photographer who was sent by the British Court to the Crimean War in 1855. His mission was to document photographically the good condition and vigorous morale of the British troops, opposing the journalistic reports to the contrary (Rosenblum 1984: 180). Moreover, Thomson’s Chinese tour was awarded a gold medal by Queen Victoria herself (Cowan 1985: xii). The Court had clearly discerned the potential of the new medium, as well as the skills of its distinguished subject John Thomson.

What was Thomson’s view of Cyprus? The album opened with a portrait of the first English High Commissioner in Cyprus, Sir Garnet Wolseley. One can assume that Wolseley made the whereabouts of the celebrated guest in the island easier in many ways and so the portrait can be read as an act of gratitude. But its placing on the album’s first page, the formal pose in uniform and full decoration, officializes and personifies beyond any doubt the British rule on the island. The main body of work constituted an efficient tour: Larnaca, Nicosia, Kyrenia, Paphos, Limassol and Famagusta, together with a climbing trip to the top of mount Troodos. How do Cypriot towns of the time appear in the album? With the exception of Larnaca, Thomson rates the architecture as unremarkable and hygiene conditions often unacceptably low, a fact leading regularly to the outbreak of epidemic diseases, noting himself the victim of a dangerous infectious fever in Famagusta. Yet he claims that change is under way: the British authorities have started to improve hygiene conditions, the road network and the waterfront lighting. Thomson remarks that harbours are badly maintained, small and often shallow, but can be greatly improved to broaden the trade potential of the island, consequently making an open call for investments that can capitalize on the local resources.

The people appear in a good number of street scenes and portraits. According to Thomson, Cypriots are healthy, nimble, courteous and hardworking while the wages of both men and women, as he points with precise numbers, are very low. His images often depict peasants and everyday people, omitting local lords and dignitaries. Ethnological, folklore and sociological remarks include comments on beggary in the island, relations between young and old, the hospitality and wealthy financial status of orthodox monks, differences between highland and lowland people, the absence of female beauty due to hard manual labour, dressing and footwear habits.

Figure 2.1 John Thomson, ‘A group of native Cypriots, Cyprus’, 1878. Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Significant scope is given to images picturing surviving monuments or ruins: St Lazarus Catholic Church in Larnaca with the British tombs, the gate of Nicosia with a view to the city castle, the Belle Paix Abbey near Kyrenia, ruins of the ancient kingdom of Lapithos near Kyrenia again, the ancient tombs in Paphos and the Gothic cathedrals in Nicosia and Famagusta turned to mosques. The texts are often enriched with historical and mythological information and references to the work of earlier travellers such as Lithgow, Mariti and Pococke, in relation to work which Thomson seems quite familiar with.

Another group of images turns to landscape as a central theme. Picturesque views of harbours are combined with comments on the minarets and bell towers that decorate gracefully the sky, in contrast with the broken people. The landscape of Larnaca is referred to as one of ‘Oriental beauty’. Thomson describes Arcadian scenes with gardens in bloom and peaceful flocks, details on the beautiful Cypriot flora and the seductive atmospheric perspective. A view from the Belle Paix Abbey near Kyrenia is considered by Thomson as one of the most beautiful panoramas off the Mediterranean coast. However, aesthetic praises are offset, if not eclipsed, by descriptions of uncultivated plains that can return great profit, of swamps and saltmarshes that need to be drained, of farming and the quality of timber. Many of these descriptions are associated with specific sites of the island. Thomson risks the prediction that some of the ‘richest farms in the Levant’ can be established in Cyprus, as ‘Nature in this island is not only beautifying but bountiful and she yields a handsome return for invested labour or capital.’ The delicate transition from beautifying to bountiful makes clear how well Thomson balances between the touristic and the utilitarian viewpoint.

Figure 2.2 John Thomson, ‘View of Kyrenia harbour, Cyprus’, 1878. Credit: Wellcome Library, London

Typical of this approach is photograph no. 3 of the album titled The Sea-Shore, Larnaca, a scene rated as among ‘the most picturesque in Larnaca’, in which the ‘rich green clusters of cactuses harmonize with the warm tone of the coast, the clear blue line of the sea’. In his adjacent text Thomson starts to describe the coast in aesthetic terms, but then shifts the tone: the saltmarshes, he notes, although serene and picturesque, are nothing more than malaria-riddled swamps the income from which has greatly diminished but the land resulting after draining may prove very profitable. In the scene’s foreground, apart from the prickly pears, a poor Cypriot peasant poses, possibly as an index scale, as was often the occasion at the time. Nevertheless his presence seems like an open hint: this land is not just fruitful; it comes with its own subdued, available manpower. In the same spirit Nicos Philippou contends that Thomson presents Cypriot nature as a fertile field awaiting capital investment and that he tends to regard Cypriots as relatively ‘uncivilized’ and ‘primitive’ – meaning a suitable work force for the ‘rational’, ‘cultivated’ colonial elite (Philippou 2010: 247–9). Thomson’s view on Cypriots is not unsympathetic, but it presents them mostly as adjusted to submission and stagnancy rather than claiming forcefully an independent future.

Photograph no. 45 titled Paphos’ plain echoes a similar atmosphere. It depicts a desolate, barren and unexploited plain, with sparse but evident traces of history; that is, ruins of pre-Roman tombs in the foreground carved on the rock, all of them despoiled, that look as dark mysterious openings in the ground and small, scattered rural huts. Thomson again brings to mind the soil’s extreme fertility that can be greatly improved through irrigation. His landscape approach is based once more on a composition quite rich in information displaying a careful succession of planes. Though the meaning of the photograph, as defined by the adjacent text, is not limited in a historical or aesthetic approach of Paphos’ landscape, it offers particular prospects on its practical use.

The photograph titled Ruins at Famagusta (51) summarizes, appropriately, the palimpsest of three historical periods in a single cultural landscape: in the foreground the ruins of a Byzantine church stand amidst the weeds, with tiny figures acting possibly again as a scale index. According to Thomson, the situation is typical of most churches, taken apart mainly for using stone and marble as building materials. Built remarkably close, in a kind of intro-Christian confrontation, a Gothic church preserved intact marks the Frankish Lusignan rule. The more recent Ottoman period is not raising architectural ambitions; it demolishes the Byzantine church turning the Gothic one to a mosque, adding also a minaret.

What conclusions can be drawn from Thomson’s work in Cyprus? First, he is not indifferent to the album’s possible commercial success, as he often includes information concerning the island’s prospective visitor. In the text of photograph no. 35, he lines up advice for future tourists, praising local hospitality, reporting on the good and the bad and recording average daily expenses. Moreover, he claims that the album is not directed only at those interested in an articulate topography of Cyprus and its assets; those who have already visited the island will find in it a reliable souvenir of their travels. The founding stone of tourism for a broader audience was already set in 1836 when John Murray published his travel bible in which sightseeing and picturesque routes of Holland, Belgium and Rhineland were marked and rated. It was the pressure from developing urban society that created the need of an escape which urged the romantic vision to place freedom away from modern civilization, where untouched nature and history dominated (Enzensberger 2000: 90–9).

Figure 2.3 John Thomson, ‘(Ruins at) Famagusta, Cyprus’, 1878. Credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Second, the fact that each photograph was printed on a separate well designed page with tinted borders indicates an aim to surpass mere documentation, revealing an artistic aspiration (Cowan 1985: x). Third, the political need to diffuse early negative impressions has already been mentioned. Even so, the album’s main goal seems to go further: through an alternatively vivid and austere style of writing flowing smoothly from historical and mythological information to daily life; through images offering a clever dispersion of subjects and careful interweaving with text; through an anecdotal accounting that leads gradually to familiarity, Thomson puts forward a kind of cultural imperialism, collecting information for the British upper class (par excellence clientele of such an album), creating a complex as well as elegant colonization handbook. Cultural imperialism is examined by Edward Said in his classic work Orientalism, as a process forming the mental and intellectual map through art, literature, history and other disciplines with which the Westerners were ‘dominating, reconstructing and exercising authority on the East’. Said described Orientalism as a ‘systematic discipline with which the European culture managed to manipulate – or even invent – the East politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively in the post-Enlightenment period’, underlining that the flourishing of Orientalism coincided with the peak of European colonialism which in the nineteenth century came to rule about 85 per cent of the earth (Said 1996: 13–4, 27, 57). Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin supported also the view that the study of other people has been the most prominent ally of economic and political control as the process of collecting, documenting and classifying knowledge supported imperial dominance and became a mirror into which the people were convinced to look at themselves (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1995: 1).

In his analysis of the discourse of Orientalism Said examined various kinds of imagery. Strangely, he omitted photography, a very sophisticated technique of perceiving, studying and occupying the East or any place on earth, through images that exerted influence in a metropolitan audience, undoubtedly though in a colonial one too. In that line Peter Osborne argues that photography in the nineteenth century functioned as a strong determinant in unifying the geographical, economic, ideological and imaginary territory, unification necessary for the expansion of capitalism. The process combined ‘brute force with the logic of the market, and the efficacy of technology with the allure and cultural violence of representation’, allowing him to conclude that ‘all travel photography outside metropolitan centres was in some way touched by colonialism’ (Osborne 2000: 11–2, 18). Much in the same spirit Nikos Panayotopoulos analyses how the image of Greece, a country sharing important historical and cultural features with Cyprus, was constructed according to prevalent Western norms surrounding it, remarking that ‘Western cultural hegemony produces and imposes a Western gaze, whose apparently self-evident nature conceals its historical and ideological constitution.’ (Panayotopoulos 2009: 181–94). It is exactly the condition for which Derek Gregory introduces the term ‘emperors of the gaze’ (Gregory 2009: 197). The term suggests that photographers in the Near and Middle East helped to construct the image of the place, its history and its people, in the rising discourse of Orientalism, creating multi-layered images that could also exert power and participate in the shaping of colonial strategies.

In a similar context, Thomson implements photography and language to sketch a portrait of the island in which history, aesthetics, investments and politics are filtered through Western norms and demands from the region. It is true that when Thomson visited Cyprus its photographic records made by foreigners and locals were still quite poor. According to Mike Hajimichael, Thomson clearly applies here a colonial gaze addressed to an audience ‘comprised of the aristocracy, merchants, colonial employees and generally people who had the luxury or maybe the interest to visit places around the “empire”’ (Hajimichael 2006: 62, 64, 73, 75). Clarifying his motivations Thomson writes in the text of photograph no. 2 that when the island came under British control speculators rushed to Larnaca and companies were founded in London for the swift development of Cyprus, in the belief that the place could turn into an eastern El Dorado. Nonetheless, as he explains, many were quickly disappointed. This justifies perhaps Thomson’s haste; he realized the whole project in the enviable time of five months! It also explains why information in the album ranges from local shoes to Limassol’s exact trade balance, from references to the goddess Aphrodite born on Paphos’ waves to precise data on Limassol’s products or the population proportions of Greeks and Turks. Moreover, rousing the public’s bulimia for acquiring antiquities, he recounts in text no. 44 how he bought coins of the early Christian period from a local along with a Roman seal depicting Zeus and his eagle. His work attempted to make Cyprus look sympathetic to a broader, mainly British, audience inscribing it gradually in its collective consciousness. The local audience was not a primary target, commercially or ideologically, contacting Thomson’s album at a later stage. If, as Hajimichael points out, Thomson pays respect to ancient Greek civilization displaying also the general condition of ‘decay’ associated with the East, then the need for Western ‘progress’ that Britain provides is well justified (Hajimichael 2006: 70). The view of a decadent place could arouse a sense of superiority on the side of the spectator and a perspective of development.

Photography exercised in the context of cultural imperialism showed reasonable interest in landscapes and portraits that preoccupied at the time the largest part of photography anywhere. But there seems to be a reason for it. Landscapes, especially the ones devoid of people were, according to Abigail Solomon-Godeau, a choice aligned ‘with the ideology of colonialism, suggesting that empty space is a vacuum waiting to be conquered and possessed, prey of an expanding empire’ (Solomon-Godeau 1991: 159). One can recall W.J.T. Mitchell remarking that places where landscape imagery historically flourished were either empires or countries exercising colonialism, posing the question whether ‘the representation of landscape is an international phenomenon related with imperialism’ (Mitchell 1994b: 9). Portraits on the other side served as a means of acquaintance with the faraway, unknown people. Derrick Price indicates that the ‘subjects of the colonizer’s look were regarded often as plain representative types of racial or social groups, and were usually placed in a way that embodied particular forms of dressing, social roles, and material culture’ (Price 2007: 89–90). Thomson certainly depicted with equal care the vacuum and the representative types inhabiting it, both waiting to be conquered.

What is Thomson’s approach to photography through the pages of the album? In 1867 Thomson declared that ‘sun pictures’ are the best available means to illustrate scientific works and travel books, supplying ‘a means of passing down a record of what we are, and what we have achieved in this nineteenth century of progress’ (Thomson 1985: x–xi). In his introduction to Illustrations of China and its People (1873) he wrote that ‘the faithfulness of such pictures affords the nearest approach that can be made towards placing the reader actually before the scene which is represented’ (Goldberg 1988: 165). A high appreciation comes forward for the documentary aspect of the medium (which of course was not questioned at all in his epoch) and the need for factuality, empirical or scientific, that was fuelling the engine of progress. At the same time, as observed above, photography was an indispensable tool to exploration and an appropriate means to influence public opinion. After all was the Royal Geographic Society of which Thomson was an honoured member, not to some extent an oblique antenna of the British imperial establishment?

Thomson’s photographs usually combine layering of information with an austere documentary style, avoiding excessive picturesqueness, with a few exceptions, mainly harbour views. Why is that? Possibly because his publishing experience from previous tours pointed that aesthetic pleasure and practically oriented readings often work against each other. If the viewers were to process Thomson’s views on Cyprus then the photographs, without lacking in autonomy or visual integrity, should rather serve the purpose of a meaningful illustration than claim always full attention on their own.

Thomson’s sophisticated editing of the album becomes clear in the last photograph, the only one depicting a female figure dressed in contemporary European clothing. Looking at the lens, the woman stands as a metaphor for Cyprus: a contemporary, second-rate version of Aphrodite that demonstrates, with confidence and modesty, the modern spirit that can be achieved under the supervision of the Victorian ruling class. The album begins with the image of the English High Commissioner in Cyprus and ends with one of a local woman dressed in European fashion. It begins with the present and ends with the future. In the intervening pages prospects are opened, hints are made; a scenario is discreetly but methodically weaved. In a sense, the album’s pages bring to mind what, much later, W.J.T. Mitchell named imagetext, indicating that in every text there are latent images, the same way most images contain latent texts (Mitchell 1994a: 83–100).

Only once did Thomson seem to hesitate during his short stay in Cyprus: while on top of Mount Troodos he came across and photographed the remains of an ancient sanctuary. A violent storm broke then, which Thomson considered a strong protest against the sacrilege of photographing, for the first time, such a place (Thomson 1985). His rationalism compromises here with ancient Greek beliefs considering nature as inhabited by deities commanding its elements.

Cyprus was the last photographic tour of Thomson, in support of the British colonial plans. Enjoying a good reputation as a photographer he went on to establish a portrait studio in London’s rich and elegant West End. Also, for a number of years he successfully undertook the photographic training of younger Royal Geographic Society members. The Society acknowledged his important services by giving his name to the top of Mount Kenya conquered by British explorers in 1900 (Cowan 1985). Point Thomson was undoubtedly a full justification of his exploratory missions. On the other hand, it served as an open promise for the planning and realization of more ‘exploration missions’, photographic or other, in new, faraway, exotic lands.

Conclusion

John Thomson’s Through Cyprus with a Camera is certainly a unique photographic testimony and a rich visual record of nineteenth-century Cyprus at the beginning of the British rule which lasted eighty-two years. An independent discussion could attempt to trace possible influences of Thomson’s work in the evolution of Cypriot photography. The fact that Thomson, as a major photographer, completed a photographic work in nineteenth-century Cyprus makes it unquestionably a point of reference. Its critical assessment though had to wait long. Initially, the dialogue on photography and its political or ideological implications was very poor even in the metropolis. When in the second half of the twentieth century this dialogue advanced and was gradually diffused adequately from the metropolis to the periphery Thomson’s work, as Hajimichael indicates, had already acquired a historical patina that blocked perhaps for some time alternative readings (Hajimichael 2006: 73). Yet, it is indeed strange that it had to wait until the dawn of the twenty-first century to be discussed in more critical terms.

A close examination reveals that it is finally a much more complex work than it might originally seem: designed to constitute a traveller’s guide, a historical and ethnological document, it seriously aspires to commercial success, it discreetly claims artistic values, while acting in the service of cultural imperialism. It also maintains a remarkable illustration and editing logic, and an advanced view on the polysemy of photography, its communication and propaganda potential and its bonding with language. It is evident that this view subjects elaborately exceeding archaeophilia, picturesque romanticism and illustrated tourism to the goals of colonial strategy. Cyprus is examined here not only as an ancient cradle of civilization with traditional values and beautiful landscapes, but also as a big and fertile hectare of land, strategically important, waiting its normalization.

At the same time Thomson’s work is an implementation, perhaps for the first time so methodically in the island’s history, of the Western view and its organization of pictorial space on Cyprus, a view that carries along particular ideological and cultural baggage. In that sense two worlds seem to intersect here: the rational, colonialist Western view against the mythical, historical background and the slow paced Middle Eastern reality, revealing the former’s attempt to control and redefine the latter. One recalls the famous 1852 Karl Marx phrase: ‘they cannot represent themselves. They have to be represented’ (Elster 1986: 254). Marx wrote it for the French peasants of his time that had not formed class consciousness and so they lacked political representation. The situation of Cyprus was not dissimilar: passing from the long Ottoman rule to the status of a British colony, it could not voice itself. Politically and culturally ‘it had to be represented’ by the ruler’s means and interests. Photography, with its infinite ability to inform and seduce, proposed itself as an undisputedly ‘objective’ frame for such a representation, obscuring power relations through the image’s fascination. John Thomson, the unresting, plethoric and talented photographer, played an instrumental role in this mediation, normalizing the British view on the new possession.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Yannis Papaioannou and Stefanos Tsakiris for their assistance. Also to Nicos Philippou, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Liz Wells for their critical comments and advice.

Note

1. An earlier version of this essay was published in Greek under the same title in the magazine Gramma, a Theory and Criticism Journal of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (2001) 7: 105–19.

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Rosenblum, Naomi (1984). A World History of Photography, New York: Abbeville Press.

Said, Edward (1990). ‘Yeats and decolonization’, in T. Eagleton, F. Jameson & E. Said (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (pp. 69–98), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———(1996 [1978]). Orientalism, Athens: Nefeli.

Schwartz, Joan M. & Ryan, James, R. (2009 [2003]). Picturing Place, Photography and the Geographical Imagination, London & New York: I.B.Tauris.

Simopoulos, Kyriakos (1970). Foreign Travellers in Greece, 333ad–1700, Athens.

———(1973). Foreign Travellers in Greece, 1700–1800, Athens.

———(1975). Foreign Travellers in Greece, 1800–1810, Athens.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail (1991). Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions and Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Thomson, John (1873). ‘Illustration of China and its people’, in V. Goldberg (ed.), (1988 [1981]) Photography in Print, (pp. 163–5), New York: Simon & Schuster.

———(1985). Through Cyprus with the Camera, In the Autumn of 1878, London:

Trigraph (originally published (1879) as a two volume work by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington).

THREE

The National Geographic and Half Oriental Cyprus

Nicos Philippou

When John Thomson journeyed and photographed Cyprus and its people in 1878, the year when the British assumed administration of the island, he appeared preoccupied with providing a cultural classification of the place. This sought-after straightforward classification of the island proved elusive as Cyprus was a geographical and cultural territory that resisted a direct categorization and placement within either of the perceived as opposite cultural spheres of Occident and Orient. As a result Thomson adopted an ambiguous gaze and his narrative was dominated by juxtapositions between features of a contemporary post-Ottoman and Oriental Cyprus with those of a past Classical and European one.

When Maynard Owen Williams visited the island to produce a travelogue on Cyprus for the National Geographic Magazine (July 1928 issue) he spelled out what Thomson implied through his ambiguous gaze and parallel narratives: Cyprus is ‘Half-oriental’. Williams’ text starts with positioning Cyprus on a geographical map. He does this in admirably vivid style and he constructs images, shapes and an atmosphere that was not only designed to aid his readers to imagine the geography of the region that surrounded Cyprus but to also provide them with intertextual tools for placing Cyprus on an imaginary cultural map:

    IN SHAPE a rumpled oxhide, sprawling in the curve of sea where Syria swings west toward the Cilician Taurus, Cyprus points its tail toward fateful Issus, where boyish Alexander routed the hosts of Asia.

        Stand on the heights of Lebanon in summer and the profile of Cyprus, sixty miles from the mainland, shadows an inky blot on the waning sun disk. Look across the forty-mile strait from Asia Minor and you can count the serrations in the Kyrenia hills.

        Once moss-backed with forests, later famed for the copper which bore its name, Cyprus acted as a stepping-stone and exchange center for ancient civilisations.

        ‘What did you find to photograph in Cyprus? I did not take one camera out of its case,’ said a fellow-seeker for the charms of the Levant.

        I know the feeling. That barren ride from the port of Larnaca to Nicosia through a chalky wilderness is enough to repel a very Romeo among travellers. Half-oriental Cyprus veils her charms, modestly masking her beauty in remote mountain valleys and along the northern shore, where no steamer stops except for carob beans, destined as provender for Spanish cavalry horses […].

        Steaming from Beirut into the sunset glow, one docks at dawn in Famagusta harbour, beside Othello’s Tower, where the dark-skinned Moor, inflamed by Iago, smothered his Desdemona.

The Levant, Alexander, Syria, Othello and Desdemona, ancient civilizations, the veil; a barrage of vivid representations destined to fascinate and charm the National Geographic reader. Within this masterful blending of words and representations and amongst references to ancient civilizations and Shakespeare, Cyprus of the late 1920s is construed as an exotic and tantalizing ‘half oriental’ female who alluringly hides her charm and beauty behind a veil.

The very description of Cyprus as half-oriental is remarkable. Historical conjunctures, geographic location, regional influences and a multi-ethnic population mix rendered Cyprus ‘unclassifiable’ in an era of perceived rigid boundaries between the East and West. Like Thomson, Williams apprehends Cyprus through a gaze that blends impressions of European heritage with evidence of the influence of the East; a glorious classical and medieval past against a dilapidated post-Ottoman present. There are many examples of such juxtapositions in his text and captions beyond these few introductory paragraphs. The caption of an image of Famagusta harbour on page 2, for instance, states that ‘only memories remain of the once proud “Emporium” of the East’ whereas a Famagusta general view on page 6 is captioned as follows:

    Cyprus dines near where kings were crowned/ Shaken by quake and bombardment, scarred by Turkish cannon Balls, one Gothic turret elongated into a minaret, the broken buttresses and ruined belfries of the cathedral-mosque of [St. Nicholas] even so recall brave days in Famagusta, when the Lusignans, after Acre fell in 1291, were crowned here as kings of Jerusalem.

Oriental Cypriots

‘Orientalising’ Cyprus, as in cases like any other territory, was not limited to references to its built or natural landscape. It was primarily achieved through descriptions of people, their appearance and behaviour. If to ‘Orientalise’ non-Western people is to construe them as passive, childlike, feminine and timeless as opposed to the active, mature, masculine and progressive Westerners (Marien 2002), Williams’ Cypriots can be seen as examples of Orientals par excellence; only acting out their Oriental lives in a Classical and Gothic backdrop.

A return to Said’s seminal Orientalism is useful here. Said quotes from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British politicians and colonial administrators, proponents of British colonialism, like Arthur James Balfour and Lord Cromer, to demonstrate how the Oriental is construed as ‘irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, “different”’ in juxtaposition to the European who is presented as ‘rational, virtuous, mature, “normal”’. For a Westerner then to construct the Oriental is to also construct himself; as an opposite. Such comparisons are basically a reflection of the relationship between Europe and the Orient as one of domination and subjugation (Said 2003).

Said provides several examples of Western text in which the Oriental is assessed against the European who is given the status of the benchmark. Lord Cromer, England’s representative in Egypt from 1882 – year of the British occupation of Egypt – onwards is quoted by Said as making such an assessment of the ‘Oriental’ in opposition to the European:

    Want of accuracy, which easily degenerates into untruthfulness, is in fact the main characteristic of the Oriental mind.

        The European is a close reasoner; his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature sceptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description. Although the ancient Arabs acquired in a somewhat higher degree the science of dialectics, their descendants are singularly deficient in the logical faculty. They are often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they might admit the truth. Endeavor to elicit a plain statement of facts from an ordinary Egyptian. His explanation will generally be lengthy, and wanting in lucidity. He will probably contradict himself half-a-dozen times before he has finished his story. He will often break down under the mildest process of cross-examination.

(Lord Cromer as quoted in Said 2003: 38)

Mary Warner Marien suggests that the National Geographic Magazine, with its rather friendly approach and the adoption of a policy of avoiding controversy, consciously avoided the worst kind of misrepresentations of local people (2002). Nevertheless, Williams’ descriptions of Cypriots echo the sense of racial and cultural superiority expressed by such characters as Cromer who wrote about the region and its people before him.

For instance, within a rather detailed description of the Cypriot male costume, with particular reference to the ‘voluminous Turkish trousers’ and head shawls which led Williams to often mistake men for women he states that ‘when one sees a group of Cypriotes at a distance, he looks for toy shovels and pails, for they resemble little boys in wide rompers and sun hats, going to play on the beach’.

Williams first feminizes and then represents the Cypriot male as childlike in a very lucid example of the alignment of the Geographic’s discourse with the explicit racism of late nineteenth-century pro-colonial discourse. Williams employs more explicitly demeaning descriptions of the local characters further down in his text. In a section of the text titled ‘Rediscovering Buffavento Castle’ Williams first makes reference to other Westerners that conquered the site before him, like Van Bruyn, a Dutch traveller who climbed it with his ‘hands as well as [his] feet’ in 1683 and a certain Rey who had to climb flat on his belly to reach the top. Williams’ description of his own attempt to climb the peak is delightfully illuminating as to his perception of the locals and therefore I am quoting his narration extensively:

    After an hour and a half we came to a village. The muleteer who was riding gestured, palm down, as an umpire does when a man is safe. That in oriental, means ‘We’re here!’ He was bubbling with delight, his duty done.

        High above us, and miles away, there towered the peak on which I imagined the castle to be.

        ‘We are here, but Buffavento Castle is there,’ I said, my arm lifted toward the zenith. The plainsman went white. All his life he had lived at the foot of that puny range. But climb to the top? He called the village schoolmaster.

        ‘I speak very well English,’ said the village Ichabod, but when

    I inquired about the castle, he had never heard of such a thing. ‘Castle? What is it, a castle?’

        Full of military architecture and battlements and moats and bastions as I was after days in Famagusta, my lecture left him blank. He could only point up the slope toward a white monastery set among charming orchards and suggest that I inquire there. Because that brief climb was beyond the mental terminus of the muleteer, he made hard work of it.

        Being a Cypriote, his worry was not at being asked to do more than he had bargained for. He was not shamming to swell the travel fund. That upreared mountain really oppressed him.

Williams in this section of his text is constructing the Cypriot and the Westerner as absolute opposites. The Cypriot in the person of the local muleteer was presented as seriously challenged when faced with the prospect of a simple climb and this was attributed to a sort of limited mental ability and not a lack of physical prowess. The Westerner, on the other hand, as the Geographic told its readers had a long history of challenging and heroic triumphs over the particular peak. And Williams, another Westerner, was about to do it again.

Also, the Cypriot in the person of the local teacher is ignorant; his claim of speaking good English ridiculed as he was ‘caught’ unable to grasp the meaning of such a common word as ‘castle’ despite living at the foot of the mountain whose peak was adorned by one and despite having just been lectured to on the topic. The difficulty was not merely a linguistic one. The reader is told that the local teacher was simply incapable of grasping the concept of a castle and that he was very likely ignorant of the presence of one near his village.

The very description of the teacher as the village’s Ichabod is an inter-textual attribution of ignorance and an unfounded pretence to knowledge. The reference is to Ichabod Crane, the main character in Washington Irving’s 1819 short story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. The story casts Ichabod Crane as an absurdly ignorant and pretentious schoolmaster whose status as an educated man is attained only because the community he serves is even more ignorant:

    In Ichabod, the reader sees the country schoolmaster as a clownish buffoon of questionable intelligence and meager education. He is a ridiculous looking man who is unduly proud of his educational attainments, which amount to little more than the ability to read and write, and his social skills, which are questionable at best. Nonetheless, he is accepted as an educated outsider in Sleepy Hollow, a quiet, isolated little community worthy of its name.1

No need to explain what this literary intertextual reference in the Geographic says about Williams’ perception of both the Cypriot teacher and his community. By casting the local teacher as an Ichabod Crane he is actually casting himself as an anti-Ichabod informed, capable and superior outsider. He not only is aware of the presence of Buffavento Castle, but knows of its history, is about to conquer it, and on top of all that he is in a position to deliver a lecture to even the most educated among the locals, on the subject.

The other interesting concept emerging from this passage is that there is such a thing as a universal Oriental body language; that is a code of gestures shared by all Orientals whether they are half-such Cypriots, Egyptians or Chinese. In any case, Williams’ narration of the event continues with a similarly acute arrogant flavour:

    The ‘pappa’ [priest] at the monastery of St. Chrysostomos made things sound simpler. Out of the welter of Italian, crusted over with Latin, I sorted out the idea that he would give me a ‘homo’ to guide me to the top.

        Since the magnitude of our undertaking still had the muleteer gasping for breath, I decided to leave him behind with his mule.

        The ‘homo,’ a toothless woman, was no flapper, but her heelless slippers were.

        It was too much for my manhood to see that little woman shoulder my heavy camera and start to scale that precipice in flapping slippers held on by personal magnetism. I would not stand it. So I called the muleteer and made him [Williams’ emphasis] carry the camera.

The group successfully made the climb and returned to be treated with mountain honey, cheese and bread courtesy of the priest. Williams ended this section of his text with a final barrage of sarcasm directed towards the local characters involved in this story of his own heroic exploit of having conquered Buffavento:

    The ‘homo,’ delighted with a present she well earned, busied herself at the unbelievable anachronism of suckling an infant.

        After that climb a Cyprus saddle was no kind treatment for honest legs; so I returned to Kythrea, as I had come, on foot. Behind me rode the muleteer, chuckling over the greatest conquest of his life – a plainsman turned mountaineer in one lesson, and that lesson given by a toothless woman with a newborn babe.

The anachronistic, toothless and nameless woman who behaved in a manner that led Williams to force the local muleteer to carry his own camera so that his tarnished masculinity was repaired, went on to breastfeed her child and was fortunate to then have her likeness published in the National Geographic Magazine. The picture shows the Buffavento Castle ruins from above. Below in the foreground at the bottom-right corner the tiny figure of this woman appears as nothing but an index for the reader to measure the impressive size of the site.

Unspoiled Cyprus

The July 1928 National Geographic travelogue on Cyprus carries the amusingly long title ‘Unspoiled Cyprus/ The Traditional Island Birthplace of Venus is One of the Least Sophisticated of Mediterranean Lands’, which reads more like a thesis than a title. ‘Unspoiled’, the first expression in this quite significant piece of text on Cyprus sums up successfully the visual and to a certain extent the textual narrative of the story.

The visual narrative, to begin with, is very much driven by a yearning for tradition and pureness. Through his selection of subject, Williams constructs a romantic Cyprus with women in traditional costumes and men in baggy trousers against a context of mostly medieval, as well as classical architecture and a picturesque landscape, all presented to be totally unaffected by modernity.

One photograph combined with its caption very lucidly conveys the ‘Unspoiled’ theme of the story. The photograph shows two men in baggy trousers and head shawls in a field, one of them guiding a pair of oxen pulling the plough. The photograph is accompanied by this title and caption:

    Biblical Primitiveness Pervades the Cypriote Landscape

        Grazing flocks and an oxen-drawn plow characterize this pastoral in the Bogaz, a pass through the chain of hills along the north coast. Though some of the farmers have adopted the iron plow, the light, native-made wooden implement is the type most commonly used.

I am not arguing that Cyprus was a wholly modernized society and culture at the time and scenes like the one presented in the said photograph did not exist or would not impress a visitor. Nevertheless, the year of publication of the National Geographic travelogue on Cyprus is at the heart of a period during which Cypriot society was being reshaped by modernity or by a wave of modernizing movements. Many observers attest to this. Loizos (2001) reports on structural changes, a boom in mass education, a shift away from agriculture, changes in production techniques, the emancipation of women and the impact of these developments on changing relations of authority. The 1931 uprising and the burning of the Governor’s mansion in Nicosia are presented by Loizos as the accumulation of these changes and he draws parallels between the event and the storming of the Bastille (Loizos 2001; see also Loizos 2010).

Persianis reports on urbanization and the changing face of Cypriot urban centres at that same period. He also notes the attachment of symbolic value onto infrastructure projects by the local urban population who understood these as signifiers of progress, modernization and Europeanization (Persianis 2007). Fokaidis reports on the use of transport technology in Cyprus during the first half of the twentieth century, including the emergence of the railway and the rapid expansion of the use of the motorcar as the preferred means of transport within certain sections of Cypriot society (Fokaidis 2011). In 1927, the year when Williams of the National Geographic toured Cyprus, there were 902 registered cars, trucks and motorcycles; in 1928 the number rose to 1,230 and in 1929 to 1,500. By that year the number of driving licences issued by the colonial government in Cyprus reached 4,967 (Fokaidis 2011). These numbers convey a motorcar boom in that period and when one considers the rather modest size of Cypriot towns plus the small-scale population of the island it can effortlessly be inferred that motorcars should have been quite visible during Williams’ visit. Fokaidis actually reports on traffic congestion problems having emerged already during this period in urban centres and he refers to an internal note by a colonial government commissioner, dated 5 February 1930, in which the problem is acknowledged and the need to take measures towards the direction of decongestion is stressed. The note made specific reference to Nicosia and the major commercial streets of Ledras and Onasagorou (Fokaidis 2011).

Further, Panayiotou (2006) reports on the emergence of the left and a leftist subculture as an alternative – to both colonialism and nationalism – modernizing movement. Moreover, in that specific period the Cyprus Communist Party was founded in 1926 (Panayiotou 2006; see also Philippou 2007 and 2010a). The gradual adoption of modernity by Cypriots during the first half of the twentieth century is reflected in the period’s family albums in which representations of the ‘self ’ appear as celebrations of the adoption of modern identities, lifestyle and technology and never celebrations of tradition (Philippou 2010b).

Still, a photographer in search of a pure Cyprus would consciously, or not, filter out of his visual record any manifestations of modernity that might weaken the image of a ‘virgin Cyprus’, however that was imagined. For instance, transport technology of the modern era was generally edited out of Williams’ photographs. Out of the 65 or so photographs published within the article only one shows a motorcar, in the background, and it is implied that the car is the one used by Williams. General views of city centres do not depict cars. Additionally, one photograph shows a steamer being loaded with Famagusta oranges, but the caption informs the reader that the steamer is Greek and not local. Bicycles are absent too. In only one situation does a bicycle ‘force’ itself into the frame; its wheel appearing on the fringe of a photograph. Cypriots were shown by the Geographic to be using, predominantly, donkeys, oxen-carts, horse carriages and camels for transportation. Motorcars are brushed out of the picture constructed despite the fact that Williams reported on the use of cars by locals in one of his captions:

    Camels, oxen, and an occasional motorcar are good enough in their way, but the Cypriote could not get along without his donkey.

Manifestations of modern culture and fashion were also generally avoided. A Nicosia street scene is a striking exception as it depicts the entrance of a Paramount film theatre with a life-sized portrait of a Hollywood actress standing on the pavement outside. Likewise, men and women walking the street appear dressed with modern clothes. Williams made a point of telling his readers that the scene was not typical of Cypriot towns:

    Ledra Street Lends an Air of Modernity to the Capital

        Despite narrow thoroughfares with overhanging balconies, some parts of Nicosia have an up-to-date flavor, and for this reason it looks down on deserted Famagusta and provincial Kyrenia.

And not only was this glimpse of Cypriot modernity presented as untypical but it was also undermined; a reference to Nicosia in the text reads:

    The young folks of Nicosia are not ‘unspoiled’. They don’t doff their hats to the foreigner; they don’t wear rags; they are independent and awkwardly spank themselves in an obscure measure known as the Black Bottom. Nicosia is progressing. Neat suburbs with attractive homes are growing outside the crumbling walls. It looks down on deserted Famagusta and provincial Kyrenia. And its condescension is comic.

In the very exceptional cases where his photographs depicted modernity, Williams needed to set conditions, in words, as to how these manifestations should be perceived to avoid undermining his vision of a pure Cyprus. But it is a particular discrepancy between Williams’ images and his text which I find intriguing. The visual narrative is much more ‘loyal’ to the ‘Unspoiled Island’ theme than the textual narrative is. Williams reports more modernity in his text than he shows in his images. It is as though the photographic record should be more faithful to the spirit of the story and his vision than the text itself.

In one instance Williams gives the game away, entirely. While looking at his portraits a reader would assume that Cypriots, the women in particular, dressed only in rustic traditional garments, Williams admits in a caption under the photograph of the two daughters of the muchtar of Lefkoniko, a town in the Famagusta district, to have ‘persuaded’ them to dress up for the occasion:

    It was with difficulty that the author persuaded these ultramodern [my emphasis] daughters of the town headman of Lefkoniko and the village school-teacher to wear outmoded costumes of Cyprus – one of the fast disappearing charms of the island.

It is surprising and interesting that Williams or the National Geographic would ‘refuse’ to contaminate the visual narrative of a pure and primitive land and people with fragments of modernity but would at the same time lay bare the very process that produced such a purified visual narrative in their text. This reveals a paradox. One would expect that because of the perceived superiority of photography over text as a form of evidence, things should have worked the other way round: a much blander photographic essay and a less ‘honest’ text.

It seems that unlike photography, the written text, or painting for that matter, had no immediate bearing on perceived realities and by extension on definitions of place. In other words as photographs were seen to have a tautological relationship with their subject, photographs of Cyprus and Cypriots had to be aligned with dominant fantasies and definitions of Cyprus and Cypriots.

Still, as shown above, if Williams’ photographs deny Cypriot modernity or at least the effects of modernity on Cyprus, his text ridicules any such claims. This is not limited to Williams. This denial by outsiders of Cypriot claims to modernity is more general. As Argyrou explains ‘the West essentializes itself as the only true source of legitimate culture so that the practical manifestations of Cypriot claims to modernity seem a poor version of the “original”’ (Argyrou 1996: 177).

Figure 3.1 Maynard Owen Williams, ‘These “ultra-modern” Cypriots were persuaded to wear outmoded costumes of Cyprus’, in July 1928 edition of The National Geographic Magazine. Credit: The National Geographic Magazine

In Search of Aphrodite

Despite the apparently more ‘personal’ approach of Williams’ portraits as opposed to the body of work on Cyprus by Thomson, he does not generally construct persons but types; portraying mainly professions and regional specific types. This is a common criticism of photographs in the Geographic of that period. Captions or text rarely provided the names of subjects as ‘they were seen as specimens or archetypes, and therefore their singularity, as people, served no editorial purpose’ (Franklin 2004).

One such example is a stunning interior photograph of three Rizokarpaso young women. The caption is characteristic of the crude generalizations arrived at by travellers of the period but at the same time it tells of Williams’ sympathetic assessment of the women of this community as he says of them that they ‘have a reputation for industry, for a beautiful headdress and costume, and for a queenly bearing’.

The evidently highly orchestrated photograph shows the three girls, possibly sisters, posing in the interior of what would probably be their home. One of them is sitting, her foot resting on a spinning wheel in front of her, while the other two are standing. Each of the girls look to a different direction: the girl sitting is looking at the lens from a 45 degree angle, one of the girls standing is glancing directly at the lens and the other stands with her side towards the lens. The direction of the gaze and the corresponding posture each girl was asked to adopt echo both forensic and nineteenth-century anthropological photography. The photographer managed to compress three forensic-like views (a frontal, a side and a 45 degree) of the type ‘Rizokarpaso woman’ in one photograph.

One of a handful of exceptions of individual Cypriots that were named in Williams’ text was a twelve-year-old Rizokarpaso girl, named Helene, who quite evidently charmed the man. Another was Iphigenia, the daughter of the muchtar of Lefkoniko whose picture was discussed above. Finding Helene was the product of a search, very common among travellers to Cyprus, of a contemporary Aphrodite. Almost by default travellers to Cyprus assumed it was their duty to decide whether their contemporary Cypriot women were beautiful enough to qualify as worthy descendants of Aphrodite. What on the surface appears to be a rather inoffensive pursuit should be seen as fitting within a more general ideological framework related to classification and hierarchies of races and cultures. Finding Aphrodite in the persons of modern day Cypriot women can be taken as proof of the classical Greek descent of modern day Cypriots and would allow classifying Cyprus as Occidental. Failing that – concluding in other words that Cypriot women are ‘ugly’ or not ‘beautiful enough’ – would fit in well with arguments about contemporary Cypriots having been culturally as well as genetically ‘contaminated’ as a result of their conduct with Oriental peoples. The search for Aphrodite is, therefore, an act of cultural classification of a whole people on the basis of physical characteristics or physiognomy.

Figure 3.2 Maynard Owen Williams, ‘A “forensic” style image of three Rizokarpaso girls’, in July 1928 edition of The National Geographic Magazine. Credit: The National Geographic Magazine

Williams’ take on this issue is ambiguous and very reminiscent of his introductory assessment of Cyprus as half-oriental:

    The women do little to keep alive the Aphrodite tradition. One of their sex says of them: ‘They are rarely pretty or even good-looking, being heavy of feature and clumsy of form, and their voices are harsh and shrill. But how could any woman be beautiful who works from sunrise till dark for a few piasters a day?’

With this paragraph Williams at one level sets the scene for the search for Helene but at another he reveals his assessment and answer to this most ‘significant’ of questions. His contemporary Cypriot women did not live up to the standard. The crude quoted description he provides of them indicates that their appearance seemed, in his eyes, to be far too imperfect to match his ideal; a modern, Western ideal projected back to ancient Cyprus. Nevertheless, he appears reluctant to take classical ancestry entirely away from his contemporary Cypriots and blames the failure of their women to embody the myth of Aphrodite on harsh contemporary economic conditions.

After this general assessment Williams tells of a local informant, Murat, from Famagusta, praising the women of the remote village of Rizokarpaso. The people of Rizokarpaso, he says, were presented to him as more industrious, living in houses built with stone instead of mud, but more crucially, they did not ‘work their women so hard’. This, and the promise of a climate not as hot as in the plains, rendered a trip there in search of Aphrodite worthwhile. Williams doubted Murat’s account and put it down to a suspect imagination, particularly as on arrival, while visiting the coffee house he came across a group of shouting drunken men and the cook, ‘a super-Katarina, [who] fulfilled the letter of [Murat’s] description, but violated the spirit through sheer generosity’; too fat for an Aphrodite!

But then he was told of a local pretty girl and Williams rushed to meet and photograph her. His description of the event is quite colourful:

    When my driver came to say that a pretty girl was waiting, the town rose as one man and followed us. During the trying moments that ensued I conceived a deep respect and liking for the twelve-year-old Helene who bravely faced my camera while the curious crowd of her fellow-townsmen gazed and jabbered and laughed.

        It was too cruel a test. On the morrow, I suggested, I might try again.

        ‘To-morrow I have to work on the Cape Andreas road,’ Helene answered naively, ‘but if you want to take my picture, my mother will break rocks in my place.’

Despite the difficulties, including the villagers having, evidently, turned the event into a parody, Williams managed to take several pictures of Helene. Three photographs of her found their way into the pages of the July 1928 issue of the National Geographic Magazine. One of them is a highly constructed, romanticized colour full-length portrait of Helene kneeling in a field, among a sea of poppies and wearing a local, Sunday best costume. Helene is holding a bouquet of poppies while her gaze is directed towards a low point on her side, her head is tilted downwards and her eyes are almost shut; all signs of feminization and subjection to the power of a simultaneously male, middle class and colonial gaze.

The other photograph, titled Beauty at the Bakery, shows Helene inserting freshly baked bread in a stone built oven while facing the camera with a subtle smile on her face and still wearing her Sunday best. The third photograph is rid of the visual and thematic romanticism of the other two as it shows Helene sitting on the ground in front of a pile of rocks and at the side of her mother who is giving the lens a rather suspicious look. Helene is no longer wearing her Sunday best and as the caption informs us she is ‘breaking rocks to be used in connection with road work’.

But what is his final verdict? Could she fill the Aphrodite part? Williams makes his assessment:

    Not once did I capture the whole charm of that gentle little girl whose tasks are those of men. Her hands were horny with labor. Her large feet were cased in rude shoes. Her immature body skimped Murat’s description as the cook’s had over-flowed it, but Helene won my gratitude for her help. When you look at her picture, it is a fine spirit that is speaking to you across the miles.

The clumsiness and imperfections of her immature body and, more importantly, her roughness – product of her nurture and hard labour – rendered Helene unsuitable for the part in Williams’ eyes. Nevertheless, she was treated in a ‘privileged’ and unconventional way. The very fact that information about her, like name, age and occupation, were published is a clear indication that for Williams she was more than just a typical local girl: thus, the attempt to represent her as an individual with a personality of her own and the reference to her ‘fine spirit’.

What, then, was unique to Helene so as to ‘force’ a change in convention?

Elsewhere in the article a photograph of two women carrying a heavy load of rocks on their backs is captioned as follows:

    A smile lightens a heavy load: Under such conditions of backbreaking toil from sunrise to dark, it is little wonder that few Cypriote women can keep alive the Aphrodite tradition.

These women are insensitively used as an example of the failure of Cypriot women to keep alive the Aphrodite tradition. As in the case of Helene their shortcomings are attributed to the hard conditions of living. But, unlike Helene, they are not afforded the chance to be represented outside the context of labour; they are not presented as individuals and are certainly not romanticized. The famous content analysis of photographs of the National Geographic Magazine by Lutzs and Collins revealed, among other things, that people of colour (coded black and bronze) were more likely to be represented at work, and more likely to be photographed in groups, and were ‘less often the subject of individualized photographic accounts, attentive to “biographic” features and life circumstances’ than those coded white (Lutz & Collins 2002).

Despite the fact that this research has been concerned with a later period in the history of the magazine it provides a rationale that could be used as an explanation here. I am, therefore, suggesting that it is the apparent and ‘untypical’ fairness of Helene that helped her qualify for this ‘special treatment’; Helene’s daughter, Maroulla, who I traced and interviewed, described her mother as ‘blue-eyed, blond, pleasant, tall and pretty’.

Williams closes the section of the text he dedicated to Helene with the following paragraph:

    As we returned from the church of St. Andrew the Miracle Worker, dowered with grotesque ex voto offerings in beeswax – one of them presented by a man who then lay, slowly dying, on the floor – there was Helene straddling a pile of rocks, ‘making little ones out of big ones’ as industriously as any convict.

Helene is represented as an unfortunate convict of a deprived environment that prevents her from blossoming into a modern day Aphrodite. A ‘European’ looking girl condemned to a jail sentence in the Orient. Helen could be taken to be a metaphor for the whole of Cyprus.

Helene Re-visited

When Jean and Franc Shor visited Cyprus to write a story for the May 1952 issue of the National Geographic Magazine they, generally, avoided such crude descriptions and characterizations of individual local people. Having said that the couple continued the story from much the same point as Williams left it. The tone is similar and the place is presented in an unchanged light. Helene is an important component of their construction of yet another pure Cyprus. But before we return to Shors’ perspective on the Helene story it is useful to present the tone of their piece through a couple of examples.

The Shors reported a couple of incidents that were treated, albeit in a subtle and, on the surface, humorous tone, reveal the very ‘Oriental’ inefficiencies of the locals. Consider the Shors’ delightful narration of a very ‘Eastern’ accident:

    Returning to Nicosia, we soon found that East and West meet in Cyprus, sometimes violently. The first day there our taxi, weaving through narrow, crowded streets, rounded a corner and sideswiped a bicycle. The cyclist careened into a baggy-panted farmer, who fell against a plodding donkey loaded with melons. The frightened beast leaped onto a sidewalk, and the basket on his back smashed a shop window, scattering the melons amid a display of plastic dishware.

        Driver, cyclist, pedestrian, and donkey herder waved their arms and shouted in furious argument.

        ‘There,’ said Jean, ‘you have 2,000 years of progress compressed into one accident.’

        After settling the uproar as best we could, we looked up for Mr. G.F. Jaratt, director of the Cyprus Tourist Development Office.

Such a bizarre road accident could not be accounted for without a reminder that Cyprus approximates the ‘East’ geographically as well as culturally. The locals, being Easterners, could only respond to the incident with emotion and fury. Another incident, telling of the backwardness of the locals, was conveyed to the Shors by a ‘continental’ style hotel proprietor:

    The proprietor told us of his difficulties in training near-by villagers for modern hotel service.

        ‘We operate as a continental hotel,’ he said, ‘and guests put their shoes outside the door at night for the “boots” to shine. Last season on three successive nights a pair disappeared. We searched everywhere but couldn’t find them.

        ‘The fourth day I saw a new chambermaid walking home after work, a pair of shoes in her hand. I asked her where she got them.

        ‘I found them,’ she replied. ‘One of the guests put them outside his door to be thrown away. And do you know, this is the fourth pair I’ve found in as many days!’

The Shors’ text is in conflict with their visual narrative in the same way as Williams’ was. Modernity or progress as the Shors refer to it is ‘recorded’ in the text. For instance a section titled, ‘Cities Booming, Country Unchanged’ reads:

    Cyprus we found, has felt the touch of progress. In booming cities, glass-bricked modern homes rise in the shadows of ruined medieval palaces. Gleaming shops offer the latest British and American products. Smooth highways crisscross the island.

        But outside the cities, off the main roads, live people like the shepherd near Nicosia who cling to the old ways.

        About 65,000 of the half-million people of Cyprus are farmers. From their lands come citrus fruits, wine, vegetables, grain, seeds, and carobs, a bean used as fodder. Farm products account for more than a quarter of the island’s exports, which total some $30,000,000 a year.

Despite the text clearly indicating that agrarian economy and lifestyle have been shrinking, the photographs construct an entirely different picture of the place. National Geographic readers do not see any of the changes on the built landscape that were referred to in the text; no modern houses and no highways. Motorcars seem entirely absent as in Williams’ photographs and donkeys and oxen-carts appear to be plentiful. One exceptional photograph shows Cypriots riding bicycles.

And Cypriots are presented to be leading agrarian lifestyles; they are shepherds, farmers, they weave, and produce traditional red clay pottery. They are, of course, dressed in rustic garments; the women wear headscarves and the men are moustached.

Modern clothed women posing by medieval monuments in three photographs appear to be tourists. An elegant, perfectly modern, woman positioned under an arch at St Hilarion Castle is, the readers are told, an American visitor. A handful of exceptional images of Cypriots in modern clothes depict children only.

The National Geographic dedicated more than a page of text and three pictures to the rediscovery of Helene in their May 1952 issue. Under the subheading ‘Sentimental Journey’ the scene for the rediscovery of Helene is set:

    ‘Let’s find Helene,’ Jean suggested, ‘and compare her life today with that which Dr. Williams described. She’ll be a woman now, of course, but we can see how her home and way of life differ from those of her mother, about whom he wrote.’

        During our own visit, we had been continually astonished at how little change there had been in the people’s habits and customs as described by Dr. Williams. The cities were more modern, it was true, but in the country and villages we had found his descriptions as fresh and accurate as if they had been written yesterday.

For this pair of writers the search for Helene is irrelevant to beauty. Their quest is a different one. What they are hoping to find in the progress of Helene, and by implication of Cyprus, is evidence of it never having taken place. Their search of Helene should be taken as a nostalgic search for a Cyprus as was constructed by Williams twenty-four years earlier; a Cyprus that is unspoiled, pure and virgin. The pair chooses consciously to close their eyes to the manifestations of modernity which they admit they have observed in the cities and turn to Helene for a confirmation of their fantasy of a still unspoiled and pure Mediterranean island.

On their arrival in Rizokarpaso the authors explained their ‘mission to a group sitting in front of a coffee house’ and were surprised to discover the ‘local fame her picture in the National Geographic Magazine had brought her’:

    Helene? She who had been pictured in the American magazine? Of course! Everyone knew Helene. Directions followed, and in a few minutes we stopped in front of a low stone house near the edge of the village.

        A tall, handsome woman of middle age came to the gate. [Our guide] explained our mission. For a moment she looked startled, then giggled like a girl, her face covered by a sudden blush.

        In a torrent of Greek she welcomed us, led us inside her spotless one-room house, and offered us chairs. Hurrying to a cupboard, she drew out a worn copy of the National Geographic Magazine bound in heavy wrapping paper and opened it to the picture taken 24 years ago. She was Helene!

The authors then describe Helene’s current situation. They conclude that Helene changed as a result of giving birth to seven children, hard work and the effects of time but that her face remained ‘warm and strong and intelligent’. The readers were also told that Helene worked six days a week in the fields with her husband and stayed at home one day to bake a week’s supply of bread and that the one-room house she was living in she inherited from her mother.

Her oldest child, an eighteen-year-old son, had emigrated to Australia, the authors report, and the others, two boys and four daughters aged between one and fourteen, lived at home and under the care of Helene. She is presented as proudly admitting to abiding by tradition in the upbringing of her children and her family life in general:

    ‘They are being raised as I was,’ she said, ‘to hard work and a simple life. In our village, life has not changed. This was my mother’s house, her furniture. These loaves are baked as she baked them, and we till the same fields in the same way. Life is just as it was when Dr. Williams visited us’.

It is later in the text implied that Helene’s life could have followed a radically different course had a letter from America arrived a year earlier than it actually did. Helene:

    ‘That story he wrote nearly got me in trouble,’ she laughed. ‘Five years after it was published, a year after I was married, a letter came from a young man in America. He said he had fallen in love with my picture, and if I were free he would come and marry me.’

        Did she still have the letter?

        ‘Ah, no. My husband was furious. He tore it up in little pieces and burned them!’

The letter came a year too late to have any impact on the course of her life. As Jean and Franc Shor departed they exchanged gifts with Helene. They gave silk scarves to her and candy for the children and she responded by giving them two loaves of freshly baked – and still warm – bread and two carnations she had plucked from her garden.

Two out of the three photographs of Helene in this edition of the Geographic were presented on the same page and shared the same caption in a way that invited the reader to make comparisons between Helene’s ‘then’ and ‘now’. One, taken by the Shors, is a frontal full length portrait of Helene sitting in her yard, wearing daily work clothes and being occupied with sorting out silk worm cocoons in a flat reed basket resting on her knees. Helene is facing the lens smiling with her young daughter standing by her side, both surrounded by colourful geraniums. The other photograph is, as might the reader have already guessed, the 1928 Williams’ photograph of 12-year-old Helene among the poppies. The two photographs share the following title and caption:

    Helene (Left) Has Grown into the Matron Pictured Here 24 Years Later.

        Maynard Owen Williams, a National Geographic staff photographer, made this Autochrome of Helene as a 12-year-old for the July, 1928, magazine. Jean and Franc Shor sought her out in Rizokarpaso, her home. They found that Helene had won local fame, and even a marriage proposal from America, as a result of the photograph.

        Mother of seven children, she toils endlessly in home and field. Even as she sat for her new picture, she sorted the cocoons in her basket. ‘I just can’t stand not to be doing something,’ she said.

The third photograph is evidence of life in the village having not changed at all as it visually echoes one of Williams’ photographs of Helene. The photograph shows Helene facing a clay oven out of which she extracts loaves of freshly baked bread. Her young smiling daughter is standing by her mother’s side and faces the lens. It is visually suggested that tradition is being passed on to the next generation of Cypriot women.

Appropriately, the Shors closed the section of text on Helene by presenting their final verdict:

    ‘We have our answer,’ said Jean as we drove away. Life here hasn’t changed a bit. And if the Helenes of Cyprus are wise, it won’t.

Conclusions

Cyprus has witnessed enormous social, economic and demographic changes during the period that spans the two decades and a half between the two National Geographic Magazine visits to Cyprus. The Shors, like Williams before them, not only de-emphasized or, better still, eliminated these changes from their visual narrative but also instructed Cypriots to resist change and progress. Helene is elevated into a symbol of an eternal Cyprus and as a paradigm to be followed by Cypriot women.

One aspect of the magazine that attracted major attention and criticism is its appetite for the exotic. As Franklin (2004) put it in a National Geographic publication presenting and celebrating the Society’s collection of portraits but also through which the Society engages in self-reflection and criticism: ‘the National Geographic collection is a traveller’s tote – bag of the unusual, the exotic, the strangely costumed: the other.’ For a generation of Geographic photographers – up until the 1930s at least – natives were only perceived real natives if they behaved as it was imagined they behaved before they came into contact with whites and modernity; ‘Airbrushed out were the automobiles, railroads, and virtually any signs of modernity’ (Franklin 2004: 92). Also, native costumes were ‘obsessions’ for Geographic photographers – particularly up until the period of Williams’ visit to Cyprus – and there was a feeling of obligation and duty to ‘collect evidence of what were considered to be disappearing customs and traditions’ (Franklin 2004: 94).

Williams ‘confessed’ to having ‘persuaded’ the otherwise ultramodern daughters of the muchtar of Lefkoniko to pose in traditional costumes. It appears that this was a standard pursuit of his as he gains a mention as an example of such practice in Franklin’s essay:

    In Maynard Owen Williams’ story ‘Czechoslovakia, Key – land to central Europe’ (February 1921), young Slovaks were photographed in ‘fast disappearing’ national dress. And the fascination with costumes was not simply restricted to young women. A photograph entitled ‘Public Shepherds in their Field Costumes’ is a posed picture of a matching pair of middle-aged men in traditional hat, sash, walking stick, and briar pipe, standing unceremoniously in front of a hedge.

(Franklin 2004: 94)

The Shors did a better job than Williams in acknowledging change and the influence of modernity on Cypriot society within sections of their text, although they still entertained the same ideas about the value of purity in other people’s lives. Helene still looked native enough to charm the Shors and their audience in the US. The Shors would return to their modern urban lives and the natives of Cyprus told that it is best if they stay ‘native’: after all, what would have happened to the National Geographic if all the ‘natives’ of the world ceased looking the part?

Note

1. Extract taken from the introduction to an electronic version of Washington Irving’s (1819) ‘ The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Available at http://www.schooltales.net/sleepyhollow (accessed 30 October 2011).

References

Argyrou, Vassos (1996). Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as a Symbolic Struggle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fokaidis, Paris A. (2011). ‘Τεχνολογικές εξελίξεις στις χερσαίες μεταφορές στην Κύπρο στις αρχές του 20ου αιώνα’ [Technological developments in land transport in Cyprus at the beginning of the twentieth century], Χρονικό [Chronicle], 11 September 2011: 180.

Franklin, Stuart (2004). ‘Before 1930/The strange and the exotic’, in In Focus/ National Geographic Greatest Portraits (pp. 89–95), Washington: National Geographic Society.

Loizos, Peter (2001). ‘Cyprus, 1878–1955: structural change, and its contribution to changing relations of authority’, in P. Loizos, Unofficial Views/ Cyprus: Society and Politics (pp. 127–40), Nicosia: Intercollege Press. First published in Y. de Sike (ed.) (1985). Chypre: la vie quotidienne de l’antiquité à nos jours [Cyprus: everyday life from antiquity to the present], Paris: Musée de L’Homme.

———(2010). ‘Cyprus through our own eyes’, in P. Loizos, N. Philippou & T. Stylianou-Lambert (eds), Re-Envisioning Cyprus (pp. 11–21), Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

Lutz, Catherine A. & Collins, Jane L. (2002). ‘The color of sex: postwar photographic histories of race and gender’, in K. Askew & R. Wilk (eds), The Anthropology of Media/A Reader (pp. 92–116), Massachusetts: Blackwell.

Marien, Mary Warner (2002). Photography/A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing.

Panayiotou, Andreas (2006). ‘Lenin in the coffee-shop’, Postcolonial Studies 9(3): 267–80.

Persianis, Panayiotis K. (2007). Πόλεις και Πολιτισμός [Cities and Civilization], Nicosia: Intercollege Press.

Philippou, Nicos (2007). Coffee House Embellishments, Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

———(2010a). ‘The legibility of vernacular aesthetics’, Photographies (Spring) 3(1): 85–98.

———(2010b). ‘Cypriot vernacular photography: Representing the self ’, in P. Loizos, N. Philippou & T. Stylianou-Lambert (eds), Re-Envisioning Cyprus (pp. 39–51), Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

Said, Edward W. (2003). Orientalism, London: Penguin Books.

Shor, Jean & Shor, Franc (1952). ‘Cyprus, idyllic island in a troubled sea’, National Geographic Magazine CI.5 (May).

Thomson, John (1985). Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878, London: Trigraph (originally published in two volumes in 1879 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington).

Williams, Maynard O. (1928). ‘Unspoiled Cyprus’, National Geographic Magazine LIV.1 (July).

THE POLITICAL GAZE

Memory, Politics and the Construction of National Identities

FOUR

‘Imagining Cyprus’: Photographic Exhibitions on Cyprus and their Reception in Greece, 1950s–80s

Iro Katsaridou

‘Cyprus is a place where the miracle still works.’

(George Seferis, Logbook III, 1955)

Stereotypes have always haunted the image of the island of Cyprus. For the Greek poet Seferis, Cyprus has been a mythical country, a place where the miracle still works, which integrates the Greek element but at the same time surpasses it. Cyprus’ mythologization in the Greek artistic and critical discourse continued and was intensified in the postwar years. Politics is significantly and organically intertwined with this discourse. The way the image of Cyprus is shaped is thus directly connected with the anti-colonial movement of Enosis (Union) with Greece, the Greek–Turkish dispute, which reached its climax with the Turkish invasion of 1974.

If nations are defined as ‘Imagined communities’, as proposed by Benedict Anderson (1983), it seems that the images of various nations created are ‘no more than a product of the imagination, that is a fiction’ (Beller 2007: 11). In this context, the present chapter is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated in articles and critiques published in the Greek press from the 1950s to the 1980s. More specifically, it examines the discourse on photography having Cyprus as a subject, seeking to uncover the ways in which the stereotype of ‘photographic Cyprus’ is constructed, mythologized and still being transmitted.

The chapter attempts to integrate the historical and political situation of the era examined with the ideological framework in which photography, and more specifically amateur club photography is placed, so as to examine how the ‘fictive ethnicity’ of the Greek Cypriot nation has originated and for what reasons it is created in the first place.

Greek Irredentism and the 1951 Greek Landscape Exhibition in Cyprus

In the early 1950s photography and more especially Cypriot photography was not a popular subject in the Greek press. Photography was a far cry from being considered on equal footing with other visual arts. Therefore, articles and exhibition critiques were not featured in visual art journals. There were no specialized press to cover photography at the time so photographic exhibitions were sometimes reported in literary and cultural journals. Among the rare publications of the era are the articles in Hellenic Creation [Ελληνική Δημιουργία], which was published by the conservative writer and literary critic Spyros Melas.

With photography having no ‘home’ of its own, articles treating landscape photography appear in the column dedicated to the nature loving activities; photography is approached within the framework of the excursionist ‘movement’. Influenced by romanticism’s views which regard nature as an organically unified whole, excursionism treats nature as a healing power and a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization. Nature is approached through the aesthetic categories of ‘sublime’ and ‘picturesque’, both introduced in the eighteenth century (Trott 1999: 72–4). In this way, landscapes are approached as picturesque artistic views; sublime mountain passes, deep woods and sea storms are no longer merely perilous hazards, but awesome views to be enjoyed and appreciated as aesthetic objects. Renouncing the anaesthetizing comforts of urban life, the excursionists wished to ‘commune with nature’, directing their gaze to features of landscape which separate themselves from everyday experience, namely to aspects which they considered to be in some sense out of the ordinary (Urry 1990: 3).

In Greece, as John Stathatos points out, photography’s development was prompted by the discovery of the countryside by the Greek middle class of the inter-war era. This ‘invention of landscape’, as Stathatos describes it, was the result of the rapid urbanization with the subsequent idealization of the ‘chaste’ nature, as well as of the inter-war nationalism, which searched for the ‘true’ origins of Greekness in the ‘uncontaminated’ countryside (Stathatos 1996: 31–2 and 2004). It is in this context that the first field clubs were founded in Athens during the 1920s (Papaioannou 2005: 178). Dimitrios Kambouroglou, among the initiators of nature loving activities, recalls that the first field club members were ‘idealist romantic lovers of Good and principally of Nature’ (Stathatos 2004).

In 1951 an exhibition of Greek landscape photographs took place in Nicosia. The event was organized by the Federation of Field Clubs of Greece, while the Nicosia Field Club was charged with its realization. Hellenic Creation devotes two articles to it. The Mainland Greek collection was enriched by an addition of 60 photographs by Cypriot photographers; a total of 315 panels were displayed.

Inaugurated on Easter Sunday, the exhibition was of prime importance for the island of Cyprus; however, not much was dedicated to the photographs displayed or to the photographers participating. A list of the participating photographers does exist, 31 in number, many of which like Spyros Meletzis or Ioannis Lambrou were among the awarded members of the Hellenic Photographic Society. Commonalities like Greece’s ‘laughing sun’, ‘sweetest light’, ‘joyous and bright islands’, but also its ‘eternal glory’ and ‘immortal history’ are mobilized to describe the qualities of the landscape photographs on display. Apart from this, most of the article is dedicated to the symbolic significance of the exhibition itself. For the article writer, the specific exhibition surpassed all previous ones organized in Athens and Thessaloniki, as it aspired to make ‘our Cypriot brothers feel vibrations of patriotic emotion’. For, aside from ‘best promoting the natural beauties of our country’, the exhibition of Cyprus, ‘becomes ipso facto a national event with a strong symbolism’, as ‘the enslaved sister will hold in its arms a miniature of entire Greece’ (Giannoulopoulos 1951a: 735). Overtly, the exhibition was seen as a way to ‘unite’ Mainland Greece and the island of Cyprus.

The second article in Hellenic Creation was a compilation of speeches given at the exhibition opening. Speeches full of pompous expressions, nationalist sentimentalism and colourful metaphors (Giannoulopoulos 1951b: 813–15). Thus, for Loizos Kythraiotes, General Secretary of the Nicosia Field Club, not only was the exhibition of great artistic and tourist significance; it promoted the treasures of Greece and Cyprus, it emphasized the ideal of nature, but most of all it signified a dream, the dream of ‘Great Greece’. It was the symbolic representation of the unbreakable bond between the ‘Free Mother’ and the ‘Enslaved Daughter’. It was the incarnation of the ideal ‘National Castle’ which unified the borders of the Greek North with the ones of the Greek South, the materialization of the idea of a single and territorially united Greece (Giannoulopoulos 1951b: 813).

For Christos Giannoulopoulos, President of the ‘Physiolatres’ (Nature Lover) Field Club, the exhibition was ‘the dream of our sweet, eternal common Motherland, which dominates with its thousand beauties’. He stimulated his Cypriot ‘dear brothers’ to face ‘the invaluable treasures of the Greek landscape’s chaste beauty’ as ‘a holy vision, a sweet comfort and a symbolic hope’. Using a flowery language to describe the beauty of the landscape, he related the qualities of nature with the territorial aspirations of Greece, the ‘Great Idea’ as he characteristically noted.

    The blossoming land’s perfume of your laughing island reaches us, bringing your unsleeping, beautiful desires, your sweet dreams, your strong will and your deep faith in the Great idea.

(Giannoulopoulos 1951b: 814)

Giannoulopoulos did not hesitate to refer to the ‘Great Idea’, Μεγάλη Ιδέα in Greek, an irredentist concept introduced by the Prime Minister Ioannis Koletis in 1844. After the Greek Independence in 1830 large Greek populations still lived under Ottoman rule. The Great Idea’s main goal was the establishment of a Greek state that would encompass all ethnic Greeks. Its aspiration was the revival of the Byzantine Empire in the form of a modern Greek state that would include mostly the former Byzantine lands. The ‘imagined’ Hellas would comprise territories from Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace in the north, to Crete and Cyprus in the south, and from the Ionian Sea in the west, to Asia Minor and the Black Sea in the east. This reborn ‘Greece of Two Continents and Five Seas’ would restore the state’s capital to Constantinople. The Great Idea was a visionary nationalist aspiration that was to dominate foreign policy of the Greek state for over a century. But, its meaning varied concerning either the territorial expansion of Greece, or its cultural renaissance and domination in the Orient, or the State’s reconstruction (Clogg 1988: 254–5; Skopetea 1988: 257–71; Politis 1993: 62–3).

On the heels of the victorious Balkan Wars against the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria (1912–13) and having fought on the winning side with the Allies (Entente) in the First World War, Greece ensured a significant territorial expansion. Unquestionably, this historical moment constituted the greatest achievement of the Great Idea. Yet the Greek– Turkish War (1919–22) ended with Greece having to return to its prewar borders and relinquish all territory gained during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War ended. The misfortune, known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe, resulted in Greece being forced into a population exchange with the newly established state of Turkey. Despite the burial of Greek expansionism adopted by the official Greek foreign policy in the aftermath of the Catastrophe, the legacy of the Great Idea still lived on in both inter-war and post-war periods. In the years that followed the Second World War, especially during the Greek Civil War (1945–9) which was fought between Right loyalists and Communist guerrillas, the Great Idea once more aimed at the ‘National Restoration’, namely the national fulfilment in regard to the state’s borders. The political boundaries of the Greek state had to expand up to the limit where Greek is spoken and the Greek character is historically established. For the anti-communist ultra-conservative camp of the post-war era, the Great Idea was ‘resurrected’ and mobilized as a notion so as to encapsulate the ideal of national unity (Balta 2003: 133–4).

In the early 1950s this revived irredentism was best expressed in the popular mobilization under the banner of Enosis, namely Cyprus’ Union with Greece, fostered by a political culture that seemed only superficially shaken by the Catastrophe of 1922. As Ioannis Stefanidis mentions, Greek political culture of the era was anchored to the mental universe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, presenting a persistence and political salience of themes like the continuity and mission of the nation, its martyr-like quality in its perennial struggle for survival or its unique attributes (Stefanidis 2007: 277–8). Hence, it is in this same context that the Great Idea concept in Giannoulopoulos’ speech should be interpreted: Cyprus should throw off the yoke of the British colonial administration and fight for its annexation to ‘Mother Greece’.

As its inauguration by the newly elected Archbishop Makarios III proves, the exhibition had great significance for the Cypriot society of the era. Since his enthronement in October 1950, Archbishop Makarios had taken over the Ethnarchy, namely the ecclesiastical and lay institution through which the Church of Cyprus had maintained a decisive political role since the period of the Ottoman rule, and had been leading the Enosis campaign, acting as the exclusive spokesman of Cypriot people and effectively ignoring not only the strong Greek Cypriot Left, but also the Turkish Cypriot population (Stefanidis 2007: 78). Therefore, judging from his key role in the political situation at that time, we should assume the special weight his statements carried. Sharing the same frame of mind as the Field Clubs’ representatives, Makarios overtly expressed his contentment, wishing that the symbolic union of Mainland Greek and Cypriot landscape, through photographs, would soon become a true fact (Giannoulopoulos 1951b: 813–14).

It seems that any reference to the photographic qualities of the works is replaced by verbosity concerning the nation’s irredentist aspirations. In this discourse the political situation of the era is reflected, as the demand for the island’s liberation from the British started to emerge. In the speeches that accompanied the photographic exhibition, Enosis appeared as a natural and righteous claim, which should be based on the common characteristics found between the Cypriot and the Mainland Greek landscape (Giannoulopoulos 1951b: 813–14).

Apart from the articles in Hellenic Creation, the exhibition is not recorded elsewhere in the periodical or daily press. In my opinion, this is not a random incident; not only does it explain photography’s ‘inferiority’ in comparison to the other visual arts whose exhibitions were regularly critiqued in the press, but it also might hint at the exhibition’s rather ‘marginal’ direction. It is beyond any doubt that the Cyprus claim for annexation was advocated by the vast majority of Greek public opinion. Nevertheless, Enosis was not on the official foreign policy agenda of the Centre governments of 1950–2, which were too dependent on foreign assistance to defy British reactions and American warnings (Stefanidis 1999: 11–12 and 2007: 278). Sometimes public sentiment and official policy even collided; this was the case in the 1951 pro-Enosis demonstrations which resulted in clashes with Greek police and several were wounded (Stefanidis 1999: 25).

In the exhibition texts the landscape as a notion is mobilized to accommodate the political discourse. This constitutes part of a larger, nationalist theory of geographical determinism, dominant at the time, according to which physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. In this way, the Greeks constitute the chosen people, whose innumerable merits stem from their ‘sacred land’. This ‘ sanctification’ of the landscape could be related with extremist nationalism of the era. For the representatives of the Field Clubs, these landscape photographs are the symbolic place of national purity, the symbolic realization of the ultimate national aspiration. The ‘Greek landscape’ is transformed into a metaphysical concept, a concept that encapsulates in the most refined way the ultra-conservative Greek– Christian ideals, the great destiny of the ‘race’ (Balta 2003: 137).

National-mindedness and the 1954 ‘Cyprus’ Exhibition

In the 1950s several initiatives regarding photography took place. EFE (ΕΦΕ, Ελληνική Φωτογραφική Εταιρεία), namely the Hellenic Photographic Society – the first official photographic organization in Greece – was established in 1952; two years later, Hellenic Photography1 [Ελληνική Φωτογραφία], EFE’s official journal first appeared – its publication survived until 1991. Being the first official association in the country, EFE gathered everyone interested in photography; however, its main core consisted of amateur photographers, who were highly educated professionals or merchants (Xanthakis 2008: 416). As is clearly stated in its memorandum, among EFE’s aims were the amusement and the improvement of technical skills of every amateur photographer along with the development of tourism and excursionism as well as the promotion of the national and tourist treasures in Greece and abroad (Katastatikon Ellinikis Fotografikis Etaireias 1971: 1).

In 1954, pressed by public opinion and the Ethnarchy, the Papagos Government raised the Cyprus question at the General Assembly of the United Nations, arguing for the principle of self-determination to be applied to Cyprus. For the advocates of Enosis, this would likely result in the voluntary Union of Cyprus with Greece following a public plebiscite. In April 1955, the EOKA’s (Εθνική Οργάνωσις Κυπρίων Αγωνιστών, or National Organization of Cypriot Combatants) armed campaign against the British was soon to begin.

Undoubtedly, the political situation of the period had its impact on cultural activities. Thus, a photographic exhibition under the title ‘Cyprus’ was presented in Athens in autumn 1954. Organized by the EFE, the exhibition was held under the auspices of the Ministry of the Government’s Presidency and was inaugurated by the minister himself. The display consisted of a selection of 96 photographs by four Greek photographers, whose subject was Cyprus. The participating photographers were M. Chroussaki, A. Ververis, A. Economidis and

Figure 4.1 Maria Chroussaki, ‘Shepherd, Cyprus’, 1950s. Credit: National Gallery – Alexandros Soutzos Museum (Athens) V. Mingos: all were members of the Hellenic Photographic Society.

The exhibition was covered by a number of articles in Hellenic Photography. For the reviewer of the exhibition, the display contained ‘typical photographs’ of Cyprus. However, this typical Cypriot character is not further clarified; nothing is mentioned about the style of the photographs, their subject selection or the names of the participating photographers. The texts advertising the exhibition invited the public to get to ‘know the monuments, the landscapes, the folk art, and the customs of the Cypriot people’, prompting them to detect their Greek character, ‘a character that is established through the centuries’ (Kypros. Megali Fotografiki Ekthesis 1954: 20).

Once again, the article adopts a geographically determined perspective, seeking to trace and accentuate the common features between Mainland Greek and Cypriot landscape. Still, the approach is much milder than the speeches published in the extremist nationalist Hellenic Creation. The critic does not extend his argument in order to articulate the basic claim for the island’s integration into the Greek state.

The argument of the common characteristics traced among the two populations is also repeated in other reviews of the exhibition. Interestingly, such a position is adopted by Suzy Lappa, who covered the event for Eleftheria, a newspaper expressing a moderate political position and sympathizing with the political Centre. Her tone becomes quite sentimental and lyrical when praising the authenticity found in scenes she carefully describes as ‘girls in their local dresses leaning over the loom’, ‘all-white Byzantine little churches’ or ‘village celebrations with violins and dances’. In Lappa’s text, special emphasis is put on the rural community. The village in this manner serves as a geographical metaphor ‘for inherited pastoral ideals’; this ideal image of communion embodies ‘organic’ social relations of what Raymond Williams calls the ‘knowable community’ (Peckham 2001: 95). The writer goes on to compare the young girls from Rizokarpaso in Cyprus and Agrafa in Mainland Greece, the Monasteries of the Cypriot Stavrovouni and the Greek Meteora or the dances performed in Macedonia and Cyprus (Lappa 1954: 4). Local and regional identities are celebrated, but only in order to abolish the differences, a process upon which the nation’s cultural uniformity rests (Peckham 2001: xiii).

Figure 4.2 Maria Chroussaki, ‘Pentatroulos Church, Ieroskitos, Cyprus’, 1950s. Credit: National Gallery – Alexandros Soutzos Museum (Athens)

In general, the newspapers which covered the event seem to have a more political view of the exhibition. For the reviewer of Kathimerini, the leading conservative daily newspaper, there is no question of the Greekness of Cyprus. The exhibition constitutes a ‘significant argument’ to persuade those who ‘remain unconvinced’ as well as ‘those who having no evidence are still in doubt’ (GKV2 1954: 2). The political role the event has to play is more than obvious; accordingly, the critic proposes a presentation of the exhibition abroad. There, he argues, the display could function with the aim of contradicting Turkish propaganda which had circulated images that presented Cyprus in the lap of the crescent moon – the symbol of Turkey (GKV 1954: 2). Although not mentioned, we should assume that he refers to the Greek recourse to the General Assembly of the United Nations, an event that was reported extensively in the press and was greeted with enthusiasm by Greek public opinion (Stefanidis 1999: 74–5).

Intriguingly, a similar argument is adopted by Lappa, writing for the Centre-sympathizing Eleftheria. For her, the exhibition’s character is above all political. She argues that this initiative was among the most useful services that the Hellenic Photographic Society could offer to the Cyprus dispute. Reiterating the position of the pro-government Kathimerini, she advocates that the event should travel to New York, where the General Assembly of the United Nations is located. There, it will be ‘an incontrovertible proof that Cyprus is Greek’ for people ‘who doubt or ignore history’ (Lappa 1954: 4). Having said that, the hopes of the Papagos Government were to be belied when the Cyprus dispute was not discussed at the General Assembly of the United Nations in mid-December 1954 (Nikolakopoulos 2000: 189).

Despite the different approaches adopted in relation to the Cypriot dispute – as at that time the Centre, having surpassed its previous reluctance advocated a bilateral Greek–Turkish agreement and the Right opted for an international solution to be applied – the Cypriot case is unanimously fought by the Greek political parties. Acquiring the status of a ‘national cause’, the resolution of the Cyprus question became the ‘keystone of Greek politics’, the first and foremost mission on the agenda of its foreign policy (Nikolakopoulos 2000: 189; Stefanidis, 2007: 83–5).

The ideal of national-mindedness (εθνικοφροσύνη), official ideological framework and dominant everyday practice of the early post-war decades, is raised to ‘cement’ the varied bourgeois political forces. Therefore, although addressed to different publics, Hellenic Photography and politically diverse newspapers such as Kathimerini and Eleftheria echo national-mindedness. Stressing the significance of the ‘Greek–Christian civilization’ and proclaiming the ‘unanimity against Communism’, national-mindedness is summarized in the threefold ethnocentric doctrine of ‘homeland – religion – family’ (Alevizatos 1983: 88–9 and 2002: 193–6).

Undoubtedly, national-mindedness is developed in the international circumstances of the era, namely the general anti-communist ideology of the ‘Western Free world’ of the first post-war decades (Papadimitriou 2006: 177–9). In this context, an armed campaign for Enosis, disturbing the loyalism to the Western allies and especially the British, puts the national-minded journal and newspaper editors in an awkward position. As a consequence, although nationalism is still apparent, the annexationist aspirations are not explicitly expressed as in the ultra-conservative case of Hellenic Creation. This appeasement could also be traced in the alteration of the official Greek foreign policy regarding the Cyprus question. Fearing that supporting the struggle for Enosis might endanger the fundamental Western orientation of the Greek foreign policy, the governments of the Right would in the following years switch gradually to the solution of the Cypriot independence (Stefanidis 2007: 98–9). This ‘compromise’, which eventually led to the Zurich–London agreements (1959), namely the basis for Cyprus’ independence, was thought to be compatible with the interests of NATO (Papadimitriou 1999: 229).

Between National and Universal: Lazaridis’ Views on Photography

Another element that the articles emphasize is the special qualities of the photographic medium. For the critic of Kathimerini, visiting the exhibition is a perfect way to become familiar with Cyprus. It is doubtful whether someone who has never been to the island could have known it more. As he mentions, ‘everything is depicted in such a beautiful way’, that it feels as though one ‘is not leaving the gallery but Cyprus itself ’ (GKV 1954: 2).

Photography’s unique ability is truthfulness; the image that is produced can sometimes surpass reality itself. A similar position is adopted by Suzy Lappa, writing for Eleftheria. Tolerating no dissent, she does not hesitate to express her strongest belief in the power of photography, arguing that ‘nothing and nobody can contradict it’ (Lappa 1954: 4).

For the reviewer of Hellenic Photography, ‘photography is a universal and sincere language that could evidently promote Greece and attract tourism’ (I Ekthesis Kypros 1955: 20). The article celebrates the effectiveness of similar events, a success that lies in photography’s ability to tell the truth. Photography constitutes a transparent and inherently naturalistic medium that could objectively represent the exterior reality, addressing at the same time a worldwide public.

This position recalls Allan Sekula’s analysis of photography as a universal language, a cultural myth that found its full expression in Edward Steichen’s ‘The Family of Man’ (1955) (Steichen 1960: 136–7; Sekula 1984: 90–1). The exhibition, summarizing the liberal humanism advocated by the post-war US policies, opted for a version of documentary photography, where causality is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome and criticizing either the victims or their wilful oppressors is strictly avoided (Rosler 2003: 263). Equating and eventually ‘flattening’ any difference among peoples, Steichen’s choices turned the so-called ‘universality’ of photography into an apolitical framework that accommodated the ruling assumptions, values and practices of liberal capitalism.

Quite similar are the views supported in the article. Photography is an ecumenical language that could address everyone surpassing the obstacles of nationality, race or gender; furthermore, it is a sincere language that could reveal the true beauty of the Cypriot landscape, a language capable of advertising Cyprus as a tourist product and attracting visitors and eventually money. Confident in photography’s ability to persuade, the organizers of the exhibition decided to present the exhibition in all of the major Greek cities.

The discourse on photography’s universality characterized the activities of FEK (ΦΕK, Φωτογραφική Εταιρεία Κύπρου, Greek initials for the Photographic Society of Cyprus). Founded in 1960, FEK joined FIAP (namely the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique) four years later. In FIAP every country is represented by a national association of all the photographic clubs or by a single national society, as is the case for both Greece and Cyprus.

FIAP’s mission was:

    to raise photography to its peak by developing the photographic spirit through all countries, in the triple intention to increase the culture of citizens, to contribute to the technical, documentary and artistic enrichment of nations and to contribute, in the measure of its resources, to the strengthening of the peace in the world.

(Wanderscheid 1998)

Created within the framework of the post-war liberal demand for ‘universality’ and having the support of UNESCO, FIAP excludes from its activities anything that has to do with politics, ideology or religion. This apolitical ecumenism is suggested within the framework of the Photographic Society of Cyprus; it is developed in the spirit of emulation, of the numerous competitions that are founded (Antoniadis 2003: 84–7). Echoing the ‘aristocratic ideals’ of previous centuries, this character of competition constitutes a primary attribute of amateur photography, and harmonizes with the apolitical consensus that is promoted within FIAP.

In 1971 the Photographic Society of Cyprus with the help of FIAP organized the 1st International Photographic Exhibition of Cyprus. Since 1960 Cyprus had already been an independent Republic within the British Commonwealth, with a Greek Cypriot president and a Turkish Cypriot vice-president. Although this scheme led to a fiasco, the Cypriot state sought to make itself visible in any given opportunity. As a consequence, the event was placed under the auspices of the Cypriot Ministry of Education.

Anatolis Lazaridis, one of the most prominent members of the Hellenic Photographic Society, reviewed the exhibition for Hellenic Photography. For the critic, the organization has a double effect. As a well-organized international event, it ‘promoted Cyprus abroad and sealed its national and state entity’. Without doubt, the character the exhibition acquired and the auspices under whom it was placed sought to reinforce the newly established Cypriot state. On a second level, the event ‘contributed to the cultural evolution of humanity’ (Lazaridis 1971: 44). Lazaridis seems to adopt the cultural myth of photography’s universality, a stance that virtually does not differ from the official mission of the exhibition. Presenting the national participations of 14 countries with each of them displaying 15 photographs, the exhibition clearly conveyed the spirit of apolitical ecumenism.

In Lazaridis’ vision, several separate nations are bonded by art and culture aiming to advance the development of humankind. He, therefore, seeks to ascribe a special national character to each of the participations. He returns to the hackneyed assertion that the displays representing Greece and Cyprus are characterized by a common photographic perception and sensitivity, as ‘the same clear eyes see the world and its expressions’ and ‘the same soul waits behind the lens’ (Lazaridis 1971: 44).

Lazaridis continues his argument in an article he wrote in 1982, on the occasion of the exhibition of a FEK collection at the Athens Goethe Institute (Lazaridis 1982: 482–6). Once more he realizes ‘the common character, the common approach of the subject, the common impression that the Cypriot and the Mainland Greek photography make’. One cannot tell the difference between the Cypriot and Mainland Greek displays. Both bodies of work demonstrate ‘the same emotional vibration, the same sight’, as well as ‘a common attitude to keep it simple, humble and authentic’. Avoiding any pretension or construction, these photographs suggest clarity of look and kind-heartedness. What they depict is the everyday, the ordinary element: an old lady standing at the door of her house, everyday habits and needs, humble houses, scenes of a life that passes through. For Lazaridis, it is in the portrayal of the ‘simple and kind people’ of Cyprus, the ones ‘who keep their Greek faith ardent and unspoiled’ that the true Greek character of Cypriot photography lies.

Figure 4.3 Lia Platritou, ‘Mother Cyprus I’, undated. Credit: EFE (Hellenic Photographic Society)

Although he praises the simple and unspoiled life as this is represented in Cypriot photography, Lazaridis takes advantage of the occasion and does not hesitate to condemn the Greek photographers’ preference for ugliness. Their depiction of ‘huts, ruins, poorly dressed miserable men, barefoot children, lashed dogs and dirty gypsies’, are themes that, at least according to him, are common in photographers of the Far East, namely of Hong-Kong or Singapore. He encourages the Greek photographers to imitate the example of ‘more advanced’ European countries, in whose photography one can ‘enjoy a beauty, which stems from what is objectively beautiful, from cleanliness, order and the glow of mental health’.

In Lazaridis’ stereotypical views, photography has to represent a certain image of reality; not to focus on the ugly, poor or ruined, but on the beautiful, clean and tidy. These views constitute part of Lazaridis’ theory on art. He does not believe in naturalism, but in photography’s duty to present life better than it is in real life. In his view, naturalism is, by itself, anti-artistic and a passive element in art. It needs reinforcement so as to be creative. There should be some kind of dramatization, or other additional elements, which will take the spectator by surprise and grant the work with a spiritual dimension. Lazaridis makes a distinction between photography and the other visual arts; not having the greater flexibility of painting and sculpture, photography has to mobilize idealization in order to ‘skip the trap of naturalism’ (Lazaridis 1982: 485).

Pondering beauty of subject matter, tonality and composition over ‘naturalism’ and subsequently over the documentation of reality, Lazaridis’ perspective should be aligned with strategies that sought to legitimize photography as art. The medium is elevated into the realm of the arts by drawing upon established discourses of painting, a practice popular in pictorialism, the photographic style that emerged in the late nineteenth century (Sternberger 2001: 33–64).

No doubt, Lazaridis’ views are closely linked with the specific code of photographic values that appertain to the camera club photography, the genre developed within FIAP’s circles. For Michael Griffin (1986) and Dona Schwartz (1986, 1987), who have described the world of amateur photography very clearly, these values are identified with pictorialism, a term to which they ascribe an expanded definition. In this manner, the camera club pictorialism stresses correct exposure, technical perfection, and representational realism (Schwartz 1987: 260–2, 264), while it privileges idealization, ‘non-threatening, non-critical and non-controversial’ subjects and a ‘beautiful’, ‘romantic, cheerful and reassuring imagery’ (Griffin 1986: 618). As Griffin notes, this stable pictorial code favours specific kinds of ‘beautiful’ things, ‘beautifully’ photographed. It is exactly this preoccupation with the ‘beautiful’, which makes amateur work light-hearted, romantic, optimistic, and by some standards trivial (Griffin 1986: 374).

This rather narrow conservative code appears to consort well with FIAP’s apolitical spirit, as this is exemplified in Lazaridis’ discourse. Nevertheless, soon he seems to ignore the Federation’s appeasing, consensual attitude, introducing a political dimension to his argument. He prompts his readers to consider the different, harder fate Cyprus had in comparison to the one of the Mainland:

    For centuries [Cyprus] suffered under different foreign dominations; several of the dominators had a ‘superior cultural level’; nonetheless, they could not change its obstinate Greek soul.

(Lazaridis 1982: 482)

For Lazaridis, it was against all odds that Cyprus managed to maintain its Greek character, an achievement that is attributed to Greek spirited obstinacy. To strengthen his argument, he adds a lyrical quote by Kostis Palamas: ‘It changed many lords, but it did not change its heart.’ The critic discerns the Cyprus crisis in the photographic production of the island: ‘There is a wait in the air, an anxiety for the worst, a hope for the best.’ This wait can be recognized in the ‘scattered’ and ‘undefined’ character of the production, as well as in ‘the lack of a steady road’ that would ensure its future.

Lazaridis keeps an ambivalent position towards photography’s role. On the one hand, in line with FIAP’s apolitical pictorialism, he envisions a photography that focuses on beauty and idealizes reality; on the other, when referring specifically to Cyprus, his discourse becomes political, even though in a subtle and quite indirect way. The Union with Greece was never realized, as Enosis was effectively abandoned in favour of an ‘attainable solution’. The Turkish invasion of 1974 divided the island into two. As the Cyprus dispute entered a phase of continuous negotiations and peace-making efforts, Greece adopted an attitude of wait towards the Cypriot affair. It is under this prism that Lazaridis ‘reads’ the Cypriot photography; it seems that he projects his own way of thinking on the photographs displayed. In Lazaridis’ discourse the political and the apolitical, the nationalist and the universal element co-exist. Photography is the ideal medium to represent Cyprus because it conveys the sense of wait that there is in the air, because it tells the world the truth about its beauties, which should be accentuated, but also about its hard fate, its sufferings from the conquerors.

1980 ‘Greece–Cyprus’ Exhibition

As the years pass, the discourse on Cyprus becomes milder; a fact that could be justified by Greece’s negotiating foreign policy in the 1980s. The years have passed and Cyprus’ partition, although never officially recognized, is a fact for the island. This was apparent in the 1980 ‘Greece–Cyprus’ exhibition that was presented in both Athens and Nicosia. The exhibition was initiated by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education of Cyprus, and organized by the Hellenic Photographic Society and the Photographic Society of Cyprus. Two photographers from Greece, Fotis Kazazis and Adrianos Papagkikas, representing the Hellenic Photographic Society, were sent to portray Cyprus; at the same time, Jack Iakovidis and Phidias Christodoulidis from Cyprus were sent to Greece. The outcome of this attempt was an exhibition that was presented first in Athens and later in Nicosia.

Iakovidis and Christodoulidis produced typical images of Athens: Plaka; Monastiraki; the Syntagma Square and the Odeon of Herodes Atticus. On the other hand, Papagkikas and Kazazis elected to present Cyprus’ folklore character. It is not by chance that the two photographers toured the island accompanied and guided by members of the Photographic Society of Cyprus. The Cypriot Society chose to promote a specific image for the island.

Interestingly enough, in the portfolio published in Hellenic Photography, there is no comment with the exception of a single photograph by Adrianos Papagkikas. Placed on the cover of the portfolio, this dark full-page image of the Famagusta Gate, one of the most famous monuments in Nicosia, is, according to the reviewer, characterized by a ‘cruel symbolism’.

The writer admits that there are elements of optimism and creativity in the recent work of several Cypriot photographers. Although he expresses his contentment for this approach, at the same time, he points out that this optimism should not be an excuse for the Greeks of the mainland to forget the history, the past and the deep roots that unite them with Cyprus. According to the reviewer, it is in this spirit that the photograph by Adrianos Papagkikas was selected for the cover of the portfolio as it was supposed to be ‘a kind of a “sacred precept”’ (Ellas–Kypros 1980: 31). Clearly, the political dimension prevails over any reference to the qualities of the photographs. For the editors of Hellenic Photography, the dark image of the Famagusta Gate symbolizes the conquered part of the island; it hints at the duty of Mainland Greece ‘not to forget’ the unredeemed country.

Figure 4.4 Adrianos Papagkikas, ‘Famagusta Gate’, 1979. Credit: EFE (Hellenic Photographic Society)

A second article in Hellenic Photography is dedicated to the display of the exhibition in Nicosia. Although presented at the Hellenic Cultural Centre in Nicosia, which was not located in the centre of the city, the exhibition attracted a wide public, which, as the reviewer points out, proves the great appeal of the event. The presence of Archbishop Chrysostomos, the Greek Ambassador, numerous ministers and representatives of the parties at the opening attest the political significance that was given to the event.

The rest of the article is confined to a description of the speeches given at the opening. Mr Ioannidis, Honorary President of the Photographic Society of Cyprus, focused on the idea and the aims of the exhibition, its significance in the promotion of cultural bonds between the two countries as well as on the identical space and everyday living of the Greeks and Cypriots. For Petros Broussalis, President of the EFE, the Hellenic and the Cypriot Photographic Societies are ‘sisters’ and the organized event highlights the bonds between them. At this point, he makes a distinction between the specific and other EFE initiatives: so, while other exhibitions tend to familiarize the public with distant places and a different kind of life, this present exhibition consists of ‘well-known images [so] that everybody can recognise the traits of the Greek race’ (I ekthesis ‘Ellas–Kypros’ stin Kypro 1980: 18).

In Broussalis’ anachronistic references, Greeks appear to be a ‘race’ with inherent traits and capacities that are entirely due to Greekness itself. Regardless, in accordance with the ultra-conservative discourse of earlier decades, the distinctions which ascribe a person to a racial group are not based on pure biology, but on what can be termed ‘social biology’, namely culture, historical traditions, customs and identities (Papadimitriou 2003: 148–9). In this ‘racial’ nationalist discourse, race is a synonym of ethnicity. Ethnicity is thus reified into a set of essentially defining traits and removed from concrete historical processes. ‘Greekness’ is raised to an abstract expression of an eternal trans-historical identity. Although not necessarily used in a specific way, the naturalization of cultural identity that these trans-historical traits imply is the foundation of racist reification of ethnicity (Harvey 2011 [1990]).

Both the 1980 Greece–Cyprus and the 1982 Athens Goethe Institute exhibitions were covered only by Hellenic Photography, the official EFE journal, and are completely ignored by the remaining press. This cannot be explained by photography’s alleged ‘inferiority’ towards other visual arts. Years had gone by and photography, even in a peripheral country like Greece, had deservedly earned its position among visual arts in the early 1980s. In the mid-1970s a generation of young photographers emerged. Educated abroad and treating photography professionally, these photographers changed the entire scene of Greek photography: new photographic publications and magazines appeared, galleries exclusively dedicated to the promotion of the photographic medium were founded, photography studies entered the Greek technical universities, and the first photography festivals were established. This new generation photography, ‘New Greek Photography’ for John Stathatos, its key theoretical advocate, although diverse and heterogeneous in style, launched the documentary approach and the social landscape iconography against the stereotypical pictorialism of the past (Stathatos 1997: XXXIV–XLI).

Keeping up the conservative and nationalist views of the past and being attached to the outmoded ideals and the aesthetic of the amateur camera clubs, EFE and FEK became obsolete institutions with a marginal role in the art world. Hence, the lack of interest the press showed for the EFE exhibitions should be interpreted by the Society’s ‘seclusion’ from the photographic events of the era.

Conclusion: Inventing the ‘Sweet Island of our Heart’

The chapter sought to examine the discourse on Cypriot photography, and more specifically amateur club photography, as this is developed in articles and critiques on photographic exhibitions having Cyprus as a subject (1950s–80s). What one can see is a general tendency to ignore aesthetics, namely the artistic school, the style, the darkroom and process techniques. According to the critics and commentators, photography is a ‘universal and sincere’ language, a transparent medium whose putative ability is to communicate a neutral, documentary truth. Therefore, it can convey a true image of the island, its beauties and its sufferings. Photography’s alleged transparency identifies every representation with its subject matter, which in most of the examined cases is the Cypriot landscape. In this way, the nationalist discourse of geographical determinism that is developed in the texts on the photographic exhibitions, mobilizes the landscape as the source from which the exceptional virtues of the Greek people stem.

The critical discourse acquires, thus, a political dimension, equating photography on Cyprus with Greece’s political aspirations, territorial claims and foreign policy in relation to the island. So, the photographic production is ‘read’ through the political situation of each period: the British colonial rule, the EOKA campaign for Union with Greece, the Turkish invasion in 1974 and the attitude of wait adopted by the Greek government in the 1980s. Nevertheless, there is no specific reference to historical facts; the writers usually resort to generalities and platitudes, for instance, like the hard fate of Cyprus, its suffering under the foreign dominations, its ‘sacred precept’ and so on.

As the years roll by and politics change, the overt political controversies are avoided. The nationalist spirit is apparent only in an indirect and quite lyrical way. Hence, the apolitical programme of FIAP seems to prevail; its policies entail universalism as a purely depoliticized concept and as an imitation of peace. Every antagonism, considered given for a state of war like the Cypriot dispute, is deliberately hushed.

In spite of everything, the image of Cyprus that is created retains the same features over the decades. It seems that in such times of political tension, a stereotyped image, which takes shape in a discursive environment, is called up from an imagined inventory. As a consequence, a pre-conceived and stereotyped model is invented for the Greek Cypriot ‘nation’, which dominates in the photographic discourse of the Greek press: to use Anderson’s now classic terminology, Cyprus is ‘imagined’ as the suffering, ‘sweet island of our heart’, as the ‘Enslaved daughter’ of the ‘Motherland’ Greece, while Mainland Greece is urged ‘not to forget’ the unredeemed country.

Notes

1. From issue 58 onwards the journal Hellenic Photography changed its title and became Hellenic Photography and Amateur Cinema, attaching an additional sequence number to each subsequent issue, e.g. 22/79.

2. GKV, as cited in this chapter and referenced below, represents the initials of an anonymous author who signs him/ herself in Greek as ΓΚΒ only.

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FIVE

Pride and Prejudice: Photography and Memory in Cyprus

Yiannis Toumazis

Introduction

Cyprus, in all its territory, is today scattered with memories of its recent past. Museums, cenotaphs, tombs for the heroes and all those who were lost, columns, colossal statues, even flags drawn on mountain slopes, are dedicated not only to the memory of the heroic struggles but also to the tragedies that have befallen the Cypriot people: monuments that are principally related to the Greek Cypriot struggle for liberation from the British (1955–59), the atrocities among the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots (1963–74) and the military invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, in 1974.

In many of the monuments, photographic and other material is exhibited which, in the case of both Greek Cypriots as well as Turkish Cypriots, illustrates what is regarded as the face of nationalism as expressed by each of the two sides. It is evident that the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have shaped these sites of memory, ‘sharing the same form of historical representation: the past as a narrative of national struggle’ (Papadakis 1994: 400). These commemorative testaments were largely constructed to underline and reinforce the two communities’ separate ideological ends – the Turkish Cypriot Taksim (ethno-national partition of the island) and the Greek Cypriot Enosis (political union of the island with Greece). They were erected during the course of a highly politicized past: How relevant are the monuments today?

The declaration of independence of the Republic of Cyprus (1960), – this ‘reluctant republic’ (Xydis 1973), did not suffice to establish the conditions for a problem-free cohabitation of Greek Cypriotsand Turkish Cypriots. For most of the British colonial rule (1878– 1960), Greek Cypriot nationalism found fertile ground in which to grow without taking account of the Turkish Cypriot presence on the island. Attalides (2003) argues that the main reason for this was the relative lack of a Turkish Cypriot national consciousness or nationalist movement. According to Kafkarides (2010) the British played the lead part in awakening Turkish Cypriot nationalism, sensing that its consequences would assist them in maintaining control on the island. ‘When Turkish-Cypriot nationalism erupted violently in the 1950s it was hard for Greek Cypriots to accept that it was a real and important political phenomenon which had to be taken into account in their own political calculations’ (Attalides 2003: 36). Notions of ‘Greekness’ and later, ‘Turkishness’ among some Cypriots often fostered a dependence on, and aspirations to annex with, one of the ‘motherlands’. As they became salient, these notions instigated arguments and a series of violent and bloody incidents, which climaxed in the Turkish invasion of 1974 and the continuing division of the island. Similarly, attitudes toward the Cyprus problem frequently took different and various forms and shapes in the respective ‘motherlands’. In anthropologist Peter Loizos’ words, ‘The island of Cyprus has been affected by, and has, itself, influenced the nationalisms of both mainland states’ (1998: 36).

Figure 5.1 Yiannis Toumazis, ‘Road sign in the Messaoria Plain (northern part of Cyprus)’, 2010. Credit: Yiannis Toumazis

This chapter focuses on the representation of recent Cypriot history in the Istanbul Military Museum, the War Museum in Athens (i.e. in the two ‘motherlands’) and in museums and monuments in Cyprus. It aims to demonstrate how this representation reflects, as well as enhances nationalist ideology. Further, it assesses the museological approach adopted in each case, both of which include extensive imagery of violent and traumatic events along with the public display of death as a means to shape and sustain nationalist consciousness. This chapter questions the ethics of this museological approach: What is, in fact, the impact of photographic testimonies, especially of traumatic events that abound in war museums? Is this crude public display of death – exhibited through personal belongings and photographs of shot, dismembered and burned bodies – directly aimed to trigger traumatic memories? In Bodies of Evidence, Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus, Paul Sant Cassia succinctly remarks that this imagery points to an event ‘so traumatic that it exists outside time, but nevertheless marks an irreducible chasm between the before and the after’ (2007: 150). On the other hand, Guerin and Hallas (2007) argue that there is scepticism and an iconoclastic attitude against the ability of the photographs and, by extension, of museological representations to express and really imprint the traumatic experience. Can the bombardment of images of death and destruction function critically, substantially, positively or even therapeutically? According to Sontag (2003), on the one hand, image-glut keeps attention light, mobile and relatively indifferent to content. Sontag also suggests that image flow precludes a privileged image. On the other hand, she argues that ‘the quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the degree of their familiarity with these images’ (1977: 19). Caruth (1996) maintains that the shock of traumatic sight reveals at the heart of human subjectivity not so much an epistemological theory, but rather what can be defined as an ethical relation to the real.

One Space, Two Histories – Museology and Photography on Cyprus

Istanbul

The Istanbul Military Museum (Askerî Müze ve Kültür Sitesi Komu-tanlığı) is housed in the imposing building that was once home to the Military Academy of the Ottoman Empire, where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk studied. It now belongs to the Turkish Army.

The triumphs and conquests of the Ottoman Empire are presented on the ground floor of the museum, inside large glass showcases, but also through impressive panoramic representations, such as that of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed II the Conqueror and the subsequent fall of the Byzantine Empire.

The first floor is dedicated to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, by Atatürk, and the military history of Turkey in the twentieth century. Firearms, cannons, armour and military accoutrements of the Turks, portraits and uniforms, as worn by sultans and their generals, personal belongings, photographs, valuable papers and historical documents are the main exhibits of the museum. A hall is dedicated to the extensive slaughter of the Turks and their suffering at the hands of the Armenians. The showcases in this section exhibit photographs of Turkish corpses, mass graves and blood stained clothing. The display implicitly contradicts the official acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide committed by the Turks, as recognized by more than 20 nations and international organizations (which include the USA, France, Russia, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe).

At the end of the corridor to the right side of the first floor, a large hall houses the Korean and Cyprus Sections together. The Korean conflict began when North Korea invaded the South; but, the North Koreans considered it to be a war fought for the liberation of the fatherland. The 38th parallel acted as a ‘green line’ of separation in a cold-war theatre of war. Correspondingly and perhaps keeping pace with the geopolitical semiotics of the era, the 35th parallel has been proposed by the Turks for the division of Cyprus. The Korean conflict ended in a stalemate, and the division of Korea in North and South stands until today. Regardless, from the Turkish viewpoint, and with reference to cold-war international alliances, the role of Turkey was considered a policing and peacekeeping one; aiming to avert the occupation of South Korea (the soldiers having been distinguished for their heroism and self-sacrifice had suffered many losses). Likewise, the invasion of the Turkish Army in Cyprus in July 1974 is portrayed in the museum as a peacekeeping operation.

In the main, the museum sections perhaps with the exception of a display referring to the Greek campaign in Asia Minor and its consequent failure, presents Turkish army objects, photographs, uniforms and keepsakes. In contrast, the Cyprus Section largely exhibits plunder captured by the Turks, as defined in the captions.

The museographical approach, contrary to what we are accustomed to in modern Western museums, is marked by rigidity and repetition. There is a total lack of explanatory narration, while the descriptions accompanying the exhibits (at least in their English version) are full of grammatical, spelling and syntax errors. The absence of general explanatory texts, which is observed in most of the museum’s halls, renders difficult any attempt to place the exhibits in a clear chronological and historic context. Conceivably the exhibits of central importance in the Cyprus Section are the Greek flags (several of them), and especially those with dozens of signatures-autographs of Turkish servicemen who took part in the invasion.

As is cited in the caption but also in the respective photograph, Turkish soldiers presented one of these flags to Ergin Konuksever, who as a journalist participated in the ‘Peace Keeping Operation in Cyprus’. For this period he had three cameras of high quality equipped with zoom lenses, which he used to produce extensive documentation. He is also the photographer of the infamous series of photographs of the five Greek Cypriot soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Turkish Army in the village area of Tziaos. Even today and perhaps with greater frequency, some light appears to be shed on unresolved stories dating from 1974, in particular following the exhumation of bones from locations in both the northern and southern parts of the island, and their genetic identification. But the interpretation given to such cases is often ambiguous. The photographs of the five captives have been the focus of a long, ongoing debate; especially the photograph depicting the five men with their arms raised which has acquired the status of an emblem used excessively to describe the Greek Cypriot tragedy. Additionally, this image acts as a symbol for the verification of the fate of the missing Greek Cypriots.

One of the sites where this image appears, in the form of a haunting, worn-out poster, is the Greek Cypriot outpost at the checkpoint of Ledra Palace. There, the photograph in question lies next to the photographic portrait of Theofilos Georgiades, who was actively engaged in the Kurdish Issue and was murdered in 1994. Alongside of the images, there is a quote by Georgiades: ‘As long as I live, I shall insist that there are missing persons alive. I will not accept it for them to be buried alive and should I be gone, my soul will fight for them from above.’ Similar expressions appearing in the media, in public discourse and in publications, illustrate the hope of Greek Cypriots that the missing will be eventually found somewhere, alive. However, throughout time, there has been evidence to the contrary. For example, Konuksever has been claiming for several years that he took many more photographs beyond those in circulation that depicted the five prisoners as dead. The Turks evoke the non-use of the photographs by the Greek Cypriot side as propaganda, designed for further exploitation in relation to the ongoing case of the Greek Cypriot missing persons (Dalitis 2009d).

The discovery and identification of the bones of the five soldiers, together with 14 other remains in a well in the area of Tziaos, in addition to an apparently unpublished photograph of the five recently spotted in Greece, seems to affirm the testimonies that all of these persons were executed in Tziaos (Pallikarides 2009). Accounts by certain relatives of the five imply that they were deliberately left in ignorance regarding the fate of their relatives and that their case was used for propagandistic ends by the Greek Cypriot authorities (Dalitis 2009b). Besides, individual elements of the contested photographs have also been the subject of debates, such as, for example, the cross, which one of the prisoners wore around his neck, but which was evidently removed from the prisoner as it cannot be seen in any other photograph of the same series or a Turkish soldier offering one of the prisoners a cigarette. These images were perceived as prime material for Turkish propaganda by Greek Cypriot journalists since, had they been used effectively, they could have promoted the ‘peace-keeping’ nature of its operation in Cyprus (Vassiliou 2009; Dalitis 2009a, 2009c).

But the most paradoxical and ironical part of the story is found in a PowerPoint presentation by the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Cypriot Issue, which is available online. On page 18 of this presentation entitled: ‘Cyprus Issue – Historical and Actual Facts’, Konuksever’s known 1974 photograph depicts the five Greek Cypriots as being Turkish Cypriot, used as yet further evidence of the cruelties of the former against the latter, in 1963. The accompanied text reads:

    Christmas 1963 – Greek Cypriot militia attacked Turkish Cypriots across the Island; many men, women, and children killed. 270 of the mosques, shrines and other places of worship desecrated. 103 T/C villages destroyed.1

Returning to the Istanbul museum, the interest primarily concentrates on the large central showcases where the Greek flags are displayed, flanked by uniforms, guns and other objects originating from either the Cypriot National Guard or the Hellenic Force in Cyprus (ELDYK). One particular showcase is dominated by a national emblem depicting the double-headed eagle, a byzantine symbol that acquires special significance since it is exhibited as plunder in Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire.

It was in the same showcase that on 24 November 2007, I came across and photographed the military identity card of Greek Cypriot reserve Second Lieutenant Christou Christakis, son of Tryfon, from Limassol. The caption mistakenly informed that it belonged to a Greek officer. It is not unusual for an identity card to be exhibited in a museum, and indeed in a military gallery. This usually happens for very specific purposes. For example, when the nationality and hence the identity of the person became a reason for persecution, such as in the case of Jews persecuted by the Nazis; in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris, identity cards of French citizens marked in handwriting or stamped with the indication ‘Jew’ are exhibited. In the Greek Cypriot Museum of National Struggle 1955–59 there are several identity cards, passports, driving licences and military documents on display, belonging to EOKA fighters. But what is the symbolism of exhibiting this specific identity card, and, by extension, the photograph of an ‘enemy’ at the Istanbul Military Museum?

To begin with, an identity card, and especially a military one, is a personal document whose holder must carry with him at all times, and mandatorily in times of war. Exposing such a document publicly automatically raises questions and evokes a series of associations: Is the depicted alive or dead? Was he captured or killed in battle? How was the identity card removed from him?

In the context of the museum and in the absence of more information on the original holder, this personal document may provide testimony for a potentially violent death or capture. As Hirsch remarks: ‘the horror of looking is not necessarily in the picture, but in the story the viewer provides to fill in what has been omitted’ (1997: 21). The known-unknown soldier, contrary to the heroes or martyrs on the other side, personifies the ‘dead enemy’, albeit without any military honours attributed to him. Furthermore, the acquisition of the identity card, with all its connotations, comes to represent an act of bravery and victory for the executor.

Figure 5.2 Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The identity card of Christou Christakis’, on display at the Istanbul Military Museum, 2007. Credit: Yiannis Toumazis

Semiologically, the exhibition of Greek Cypriot uniforms in the showcases, although generally carrying no names, operate in similar ways to the identity card. Even though such items of clothing could well have been collected in abandoned army camps of the enemy, they still insinuate here a violent death or capture. Thus, in a strange manner, the uniform becomes the photograph or the identity card of a person, known or unknown, and potentially dead. According to Barthes, ‘photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead’ (1981: 32). In this case, the correlation to death is much more direct.

Upon returning to Cyprus from Istanbul, and in the context of an art project, I wrote and published in the Cypriot Press an open letter to Christou Christakis, son of Tryfon. The letter concluded with the following postscript: ‘I am certain that somehow, somewhere, someday we two shall talk again.’ It implied, of course, a sort of ‘metaphysical’ meeting in ‘another world’. Two days later, through the editor of the newspaper, I received a series of phone calls from some of Christakis’ relatives, who provided information on his whereabouts, and helped me to get in touch with him in France, his permanent residence since 1974. As he confirmed in person, he had indeed been captured by the Turkish Army and subsequently released.

I paid another visit to the Istanbul Military Museum on 18 August 2010. The showcases and exhibits were exactly as I had photographed them back in 2007; all except one: Christou Christakis’ identity card had been removed from its former place in the showcase, which, to my knowledge, still remains empty.

Athens

The War Museum in Athens (Polemiko Mouseio) is housed in a magnificent modern building, constructed in the era of the Colonels’ dictatorship (1967–74). It was inaugurated in 1975 and belongs to the Hellenic Army. A major part of the museum is dedicated to the promotion and presentation of the glorious ancient Greek past, beginning with the Neolithic Period. Impressive samples of ancient Greek pottery, sculpture and metallurgy dating from the prehistoric, the classical and late antiquity are exhibited in its showcases, complemented by photographic and explanatory material. The next section is dedicated to the grandeur of the Byzantine Empire, using images and models such as the grand walls of Constantinople. What is striking is the fact that as this chronological/museological route unfolds, the explanatory texts gradually diminish to eventually become mere descriptions of the exhibits. In Istanbul, the fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II the Conqueror is presented in a spectacular way. In Athens, by contrast, the same reference is limited to a large tombstone dedicated to the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, whose corpse was beheaded, as the relevant caption informs.

The main exhibition space of the museum also deals extensively with the Greek Revolution against the Turks in 1821. The far end of the first floor covers the first four decades of the twentieth century, the Macedonian Struggle, the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Asia Minor campaign and the beginning of the Second World War. In two privileged places and inside dominating showcases, banners and flags of the Ottoman Empire are exhibited, as well as an adorned Ottoman uniform, swords and daggers and shells, apparently looted from the Greek campaigns. There are no descriptions for these exhibits and the whimsical ‘glorifying’ manner by which they are exhibited implies, just like in the Cypriot Section of the museum in Istanbul, the death of the enemy. Had these exhibits been seen in the Istanbul museum they would have integrated well with the general museological concept. Here, they seem to serve a different purpose.

In this section many photographs from the destruction of Hellenism in Asia Minor are also exhibited, even of Turks captured by the Greeks. The relevant captions praise the humanitarianism and care the Greek soldiers have demonstrated towards Turkish captives. More specifically the following text is written on the captions: ‘Humanitarianism in all its glory. A Greek stretcher-bearer, assisted by a wounded Greek, carries an injured Turk!! From the battles at Kale Grotto’ and ‘Turkish POWs receive their mess of food, care of the Hellenic Army. To the captives who were, in most cases, barely dressed, our Army provided clothes and shoes.’

The mezzanine of the museum is dedicated to the German occupation, and to the consequent Resistance and Liberation in Greece; this route concludes with the Greek expeditionary corps to Korea, which stands next to the Cyprus Hall, just like in the Istanbul museum. Similarly to Turkey, Greece sent its own corps to South Korea; here too, there are references to the ‘heroism and humanitarianism’ of the expedition. As a sign of gratitude towards both the Greek expeditionary force, as well as the corresponding Turkish unit, the Koreans have erected monuments, models of which are displayed in both museums.

The Cyprus Hall is the last section of the museum. Two busts cast in bronze stand on either side of the entrance, welcoming the visitor. One is of Archbishop Makarios, the leader of the Cypriot Orthodox Church and the first President of the Republic of Cyprus, and the other is of General Georgios Grivas, a Cyprus-born general in the Greek Army, leader of the EOKA guerrilla organization and EOKA B paramilitary organization in Cyprus. Further on, there is a torso of Infantry Colonel Tassos Markou, killed during the invasion. This sculpture stands before a solitary Cypriot flag; no others are present in the museum (the corresponding section in the Istanbul museum exhibits only Greek flags). A caption at the entrance quotes the Greek poet Kostis Palamas: ‘You’ve changed many masters, but never changed your heart’; below is another small text referring to the ‘fate’ of Cyprus, resting on the crossroads of international conspiracy and interests; the museological approach of this specific hall aims to promote the diachronic ‘Greekness’ of Cyprus, which, despite all obstacles, managed to preserve its ‘national, historic and cultural character’ throughout the centuries. Explanatory texts are absent here too, apart from certain inscriptions on the exhibits and a brief documentary on the history of Cyprus since ancient time. One senses that the hall is conceptually split in two. The left part resembles an archaeological museum, while on the right it mainly deals with the participation of Cypriots in the national struggles of Greece from 1821 onwards, the British colonial rule on the island and the EOKA liberation struggle (1955–59). EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston – National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) started a guerrilla campaign against British colonial rule aimed at self-determination and union with Greece (Enosis).

The post-1960s history of the island is summarized in two showcases, which observe the same museographical aesthetic, namely photographs flanked by firearms. The first deals with the warm welcome of the Hellenic Force in Cyprus (ELDYK) by the Greek Cypriots and the other with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Let us focus on three photographs: two of Greek Orthodox priests and elderly Greek Cypriot peasants welcoming and embracing Greek soldiers, and one of a Greek soldier tenderly holding a baby in his arms. There are similar images on display in Istanbul: a Turkish soldier holds a baby affectionately in front of an elderly couple clinging to the British flag. Also on exhibit is an image of Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, founder and first president of the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’, a de facto proclaimed state (1983) only recognized by Turkey, embracing the Turkish general in charge of the ‘peacekeeping’ operation.

As expected, the last showcase in the Cyprus Hall is the one referring to the Turkish invasion. One of the central images is, of course, Konuksever’s famous photograph of the five captives at Tziaos. It is surrounded by photographs of bombardments, of refugees in tents, of mothers and children, of destroyed hospitals and churches. Completely absent from the showcase is any photographic material relating to the coup d’état in Cyprus, instigated by the Greek junta, which consequently led to the 1974 Turkish invasion. At the bottom of the showcase appear photographs of the murders of Greek Cypriots, Tassos Isaak and Solomos Solomou, by Turkish Cypriot nationalists in 1996. The two firearms in the showcase are described in the captions as loot, thus personifying and identifying the victimizers.

Museum – Photography – Memory

The two military museums in Istanbul and Athens present striking similarities, as these types of museums essentially do. In this case, they accurately reflect the potent function of a museum in general and of photography in particular, as carriers of memory, trauma and history. This mechanism operates on a number of levels. The modern museum, as it has emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, is according to Azoulay (2001), a spatial literalization of history writing where the documents (the exhibits) are collected, classified, interpreted and re-presented. On the other hand, the photograph, which appeared in the 1830s, some decades after the emergence of the museum, ‘also offered a new spatial unit – the unique space populated, whether randomly or deliberately if momentarily, by the photographer and the photographed’ (Azoulay 2001: 92). Both of these spatial units have the capacity, and in some cases (as in the case at hand), the desire to publicly display death, aiming to promote and sustain the respective nationalist ideology.

The reading of the exhibits and photographs in a museum and, by extension, the subjectivity thereof may determine the critical as well as the ethical role of a museum exhibit or a photograph. Having said that, how can we determine the validity of an image? How is an event registered and based on what testimonies? Is the notion of ‘I was there’ or ‘I have imprinted the event photographically’ sufficient to include it in the sphere of history? Ricoeur (2006) holds that it is at the level of explanation/ understanding that the autonomy of history in relation to memory is affirmed more forcefully on the epistemological plane.

And, although the museological and photographic approach might appear as preserving memory and transforming it to historic knowledge, the same approaches, in the way that they function, may well be employing apparently indisputable facts-testimonies, but may, in their way, shape a new memory or an artificial extension of memory, which, in turn, claims real historic space by constructing a new historic reality. The violence, the war crimes, the traumatic events are, of course, directly associated with the existence of photographic testimony that verifies the event. There is also a suspicion relating to the objective and truth of such photographs:

    Contemporary suspicion toward the veracity of the image can in part be pinned to the ability of technology to reproduce images without an original referent. However, the mistrust of the image as witness to traumatic historical events is more complicated and more deep-rooted than the ontological status of photographic reproduction. It has also everything to do with the way images are interpreted and used. In turn, the dissemination and interpretation of images are inextricably linked to the philosophical and ethical issues at stake in the context of reception (Guerin & Hallas 2007: 6).

The photographs of the naked people tortured by US and allied forces’ soldiers in Iraq, which circulated the media, were characterized as pornographic and voyeuristic, a horrific homage to violence.

    What the images also revealed were the boundaries of the acceptable representation of the human body, especially of the male body in war, and the shock that the sight of the tortured, dead, mutilated body creates in the Western World.

(Koureas 2007: 186)

Ariella Azoulay in her poignant book Death’s Showcase (2001) evokes that towards the end of Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, he refers to war and death: ‘All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war’ (1999: 234). To later conclude: ‘Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure’ (p. 235).

At the Istanbul Military Museum, the Memoirs of the EOKA struggle 1955–59, by General George Grivas Digenis, are exhibited in a table top showcase. The caption mentions ‘HANDBOOK OF EOKA’. Next to a helmet of the Greek Cypriot National Guard there are some Greek military seals and a spoiled rucksack, which as claimed by the description, belongs to Turk commando Şerev Kavak, who was martyred on 22 July 1974 in the village Zeytinlik. Directly next to the rucksack there is a cleaver. The caption notes: ‘BLOODY CLEAVER USED AGAINST THE TURKS BY THE GREEKS IN CYPRUS’. On display next to the cleaver there is a wristwatch, which belonged to Lieutenant Hüseyin Akar, ‘who was martyred in Cyprus’. There follows a handwritten letter in Turkish and a black and white photograph of a young Turkish officer. According to the description, the letter belongs to First Infantry Lieutenant Nermi Tombul, addressed to his family, but one which he did not post, as he was martyred in Cyprus.

The bloody cleaver, which is classified as a murder weapon used by the Greeks against the Turks, is exhibited next to the personal belongings and the photographs of Turkish soldiers ‘who were martyred’ and next to the Memoirs of Grivas, which are described as EOKA’s ‘Handbook’. Such objects might, fashion a spatial representation of death, and, in parallel, they subconsciously attempt a peremptory and nationalistic interpretation of the historical approach. EOKA, the Greek butchers, the Turkish martyrs.

A reprint of a photograph showing three murdered children and their also dead mother in the bathroom of a house in Nicosia is exhibited in the antechamber of the Korea–Cyprus Hall of the Istanbul Museum. The title of the corresponding article is ‘BEFORE 1974, BLOODY CHRISTMAS’. This photograph has a multiple semiotic significance. To begin with, besides the fact that the depicted are all dead, they are also women and children murdered on Christmas Day, Christianity’s most prominent festival. These are two elements which establish a horrific barbarity. Additionally, this exhibit introduces the Cyprus Section. Next to it colour photographs of the Turkish troops landing in Kyrenia are exhibited. What is implied here is that the peacekeeping operation of Turkey in Cyprus was intended to protect the defenceless Turkish Cypriots who were persecuted and murdered by the Greek Cypriots.

In the context of the research, I came across other reproductions of this photograph which is emblematic of the Turkish Cypriot national narrative. The photograph is exhibited on the one hand at the Primary School of the Muratağa, Atlilar and Sandallar villages, which has been converted to a museum dedicated to the mass murders of Turkish Cypriot women and children in August 1974 during the Turkish invasion (Martyrs’ Museum) and, on the other hand, in the house where these murders occurred, which has been converted to the Museum of Barbarism. As Paul Saint Cassia (2007) succinctly explains, in Cyprus, photography has often been used to legitimate official memories.

Figure 5.3 Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The photograph and watch of a Turkish “martyr” next to a “bloody cleaver”’, in the Cyprus-Korea section of the Istanbul Military Museum, 2010. Credit: Yiannis Toumazis

There are several examples in Cyprus where the ethical or critical role of the museum display is in question: in the Imprisoned Graves at the Central Prison of Nicosia, besides the tombs and the photographs of the EOKA fighters hanged by the British – one can also see their cells – the gallows and the stock-in-trade of the execution. There are no informational texts of any kind here, which enhances the horrific atmosphere of agony and death, evoking the last living moments of the prisoners, thus stirring up historic memory and charging it emotionally with the energy released by spaces of extermination, especially by the human absence which, once more, hints at death. Museums dedicated to the Holocaust are similarly charged, as are the crematoriums and gas chambers in concentration camps.

The Commando Museum, in the centre of Old Nicosia, is housed in a neoclassical building dating from 1936. It was inaugurated on 20 July 2010 (36th anniversary of the Turkish invasion in Cyprus) and established by the initiative of the Pan-Cypriot Association of Reserve Commandos. Equipped with latest technologies, it presents the history of Greek Cypriot commando forces. The Museum extensively utilizes large and digitally treated photographic representations. Presented in the section under the general heading ‘Chronicle of Superlative Struggles and Sacrifices’ are descriptions of battles, with special mention of the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Greek Cypriot commandos who had fallen in the period 1964–74, their uniforms and personal effects, as well as Turkish and Turkish Cypriot loot. Indeed, the photograph exhibited in this showcase and which depicts the seizure of a hill in the battle of Tylliria in 1964 originates from the archive of the War Museum in Athens. Exhibited in one of these displays and in a black oval frame is the reliquary of the identified bones of a commando who was killed in Kyrenia. Also on exhibit are remnants of his clothes and shoes, as these were uncovered during the exhumation. The following information is cited on the caption: ‘Holy Chest, Corporal Georgios Savva, hero of the 33rd Squadron of Commandos.’ Here, as in all the other cases examined in this chapter, the museum display directly implies and promotes the glorification and sanctification of death through images and relics: Saints, heroes and martyrs for freedom.

Conclusion

The museographic representations and the photographs used in the spaces examined by this chapter, aim, through various practices, to spark the viewer’s nationalist emotion. Through focusing on the traumatic memory and the aesthetization of the notion of death, these spaces activate nationalist mechanisms. Such mechanisms, not only by employing nostalgia for the past – its fictionalization – but also the victimization of one side against the other, function principally on the emotional level, which represses the critical character of the approach while at the same time lead directly to polarization and alienation.

The motto ‘ENJOY LIFE TO THE MAX’ on the t-shirt of the Turkish Cypriot caretaker of the Primary School–Museum of the mass murders should, perhaps, be read as a different view of such spaces: one where the display of life, not death should be revered.

Figure 5.4 Yiannis Toumazis, ‘The caretaker of the Martyr’s Museum’, 2010. Credit: Yiannis Toumazis

APPENDIX I

The following is an open letter published in P.S., the literary supplement of Phileleftheros newspaper, on Sunday, 9 December 2007 as part of an ongoing project with two artistic happenings that have taken place so far:

1. Dear Christaki . . . I, installation including the reprint of a supposed postcard from the Istanbul Military Museum depicting the identity card of Christou Christakis and a reprint of the open letter to Christakis. This project attempts to discuss the notion of the work of art, identity, memory and death. Exhibited in: ‘Looking forward to hearing from you’, curated by Andri Michael, Gounaropoulos Museum, Athens, 20 May–6 July 2008; ‘Paris–Chypre’, curated by Andri Michael, Nikki Diana Marquardt Gallery, Paris, 28 July–3 August 2008; ‘Looking forward to hearing from you’, curated by Andri Michael, Action Field Kodra 2008, Thessaloniki, 4–15 September 2008.

Figure 5.5 Yiannis Toumazis, ‘Open letter to Christou Christakis as published in Phileleftheros newspaper on 9 December 2007’, 2007. Credit: Yiannis

2. Cher Christaki . . . II, Vitrine en valise I, a museum installation comprising of two showcases with objects, personal or other, relating to Cyprus, the author’s life, 1974, Famagusta (the author’s hometown, now under Turkish military occupation) and Marcel Duchamp, centered around the postcard of Christakis. Exhibited in ‘Suspended Spaces #1, Depuis Famagusta’, Maison de la Culture, Amiens, France, 18 January–25 April 2010.

Note

1. Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2012) ‘Cyprus Issue – Historical and Actual Facts’: PowerPoint presentation including Ergin Konuksever’s 1974 photograph, p. 18. Available at www.mfa.gov.tr/data/DISPOLITIKA/KIBRIS/CYPRUSISSUE (ppt accessed 14 December 2012).

References

Attalides, Michael A. (2003). Cyprus, Nationalism and International Politics, Mannheim & Möhnesee: Bibliopolis.

Azoulay, Ariella. (2001). Death’s Showcase, The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The MIT Press.

Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida, Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill & Wang.

Benjamin, Walter (1999). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, London: Pimlico.

Caruth, Cathy (1996). Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore, Maryland District & London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Dalitis, Frixos (2009a). ‘Μια φωτογραφία, ένα έγκλημα’ [A photo, a crime] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 8 August 2009: 20.

———(2009b). ‘Μια φωτογραφία χιλιάδες δάκρυα’ [A photo, a thousand tears] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 11 August 2009: 3.

———(2009c). ‘Είδε την σύλληψη των πέντε’ [He saw the arrest of the five] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 12 August 2009: 3.

——— (2009d). ‘Χάρις στα πέντε παιδιά, γλυτώσαμε’ [Thanks to the five chaps, we were saved] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 13 August 2009: 3.

Guerin, Frances & Hallas, Roger (eds) (2007). The Image and the Witness, Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, London & New York: Wallflower Press.

Hirsch, Marianne (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post Memory, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press.

Kafkarides, Charalambos (2010). Τουρκία–Κύπρος 1923–1960 [Turkey–Cyprus 1923–1960] (Greek), Nicosia: Amorgos.

Koureas, Gabriel (2007). Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930, A Study of ‘Unconquerable Manhood’, Aldershot: Ashgate.

Loizos, Peter (1998). ‘How might Turkish and Greek Cypriots see each other more clearly?’, in V. Calotychos (ed.), Cyprus and Its People, Nation, Identity, and Experience in an Unimaginable Community, 1955–1997 (pp. 35–51), Boulder, Colorado & Oxford: Westview Press.

Pallikarides, Adonis (2009). ‘Κατακραυγή εναντίον της Τουρκίας’ [Outcry against Turkey] (Greek), Simerini, 11 August 2009: 6.

Papadakis, Yiannis (1994). ‘The national struggle museums of a divided city’, Ethnic & Racial Studies 17(3): 400–19.

Ricoeur, Paul (2006). Memory, History, Forgetting, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Sant Cassia, Paul (2007). Bodies of Evidence, Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Sontag, Susan (1977). On Photography, New York: Picador.

———(2003). Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Picador.

Vassiliou, Vassos (2009). ‘Διεθνής σάλος για τη φωτογραφία-ντοκουμέντο’ [International uproar regarding the photo-document] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 13 August 2009: 3.

Xydis, Stephen G. (1973). Cyprus: Reluctant Republic, The Hague: Mouton.

SIX

Developing Identity: An Autoethnography of the Turkish Cypriot Photographic Subject

Alev Adil

Developing Identities: The History of the Turkish Cypriot Photographic Subject

This chapter explores the relationship between memory, photography and identity in the context of my Turkish Cypriot cultural identity and photographic practice. Informed by Foucault (2001) and Said’s (1985) analyses of the discursive practices which emerge through public policy, political discourse, literature and art I examine how post-Ottoman Turkish Cypriot identity has been represented and created through photography. Photography has played a key part in the formation and expression of modernity, serving as an evidentiary and memorial medium for the legal infrastructure, the media and the family. My approach is auto-ethnographic, integrating an examination of photographs from my own family archive in the context of documentary, art and studio images in order to consider both the social and the personal significations which cohere around photographic representations of Cyprus and Cypriots. My family photographs and photographic practice reflect and refract the history of the negotiations that are implicit in the formation of Turkish Cypriot subjectivity, and the part that photography has played in that process of identity formation. I then begin to consider my photographic practice and explore the extent to which the photographic dérive offers an alternative research methodology for exploring personal and social identity (Debord 1956).

A studio portrait of my great-grandfather, Imam Mustafa Nuri Effendi, has pride of place in both my parents’ and my aunt’s houses. The photograph in my aunt’s house is a much larger and earlier print. The photograph shows its age and is deeply stained. The original photograph has been so heavily touched up, a black abstract perspective painted as a background, over exposed elements of the image clumsily traced over, that the image has become something between a photograph and a drawing, and has the unnatural stiffness of an icon. The portrait is undated but it is signed, as the work of N.A. Nicolaides, Famagusta. Ours was an old Famagusta family (though the family were forced to sell most of their properties in the difficult enclave years), and the fact the photograph was taken by a Greek Cypriot photographer confirms family testimony that prior to the nationalism and intercommunal division that flourished in the 1950s there was considerable intercommunal interaction. The version of the photograph in my father’s house is a much later and smaller copy of the same image. This photograph has not been touched up, other than by painting white vignette around the Imam, and this version of the image offers much more of the magic of photography, of time captured and frozen. This is a lighter image. Mustafa Nuri’s features are clearer, his rather serious and studious gaze and pose calmer and less stiff. He is holding the Qur’an in his right hand, his left hand resting gently on his lap. There are flowers behind him, which look artificial but it is hard to tell as the vignette effect obscures the studio set and evades specificity and detail, thereby emphasizing the totemic function of the image. My father estimates that my great-grandfather would have been about 40 years old when the photograph was taken, shortly before his incarceration in Kyrenia Castle by the British colonial authorities in 1916. Arrested under Emergency Laws for his involvement in fundraising activities for the Ottomans, Mustafa Nuri Effendi was imprisoned for two years during the First World War by the British authorities.

This portrait, which acts as the originary image in the family archive for me, speaks both of continuity and the radical breaks and transformation in Turkish Cypriot identity in the last century. Mustafa Nuri was a poet, as is my father, and my aspiration to become a poet was given genealogical legitimacy by this talismanic portrait and by a family narrative which made poetry my legacy. The sense of continuity and destiny that the image affords me is also marked by a cultural breach and an unimaginable cultural distance between my great-grandfather and I too. It is ironic that whilst an image of Islamic devotion is a touchstone for our familial identity the family is not religious; in fact my father is a devout atheist. My great-grandfather’s poems are written in Ottoman Turkish using the Arabic alphabet, and hence his poetry and prison notebooks are unreadable to both my father and I, both literate only in post-Kemalist Turkish which uses the Latin alphabet.

Figure 6.1 ‘Imam Mustafa Nuri Effendi’, from the Adiloglu family archive, 1915. Credit: Adiloglu family archive

Mine is a border identity. To a large extent all Turkish Cypriot identities are border identities, bisected by highly contested literal and metaphorical boundaries which work to include and exclude them from Cypriot and mainland Turkish identity, marking them as peripheral and often abject or problematic in both contexts. I am the product of a marriage between a Turkish Cypriot writer and an English painter, which marks me out as an especially peripheral Cypriot subject. Having grown up with an interstitial identity, and spending my formative years in Cyprus, Turkey and Britain has made me aware of my role as an interpreter and cultural intermediary from an early age and raised my consciousness of the violence and censorship of the insistence of competing claims of objective truth long before I was able to express or explore such ideas through academic discourse.

Mustafa Nuri’s prison notebooks, fashioned out of and written on a bricolage of pages from The War Pictorial kindly given to the Imam as writing paper by one of the prison guards, are in this respect a clearer representation of the genealogy of my identity than the portrait of my great-grandfather. British colonial rule is the ground of my identity, for the British served not only as jailors but as educators in our family (both my father and I were educated in the British system), and it is my father’s journey to England to study Law which led to my existence. My Cypriot heritage is an unreadable palimpsest written in the margins and blank spaces of colonial identity. The palimpsest of the prison notebook not only serves as a sacred object in a personal archive but also as a map of competing narratives, genealogical claims and loyalties. The pages speak of the slippage from official discourse to personal experience, and that these discourses whilst co-existing in the same conceptual space are often mutually incomprehensible. The notebooks represent the active and creative process of self-expression, the mutability of cultural identity and the negotiations and compromises inherent in the attempt at self-expression in challenging circumstances.

Sadly Mustafa Nuri’s health was never to recover from his time in prison and he died two years after his release, in his early forties. However his legacy lives on, in a portrait that performs our Muslim Ottoman origins and in the notebook which has served me as a key inspiration for my research, writing and visual work. My choice of an auto-ethnographic methodology, which interrupts official discursive practices, and of the experiential Debordian dérive (Debord 1956) as a strategy for mapping the contradictory and often mutually incomprehensible points of view, emotions and impulses that form the ground of my Cypriot subjectivity are strongly inspired by his prison notebook which, despite Mustafa Nuri’s imprisonment, make the most of the limited resources to hand to create an object that wanders across borders of art, poetry and photography. I use the word ground advisedly, for it is the militarized and border strewn territory of old Nicosia where I grew up in the enclave years (1968–74) which I return to repeatedly to take photographs of indeterminate often forbidden (I have yet to request official permission to photograph in the border zone and take pleasure in photographing signs forbidding photography) moments and objects, in contrast to the images in the family photograph album which do not venture into any forbidden zones and serve to archive sanctioned achievements along with family milestones such as births, graduations and weddings.

Figure 6.2 ‘Palimpsest’, a page from Imam Mustafa Nuri’s prison notebooks. Credit: Imam Mustafa Nuri

The physical border between north and south Nicosia is a palimpsest that traces the route of a diverted river, the Pedieos, which ran through Nicosia until the Venetians diverted its course in 1570 in anticipation of the Ottoman attack (Papadakis 2006). The border inscribes a commercial artery where the different millets of Ottoman Cyprus met and traded on shopping streets on the dried riverbed; it then scribbles a boundary, a functional divide, a barricade – a physical partition which then rules and underlines a border line, ‘one line etched by the natural course of water has governed social and political dynamics in Nicosia for centuries’ (Calame & Charlesworth 2009: 214). The series of photographic images I produced in order to explore my Turkish Cypriot identity arose out of a series of dérives (Debord 1956) around the Green Line that divides Nicosia on three occasions between 2006 and 2010. My methodology in producing the photographs, poems and prose was to inhabit a conceptual border space between the academic and the personal, to deploy a ‘layered account writing format as a postmodern reporting technique’ that enables me ‘to incorporate multiple voices including theory, subjective experience, fantasy, and more to convey aspects of a topic at hand that would be otherwise excluded from a more traditional format’ (Rambo 2005: 563).

Borders of memory, perception and interaction, as well as the hard borders of states are traversed. As Atun, Alpar and Doratli note,

    The border itself can be accepted as an entity with elements of socialization, constituting the mechanisms through which difference is accepted and instead of prolonging the conflictual aspects, a co-existence is achieved . . . like the historic walls which have now been assigned with a positive and identical meaning for both communities, the Buffer Zone, which is perceived as a ‘wall of aggression’, may become one of the biggest catalysts, as a dynamic border, for the future of the city.

(Atun, Alpar & Doratli 2009)

The images arising out of the dérive are mainly landscapes and only include portraits as part of, or as a record of some sort of social interaction.

The Epistemology of the Image

The photograph’s historical claims to being a ‘transparent’ and evidentiary medium have made it a central memory technology of the twentieth century, both in terms of official collective memory practices (the images used to illustrate and support historical and political discourse) and private memory practices (like my photo album and the products of my dérives). Deleuze characterizes the photograph as a ‘mould’ of time, which immobilizes the instant, and he highlights that the limitations of photography privileges a given point of view and in doing so creates and fixes an (institutionalized) subject. In his analysis of Bacon’s oeuvre, Deleuze contrasts at the expense of photography, the possibilities of painting and photography. ‘We are besieged by photos which are illustrations, newspapers which are narratives, cinema-images, tele-images . . . Here there is an experience which is very important for the painter: a whole category of things that one can term “clichés” already occupy the canvas’ (Deleuze 2004: 57). Deleuze is playing with language at this juncture: In French, cliché signifies both the snapshot and stereotyped thought as requiring minimal skill, time or effort, and freezing and limiting reality. Space is continuous and contiguous, exemplified by ‘any-point-whatever’ as the indivisibility of movement itself. Photography limits that perception. It privileges certain views of space and instants of time. Deleuze contrasts the photograph, a mould of space, with the cinematic shot, a mould of change. Whilst he sees the painting as providing the possibility of ‘the adventure of the line’, photography can only provide a tracing of the ‘state of things’ rather than a becoming.

The photograph presents a trace; the etymology of the word photography itself invites us to think of the medium as a way of tracing/ writing memory with light. Freud compares memory formation to the child’s toy, the mystic writing pad, where a pattern traced on a cellophane page leaves an impression on the wax slate beneath (Freud 1925). The mystic writing pad allows for the newness of the blackboard, of the slate wiped clean and leaves marks in the wax layer as unconscious memory beneath the surface of the page. ‘The appearance and disappearance of the writing’ is similar to ‘the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception’ (Freud 1925: 30). In Writing and Difference Derrida conceives of consciousness as a kind of writing, and of memory as consciousness. ‘Everything begins with reproduction. Always already: repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferment’ (Derrida 1997: 245). So, to paraphrase Derrida, writing (in this case with light) ‘supplements perception before perception even appears to itself ’ (Derrida 1997: 224). There is an always-already at work. The photograph does not simply present what it sees, it re-presents, re-members, erases and dismembers. The image reproduces what the photographer recognizes.

The Cypriot Photographic Subject

If we are to seek originary traces of Cyprus as the always-already photographic subject then it is instructive to look beyond the family archive and to examine the work of John Thomson. John Thomson was at the height of his career as a photographer, with a distinguished reputation as travel photographer, notably for his documentation of his decade of travel in the Far East between 1862 and 1872, when he visited Cyprus in the autumn of 1878, upon the British taking over the island from the Ottomans on 4 June of that year. His goal was to photograph ‘views (as impartial as they were photographic) of whatever might prove interesting on the journey’ (Thomson 1985: xxii). There is both a conceptual and a political contiguity between cartography and photography here. That Thomson’s trip is a part of the British desire to map and stock-take this new acquisition is explicit: in the same year the first modern map of Cyprus was commissioned and produced by H.H. Kitchener (Bekker-Nielsen 2004: 42).

Thomson’s photographic record of his trip to Cyprus intended to make Cyprus visible to the British colonial gaze, to give the British reader ‘a fair notion of the topography of the country and its resources’. Thomson is here to see what the Empire has acquired and to record it, his photographs will ‘supply incontestable evidence of the present condition of Cyprus, they will also afford a source of comparison in after years, when, under the influence of British rule, the place has risen from its ruins’ (Thomson 1985: xxii). Kitchener met with more resistance than Thomson, ‘on one occasion villagers shot at Kitchener’s survey team’ (Bekker-Nielsen 2004: 42). The villagers perhaps surmised correctly that the survey was to be ‘the basis of the Revenue which, as you know, is really a land tax’ (Wolseley 1992: 185). Cyprus and Cypriots signified a resource for the Empire. Thomson notes that the modern Cypriot(e) is ‘strong and nimble, affable and courteous, and has a frame whose power and development would adorn the ranks of the finest regiment’ (Thomson 1985: 40). Photography naturalized and inscribed the colonial gaze, ‘photography in partnership with the archive delineated the boundaries of what Benedict Anderson in relation to the printed word has termed an “imagined community” through which a narrative of the nation and the self were installed’ (Cross & Peck 2010: 128).

Some new subjects were more elusive than others, ‘a friendly-disposed crowd of spectators had gathered round the mosque to witness the process of photographing the exterior of the building, and while pious Moslems held themselves aloof, a large number of native Greeks volunteered to sit for their portraits’ as can be seen in his portrait Native Group, Nicosia 1878 (Thomson 1985: 16). The beautiful portraits Thomson produced are also sociologically nuanced, like his previous photographic work in China and in London. He sees and records ‘the labouring class’, peasants, beggars and the elderly. Similarly, his vision is also framed and organized like the work of photographers who were to follow in his footsteps, and of foreign artists who painted and drew the island (Severis 2000) around two mythic aesthetic regimes: the nineteenth-century European philhellenic gaze, which reads Cyprus as the terrain of Hellenic myth (Anderson 1991: 71) and the Orientalist gaze which sees a passive, perverse Other in the Ottoman or the Turk (Said 1985). Echoes of Hellenic and Christian myth are sought, and found. In the text accompanying photograph no. 37 Coming From the Well, Thomson notes that ‘the pose of the woman in the foreground was taken naturally, and yet she looks like the living model of some Greek statue which might have been found in the adjoining ruins of ancient Soli’ (Thomson 1985: 37). There are Biblical references too, ‘these wells form, as they did in Jacob’s time, pleasant meeting places where young men and maidens gather together’ (Thomson 1985: 37). Thomson records these mythic echoes in his photographs. He writes of them when they are visible, when sites/ sights contradict his mythic vision, for instance the ‘poor makeshift abodes’ in Nicosia ‘are strangely at variance with relics of the ancient magnificence of Nicosia’ (Thomson 1985: 11) as he imagines them to have been. The splendid fantasy of ‘the chivalrous bands that followed in the train of the Lusignan princes’ is contrasted with the shabby reality of ‘the motley crowd that now-a-days passes to and fro through the massive archway’ (Thomson 1985: 11). The Orientalist Other is invoked to account for the disjuncture between what was imagined and what is perceived. The Moslems are ‘languid’, ‘a military people’, they are pervaded by Oriental fatalism and melancholy, ‘one forlorn individual informed me that he had made arrangements for his funeral many years since, and that his chief wish was to mingle with the surrounding dust as speedily as possible. He was a Turk’ (Thomson 1985: 5).

These two mythic regimes of Hellenism and Orientalism, as imagined and disseminated by means of mass communication in Europe after the advent of the printing press, the novel, the newspaper and photography on the Continent, are brought to the island in 1878 and become central in the subsequent construction and re-articulation of Ottoman Christian and Moslem Cypriot subjectivities into Greek and Turkish Cypriot national identities. The composition of Greek national identity and consciousness, a direct product of the eighteenth-century European print capitalism and the integration of Greece into the expanding European economy (Friedman 1994; Carras 2004), is mapped onto the Cypriot subject, and divides them into two categories, the Oriental Cypriot, relic of the Ottoman past, and Christian Cypriot, relic of a pagan Hellenic past. Thomson’s portraits and landscapes, the spaces and the types that enunciate them, as well his accompanying notes present Cyprus as the Orientalist ruin of Hellenic and Gothic splendour. Through Thomson’s eyes the (Hellenic/Biblical/Gothic) long past is glorious, the (Ottoman) present-past is derelict and impoverished, though charming, and the future is a dream of modernization and Europeanization under the British.

In 1878 in Limassol, Foscolo and Papazian opened the first commercial photographic studio in Cyprus. John P. Foscolo, a Smyrnan Franco-Levantine, and Mateos Papazian, from Ottoman Istanbul were invited by the British to set up a studio. Sir Robert Biddulph, the British High Commissioner appointed Foscolo as official photographer to the British Army in 1879 (Kaba 2010: 13). Foscolo documented the processes and landscapes of colonial settlement in addition to running a successful studio. He developed a thriving business producing postcards of his photographs of Cyprus depicting ‘a tranquil environment, serene people, and peaceful lands all of which were icons of harmony and of course guarantee[d] of sales’ (Kaba 2007: 31). In less than a decade they were followed by local Cypriot photographers Ahmet and Ismet Sevki. The couple set up the first Cypriot photographic studio at their home in Asmaalti in Nicosia in 1897 (Kaba 2010: 15). Kadir Kaba has undertaken meticulous historical research into the couple who pioneered local studio photography in Cyprus, closely followed by the Greek Cypriot photographer Theodoulos N. Toufexis. Kaba’s research reveals that whilst the Turkish Cypriot community lagged behind their Greek Cypriot counterparts in terms of producing newspapers (Bryant 2004: 33) they swiftly embraced photography. A number of women found an arena for their creativity in photography, either as assistants to their husbands, as in the case of Ismet Sevki or as independent photographers like her contemporary, Hatice Ali San (Kaba 2010: 20). Studio photography was widely received by Greek and Turkish Cypriots as an arena for the performance of the self, their modernity mythologized by the modernity of their self-presentation and by the medium itself (Haritou 2000; Kaba 2010).

In terms of the mythic tropes at work in the Occidental photographic gaze and representation of Cypriot identity little had changed by 1928. Take the example of the work of Maynard Owen Williams in the National Geographic. Williams, a staff photographer and for many years chief foreign editor on the National Geographic from 1919–53 (Bendavid-Val et al. 2008), conveys the myth of Hellenism of the island with a beautiful young Helen, and of Orientalism with the camel in Buyuk Han and the veiled women of Paphos. As Cross and Peck remind us, ‘photography and its archives are structured by remembrance and forgetting, in which certain futures are promised and others excluded’ (Cross & Peck 2010: 128). The wars, political and social upheavals that have ensued in the region in the intervening half-century are barely implicit in Williams’ work. Williams’ photographs continue to discern the same mythic archetypes. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, the Armenian massacres, the Greco–Turkish War and the Population Exchange between Greece and the new Republic of Turkey are not visible in these images, which are organized by myth, and are presented as timeless, outside of history. Time insofar as it intrudes, does so only through the punctum of recorded light, a happenstance frozen gesture, fleeing history.

However, if we look at private images from the same period, for instance, in the published collections of Spyrou Haritou (2000) and Kadir Kaba (2010), the myth of Modernity is much more to the fore in the organization and visualization of Cypriot identity. As the work of Philippou (2010a, b), Karayianni (2006) and Papadakis (2006) demonstrates, the problem of defining Cypriot identities is not only the product of a colonial gaze but also one of local (competing) hegemonic discourses. Geopolitical ripples are invisible in Foscolo or Williams’ work in local vernacular photography. Older women in the family wear more modest, or traditional garb, and young Turkish Cypriot girls dress in European fashion. The transition from the clothes of the Ottoman era, the hijab, the fez, and the turban to a Westernized Kemalist Turkish Cypriotness can be seen across the generation gap in a single image. Even where the mother is still veiled, the young girl, usually situated as centre of attention asserts a very different femininity (Haritou 2000: 58; Kaba 2010: 115). Markers of religious difference are still visible but they are not the binarist opposition of Williams’ images taken at the same time. The young Greek and Turkish Cypriot all adhere to contemporary European fashion and are marked visually by modernity in vernacular photography. The images in the Haritou collection capture fantasies as well as aspirations and contain charming images from Greek Cypriot fancy dress parties. A Greek Cypriot couple wittily deploys Orientalism by arraying themselves in exotic fancy dress (Haritou 2000: 94). Hellenism is reinscribed through collective re-enactments, and de-naturalized through its very assertion (Haritou 2000: 100–3).

The next image I would like to discuss from my personal family archive is a small dark image. It is a snapshot rather than a studio image and captures a fleeting moment rather than a ritual moment. The photograph, taken some time in the mid-1930s, shows seven adult men and three boys standing in front of the Gothic arches of the Lale Mustafa Pasha mosque in Famagusta (formerly Saint Nicolas Cathedral). They are all Turkish Cypriot and their clothes mark out their interpretations of that identity. The storms of history ripple within the personal images in the family archive. Two of the men and the pubescent boy are wearing fezzes. Four of the men wear turbans that indicate their Islamic faith and status. The only man without a hat is my grandfather, Izzet Adiloglu, who in contrast to the rest of the group is wearing a three piece suit and tie. He stares straight at the camera, a dapper gentleman with a walking stick and performs the latest interpretation of the Turkish Cypriot no longer defined by his religion, but through national, modernist, occidental bourgeois aspirations. The camera does not capture the whole story. Izzet Bey was blinded by an accident at the age of 12; he cannot meet the camera’s gaze or see the image it produces. The walking stick is a blind man’s cane. That said, the differences and changes visible in the image were probably experienced in a much less dyadic fashion. A turbaned man smiles tenderly at the camera, his hand resting on my uncle Naim’s shoulder. This tiny image freezes a moment when Turkish Cypriot identity was in the process of transformation. Ottoman Islamic Cypriot identity was being overwritten by a secular Kemalist Turkish Cypriot identity. The curly headed toddler in the dress coat is my father. He was to inherit both these Kemalist aspirations and to build a Turkish Cypriot identity that was most profoundly shaped by British colonial education and values. Because they tend to record threshold or exemplary moments the photograph album is an archive of the performance of socially sanctioned identity, it is deeply political as well as personal.

Yet, the photograph is not an object; it is an idea (the photographic) that is used to create the object. The objects and cultural practices that arise out of the photographic notion are shaped and given meaning by the contexts and media of their production and consumption, and by the traces and associations which these networks construct though their interactions. The studio images that we see strive to capture class, not the abject poor as Thomson or Williams portray but the nascent bourgeoisie of the island. Local studio photography creates the modern subject it memorializes (Kaba 2010: 88). Modernity’s division of time is dependent on the idea of the photographic. The archive produces the events it records, just as technology becomes an extension of subjectivity (McLuhan 2001 [1967]). The archive produces the events it records, just as technology becomes an extension of subjectivity.

Figure 6.3 From the Adiloglu family archive, 1936. Credit: Adiloglu family archive

    Photography became the metaphor for an objective perception that divided the world in an instant and privileged the view. The instant reflected the transition of public and private space from the open-endedness and continual change of duration to the staccato jerks of the modern, interchangeable moments that were coloured or filled by work or leisure.

(Sutton 2009: 69)

Regardless, the Hellenized and Turcophone Cypriot routes to modernity are not identical. Hellenic modernity brings with it a reaffirmed sense of belonging and racial identity, modernity and a new sense of the traditional come hand in hand. As Karayanni points out, ‘The colonial move sees one of its multiple Cypriot manifestations in the revival of the “traditional” that seeks to exoticize the domestic space for the native inhabitant and the visitor’ (Thompson, Karayanni & Vassiliadou 2004). The Hellenic conception of modernity has both an always-already sense of catching up with modernity and of being the source of modern civilization. Turcophone Cypriot subjects of the 1920s are in a flux of identity, their Ottoman identity problematized by Greek Cypriots, the British and the new Republic of Turkey. The task of learning to become a modern Turkish subject is explicit, to the extent that night schools were organized during the Ataturk revolution to teach the new language as well as to create new national subjects (Bryant 2004: 149). Turkish Cypriots who attained literacy after Ataturk’s language revolution were exiled from their literary heritage, so in effect the written language of their parents became foreign to them. Whether they were educated in the Turkish or British education system they were not only aware of ‘learning’ a cultural identity, but also of the distance between the official cultures of educational discourse and their demotic, quotidian domestic cultures.

The boundaries between Greek and Turkish Cypriots invoked by Williams’ use of Orientalized and Hellenized images are less visible, less absolute in the studio and in private family photographs. The vast majority of Cypriots, irrespective of their ethnicity or cultural allegiances, aspired to a Westernized performance of modernity (Philippou 2010a), which is not implying that local images present a ‘truer’ picture or that the problems pertaining to the representation of Cypriot identities are solely, or mainly, a product of an external gaze (Karayianni 2006; Philippou 2010b). Most studio and domestic photographs make no effort to signify ethnicity unless a religious ritual is being recorded. Vernacular photographic practices capture local aspirations to education (posing with books as props) or wealth (the bicycle, the car) or to an Occidental bourgeois ideal of nuclear family (Haritou 2000; Kaba 2010). Whilst vernacular photography speaks of personal memory, it is still overwhelmingly bound to the social. The family album is an institutional object, the photographs within signifying some element of the institution of family, its rituals and gatherings – narratives of wealth, attainment, births and weddings. The happy moment, the correct behaviour is archived: Drama is elsewhere. There are no representations of war in my family album. In an image of an Adiloglu family gathering taken in 1963 a few months before conflict erupted, one cannot tell whether my father, his older brother and their wives are Greek or Turkish Cypriot from their fashionable clothes or the contemporary furniture. My parents are laughing as though they were sharing a joke. They are in the prime of life. A painting of the Tekke at Larnaca by Ismet Guney, who designed the flag of the newly declared, already failing Republic, hangs behind them. Mustafa and Naim are posing with their foreign brides, Turkish and English, indicating an education, cultural ties abroad and that the space of Turkish Cypriot identity is cramped.

Wars and their Aftermath

Whilst war is not shown, its aftermath can be seen in the family album in the reunions that mark the dispersal of the family to Istanbul, London, Brussels or Palo Alto. The family album is as much of a myth generator as the colonial gaze. Perhaps we must look to artistic strategies in order to deconstruct the mythic regimes inherent in the representation of Cypriot identity. Often that which is not directly shown or explicitly seen can be more powerfully discerned in its absence. The work of the contemporary artist and photographer Jim Harold seeks to circumvent the Scylla and Charybdis trap of visual (if not conceptual) Hellenized and Orientalized myth making by avoiding photographing the Cypriot subject at all and by capturing landscapes devoid of any human presence. Jim Harold, an English artist who works in the media of photography, text, installation and sculpture, made a series of visits to Cyprus between 1998 and 2005 in order to photograph the UN Buffer Zone, with the cooperation of UNFICYP. In an interview I conducted with the artist in 2006 Harold saw his work chiefly as a contemporary continuation or reflection upon the aftermath photography of James Fenton after the Crimean War. Harold is drawn by Fenton’s deserted landscapes where only additional textual information and knowledge of the historical context of the photograph enables us to understand that this has been the site of war. The site rather than sight of war, the aftermath rather than the event is what engages Harold as a photographer. He has previously documented work around the Russian/ Finnish border and is interested in recording spaces that physically mark what he perceives to be East/ West divides. But despite the evasion of visual myth Harold still characterized the border in Cyprus as one that marks out the margin between Occident and Orient.

In relation to the representation of Cyprus, Harold contrasted his strategy for representing conflict and war with that of Don McCullin whose image of a Cypriot woman’s grief on learning of her husband’s death won the 1964 World Press photo award. Jim Harold’s photography is a visual critique of the ‘high adrenaline war zone’ gaze and explores the changing role of the photographer in relation to events, rejecting McCullin’s strategy of capturing the moment and exploring the aftermath, the long-term consequences of war. His images capture the unheimlich of the Dead Zone, which is not dead at all but ‘an extraordinary nature reserve, an Arcadian idyll’ (Harold 2006); a hoopoe flies across his line of vision, a moufflon crosses his path. ‘A melancholy pervaded the land and the decaying villages had become painful pointers to the aestheticized “romantic” ruin in Europe’s romantic landscape art: that most moral reminder of human mortality’ (Harold 2006). The border is a landscape. There is a relationship between the landscape and the viewer, and the landscape as Other to the human, which both affirm and undermine the otherness of social territorialization. This is a space of absence, uninhabited, yet marked by human presence. At the abandoned airport foxes and pigeons now inhabit the departure lounge or roost in Duty Free.

    Everywhere, however, there is a palpable sense of watchfulness – not that of the Gods, but that of humans . . . the landscape bears some, if not all, of the attributes, visually at least, associated with a tranquil and natural Idyll is in the circumstances both extraordinary and disconcerting.

(Harold 2005)

Hellenic and Orientalizing myth making is not apparent in the images but, as above, woven into the text that accompanies the images, ‘we were looking towards the east – the orient – across the bluest sea you can imagine’ (Harold 2006). Harold invokes the ancient Gods in their Hellenized incarnations, a tangible but invisible haunting. The landscape images often speak of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘smooth space’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 493). In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between what they call smooth space and striated space (in a philosophical terminology derived from mathematics). This distinction coincides with the parallel distinctions they draw between the space of the war machine and the space of the state apparatus. While Deleuze and Guattari consider these two spaces to differ fundamentally in nature, they also believe that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture. What cannot be seen in Harold’s images are the organizing gazes of the military presences, the Greek National Guard, Turkish armed forces and the UN forces who understudy for the gaze of the Gods in this most surveilled of zones. This is a space governed by the gaze of the war machine, instituted by a military apparatus.

The un-photographable, the absence that Harold’s images speak of are not merely of war as death. What makes these images compelling is how they seem to inhabit the tension between movement which offers the potential of transformation and the centralized rule bound systems that have created and dominate that frozen, stilled space. The buffer zone provides a bounded stage, a mise-en-scène for Harold’s photographic exploration of borders between east and west, human and non-human, absence and presence, war and peace. Whilst the tension between the nomadic, haptic disorientating space and regulated institutional space is there, we are also made aware that the camera Harold is wielding is looking from an institutionally elevated and privileged position. The artist may see or may re-member the space that the citizen is forbidden to gaze upon.

There is a contrast between the viewpoint Harold takes from above, as a species of space (he has also documented the Russian/ Finnish border) and my walks along the border in Nicosia, as my birthplace and childhood home. The border is both a site of war and my originary space. Whereas Harold speaks of the eternal, the photographic walks I conducted between 2006 and 2011 document a changing landscape. In De Certeau’s essay Walking in the City, he contrasts the god-like voyeurism that the aerial view affords with ‘the ordinary practitioners of the city (who) live “down below”, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of the experience of the city’. I am a walker following ‘the thicks and thins of an urban text’ that I ‘write without being able to read’ (De Certeau 1984: 93). Like Mustafa Nuri’s notebook my walks inscribe an unreadable palimpsest. ‘The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognizable poem in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility’ (De Certeau 1984: 93).

Figure 6.4 Alev Adil, ‘Barricade’, 2006. Credit: Alev Adil

There is an eternal return to myth in photographic representations and re-enactments of Turkish Cypriot identity whether in the family archive or through the cartographic gaze of Thomson and Williams, the picturesque early touristic gaze of Foscolo, the artist’s gaze in Harold’s work, the war reporter’s gaze in Don McCullin’s and the vernacular gaze of local studio photography. The border is the terrain where mutually incompatible competing myths become an illegible palimpsest, a failed space of Cypriot identity. The abject nature of the space is made explicit in the sexual graffiti that adorns the landscape.

Border Identities

The task of the photographic research in this auto-ethnographic exercise is to recognize oneself as one’s own cultural intermediary. Thinking on foot through cities involves the company of ghosts and immersing yourself in one space calls to mind another. Benjamin (1927) detects both the ghost of the Russian village and the contrasting ghost of Berlin as he wonders/ wanders through Moscow. Circling back and forth around and through Abdicavus Street followed by curious little street children I, in turn, am reminded of Benjamin’s walk through Naples. I wander the streets of Havana but see Nicosia, two cities where embargoed time both slows down and speeds up. All is in ruins as if centuries have passed, prompting reminders of the past lie that little has changed. Time dilates around the Dead Zone in Nicosia generally but within the city walls one cannot escape memories of the long decade of the enclave and the last 36 years as the phantom limb of the Republic. For Helga Tawil-Souri (2010) the ghost that leads her is the ghost of divided Jerusalem and she becomes disorientated, first identifying the Border and Nicosia beyond it as an echo of Israeli occupation then seeing echoes of Palestinian East Jerusalem there. Halbwachs (1992) records in his analysis of Jerusalem that memories ‘lend themselves to enumeration, a successive review, so that thought does not remain immobile and so that, even though thought revolves around the same circle, interest is renewed by some diversity of appearances and events’ (Halbwachs 1992: 223).

The dérive is not random as Debord emphasizes. I am socially situated by those who interact with me. Those who invite or avoid my camera’s gaze do so because of who they think I am and what ends they imagine the image serves. How I feel too, is not simply individual, inside me; ‘feeling comes from without, the thickness of sociality itself ’ (Ahmed 2004: 28). The dérive explores how the city cannot be captured at a glance; the city is real and virtual, networks and perspectives, town planning (Abu-Orf 2005) and dreaming. ‘Real cities have a lot in common with Italo Calvino’s “invisible cities”’ (Latour & Hermant 2009). Like Zoebide in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1979), Nicosia is built according to the routes that dreamers remember from their dream. Calvino’s dreamers all dreamt of chasing the elusive fugitive figure of a naked woman, Zoebide, through an imaginary city. ‘The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zoebide, this ugly city, this trap’ (Calvino 1979: 37). The Nicosian trap is a ‘discourse of victimization [which] leaves little room for agency and encloses the self in the center of attacking forces’ (Demetriou 2007). For Demetriou (2007), the border is also a foundation, the Lacanian sinthome, and the boundary that marks the limits of Cypriot subjectivity. And still new Others are being created, new strangers instituted so that a dyadic notion of Cypriot identity can be maintained. Nicosia hides everything it wants to forget in plain sight, at the very centre of the old walled city.

Figure 6.5 Alev Adil, ‘Stranded’, 2010. Credit: Alev Adil

The stranger is not an outsider, one who is passing through, rather as Simmel reminds us, ‘The stranger is an element of the group itself . . . whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it.’ (Simmel 1971: 144). The stranger is

    ...fixed within a certain spatial circle – or within a group whose boundaries are analogous to spatial boundaries – but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it.

(Simmel 1971: 144)

The ground of my identity is a labyrinth of psychic and social borders: I am Ariadne, I am the maze, I am the Minotaur. The Dead Zone is the very heart of my homeland.

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THE GENDERED GAZE

Framing Gender and Other Constructions

SEVEN

En-Gendering Cypriots: From Colonial Landscapes to Postcolonial Identities

Stavros Stavrou Karayanni

‘But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.’

(Susan Sontag, On Photography 1977: 6)

Introduction

For more than a century, Cyprus’ photogenic possibilities have been explored and exploited amply and diligently first by European and subsequently by native photographers. The island’s men, women, and children, its animals and natural landscapes have posed sometimes with willingness and sometimes with reticence, awkwardness and mistrust or genteel acquiescence. Posing, they have offered moments out of the flowing narrative of their daily life to be framed in stillness and preserved in an artistic composition that bespeaks less about the object and more about the eye/ I behind the viewfinder. With an exclusive focus on Cyprus photography, this chapter examines the politics of constructing meaning in ethnic and social terms so that constructed notions of gender embodiment and sexuality will become apparent. The photographic legacy of colonial travellers who sought to represent the island and its people to the British elite served as a kind of illustrated introduction to an imperial epistemology of Cyprus and, in turn, a placement of this episteme at the service of the Metropolis; an enactment of the orientalist principle as analysed in Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1979). Subsequently, and this is the thrust of my argument, colonial images were emulated by native photographers who reproduced ‘Cyprus’ for its native people through a process that often served, warmed up and with added preservatives, the rubrics of colonial social order.

As a by-product, but also an indispensable agent of the methodology adopted by this process, is a gestural system that has fashioned, to a very large extent I argue, the modes of imagining gender, class and sexual identity in Cyprus. Auto-exoticism and a self-possessed autoethnography inform the vocabulary and tone of this gestural system. I employ the term ‘autoethnography’ inspired by Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), an influential book that introduced and established a number of ‘idiosyncratic’ terms, as coined by Pratt, whose currency in postcolonial studies has proven valuable and lasting in impact. ‘Autoethnography’ and ‘autoethnographic expression’,

    . . . refer to instances in which the colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms. If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.

(Pratt 1992: 7)

It is quite telling to examine how the ‘oriental’ character of the island was treated in the process I investigate here and how it was re-envisioned according to photographs, ‘ethnographic texts’, sanctioned by the metropolis with the purpose of serving ideological strictures that determine notions of gender possibilities and gendered embodiment in contemporary Cyprus. More specifically, the predominant questions that I find pressing in this chapter are pertinent to a pictorial semiotics of gender performance: how are certain images employed to endorse established ideological beliefs about Cypriot Greek femininity and masculinity and its class context? How are the various typologies of Cyprus images deployed in order to perpetuate imperialist master narratives about masculinity, patriarchy and gender norms? And what ‘Cyprus’ becomes manifest in those moments when images try to gesture away from colonial tropes?

In the first part of my chapter, I will discuss briefly colonial photography focusing mainly on the work of John Thomson whose Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878 has become an established reference on Cypriot photography. Then I will turn to two of the most prominent late twentieth-century Greek Cypriot photographers: Jack Iacovides and Takis Demetriades. These two artists merit attention because of their major contribution to photographic art and the canonical recognition they have received. It is interesting and necessary to point out that their published volumes are bilingual, English and Greek. It would be fairly safe to assert that in the case of these photographers the English translation functions as more than a strategic turn towards cosmopolitanism or inclusion. In other words, the English in these volumes is not there simply to facilitate access to large numbers of international readers unfamiliar with Greek. English is widely recognized and accepted as a kind of lingua franca so the English translation of the text accompanying the photographs is an indication that these images are deemed fit to represent ‘Cyprus’ to the world. And, by ‘world’ I am implying mainly the West which we imagine as the audience for the performance of these images. This is the same West where we expect our tourists to arrive from along with our self-definitions in their ideological luggage. Indeed, the images from Iacovides, Demetriades and others, seem directed by what has established itself as cultural orthodoxy to be perceived as capsules that enclose some kind of essence of the island. They are an acceptable, appropriate and a cherished representation of who and what we are. Ironically, and perhaps against their intentions, the English translation places the published work of Iacovides and Demetriades on a continuum with Thomson’s project. In my penultimate section, and in an attempt to find a way out of the impasse that I often discern in Cypriot canonical photography, I propose a reading of Nicos Philippou’s cutting edge book Coffee House Embellishments (2007) whose remarkable theme and its deployment refreshingly ignore, among other things, notions of self-declared innocence, purity, pretence, and auto-exoticism. Rather, Philippou’s collection of photographs complicates auto-ethnographic representation and invites the viewer to study Cypriot sensibilities and gender parameters that are complex and nuanced.

Peopling the Colony: John Thomson’s ‘Cyprian’ Constructs

In Cyprus of J.P. Foscolo (2003), Andreas Malecos informs us that Thomson along with Foscolo are two of the first photographers to document scenes from Cypriot life. To this day, Thomson’s 1878 images of the island remain a reference point for anyone interested in Cyprus photography; and rightly so, since they present a point of departure in the photographic representation of Cyprus as well as a rich anthropological resource. What is necessary to point out, however, is that following the years of colonial rule, many Greek Cypriot photographers exercising their art in the postcolonial Republic emulated Thomson in terms of subject choice, themes, and composition. And not only did Greek Cypriot photographers emulate the British colonial photographer; they produced photos they deemed to be a proper and accurate reflection of life and people on the island, thus embarking on a project of photography not merely as an artistic comment but as ethnographic record that, to a significant degree, determined the parameters of imagining social and gender modes within the frame of a cultural orthodoxy already determined by the tenets of colonial exoticism. In other words, the work of Cypriot photographers of the postcolonial Republic produced collections that accepted Thomson’s colonial images as mapping social, racial, ethnic and gender ideologies for the modern Cypriots. I find it intriguing, but also rather predictable in terms of postcolonial politics, that those photographers who emulated Thomson went on to become the canon of the Republic’s photographic record.

To make my point clear, I will illustrate by using a famous photo by Thomson entitled ‘A Cyprian Maid’ (Thomson 1985: 8–9). In the paragraph that Thomson provides, the (English) reader is supposed to receive verbal information that interprets, details and substantiates the text of the photograph itself. The verbal text ensures that this collection of images is also a work of ethnographic research that maps the human and natural landscape of the Empire even in its most remote corners. However, rather than clarifying or providing details, I find Thomson’s passage to be thoroughly disorienting through a description that expatiates, albeit briefly, on the Cypriot woman in a series of oxymorons and contrasting information. Apparently, the women of the island work very hard and they are uneducated. They lack grace but they are connected with classical antiquity – which one imagines as graceful. The classical reference might be an instance of what Mike Hajimichael discusses under the term ‘dislocated Philhellenism’ (Hajimichael 2006: 70), whereby British readings of Cyprus attempted to reclaim an ancient Greek past while also bringing into relief Ottoman rule as a decadent Orientalist feature. The reclamation of a Grecian connection in modern Cyprus was initially more important for the European metropolis than the peripheral Cyprus. Greek Cypriots’ presumed lineage with ancient Greece is, therefore, apparent in this woman’s features.

Furthermore, the Cypriot woman is poor but stores sizeable collections of fine linen. In his opening to the paragraph, Thomson cites Abbe Giovanni Mariti, an official of the Imperial and Tuscan Consulates. Mariti’s comment on the Cyprians’ lustrous eyes as the only beautiful feature of the women is reiterated by Thomson who then goes on to assert that the beautiful beings in Cyprus society are the children because they have not yet begun the hard work that ruins one’s looks! Mariti is an inter-textual reference that reiterates the dependence of this British photographer on Western sources for his erudition; a moment of privileging Western scholarship as reliable epistemology, capable of explaining and describing the orient for the West. (Interestingly, Giovanni Mariti is featured extensively on the ‘Cyprus Explorer’. This is another instance where Western sources are meticulously collected by Cypriots in an attempt to reconstruct the island’s historical present.)

Apart from women’s solo portraits, Thomson portrays individuals from a variety of places and even social classes. But what I find a source of fascination and relevant to my argument here, is the specific gender tropes that emerge from his images. I call them tropes because I see the images as moving beyond the confine of their frames and into the domains of the sociological and cultural as they mark turning points and shifts in the ways we imagine particular subjects in various settings. Thomson’s portraits invite anthropological interest but, as Hajimichael points out, they are the product of deliberation, meticulous planning and careful orchestration (Hajimichael 2006: 75). In ‘staging’ Cyprus, these portraits contribute to the legitimation of certain patterns of gender performance, carefully delineated in terms of image. One such trope is the old woman with the young child who might or might not be related to her, such as the photograph entitled ‘Youth and Old Age’ (2006: 9–10). This is a characteristic moment rendered important because of its oriental setting. It depicts in a somewhat plain and obvious manner the cycle of life with its simple but sophisticated mode of knowledge transmission as well as behavioural norms from the oldest generations to the youngest. I cannot imagine equivalent moments in Western iconography portrayed with the same sentimentality, or the ageing of the grandmother brought into focus and given dramatic prominence. Also interesting is the fact that women are those characteristically portrayed in this cyclical process suggesting that, generally, it is women who are the purveyors of tradition and a particular kind of wisdom, while the men, even, or especially, those who are older represent valour, prowess and determination. In fact, the portrait of the strong, vigorous, hardy but also kind peasant is a popular masculine embodiment that tropes male endurance, strength, resilience and masculine ethos. Thomson’s ‘Mountaineers’ (Thomson 1985: 39–41) are a case in point. On page 40 the man on the opposite page is described as ‘a tall, bony man of a most obligingly good-natured disposition. He, however, looked a bold, determined character, whose massive hands and muscular frame would stand him in good stead in carrying out any resolve for good or evil’ (p. 40). Finally on the point of gender inscription, the old village priest with the wrinkled face is also a popular subject. He becomes a curious embodiment of an alternative male role: that of a religious and spiritual leader. In portraying the village priest of Avgorou (a village in the Famagusta District), Thomson marks the boundaries of masculine portrayal with this somewhat queer but acceptable alterity (see plate 57). Including the priest, the colonial photographer/ethnographer completes the spectrum of masculinities that fall within the bounds of acceptability and normalcy.

Jack Iacovides and his New Aphrodites

From Thomson’s autumnal mood in the newly acquired colony we move forward in time to a hot day at one of Cyprus’ beaches. A young woman seems happy posing before the lens of Jack Iacovides, one of the island’s best-known photographers. The model’s lips are parted as if a moan of pleasure has just been uttered. The entire pose suggests a playful but gentle wantonness that breathes through the woman’s mouth. Her left arm is lifted behind her head exposing a clean armpit and a torso that seems wholly given to its availability, readiness and poise. In what appears to be an effort to support herself, her behind pushes against the statue of a female and naked figure whose breasts are almost on the same level as those of this ‘Aphrodite’, as the photographer calls her in the caption. Evidently, considerable effort is exerted at depicting this model as inviting and appetizing for the male heterosexual gaze: her belly is taught and we are expected to find her legs magnificent. Along with the appellation of ‘Aphrodite’ the photographer also assures us in his brief text that she possesses an overwhelming personality (συγκλονιστική προσωπικότητα), lest we misunderstand his intentions and mistake her for a mere sex object – which is, very much, the way she is depicted both in image and caption. Her gaze is not focused directly on the camera but seems taken by the imaginative possibilities of a hot summer day at the beach. And her skin is startlingly white despite the strong sun and despite the predominantly swarthy looks of the majority of Cypriots. In a strong sense, this model is not immediately recognizable as Cypriot to a local’s gaze even though in the words of Jack Iacovides, the photographer/ artist, the woman in this pose aptly signals our welcome to Cyprus.

Jack Iacovides made a name for himself as one of the island’s most prominent popular culture photographers. His fame seems to have increased post-1974 after the island’s violent division. Even so, the entire decade of the 1970s presented great and rare adversities because it was the period when the island was torn apart by destructive political ideologies, insurgent armies and their right-wing supporters, and a large scale Turkish military operation whose invading troops caused enormous destruction to Cyprus. This was a climate rife with hatred and extremism but also pain and suffering. Iacovides’ landscape photos re-presented the island to the Greek Cypriots, ‘capturing’, as the cliché goes, some essence that was a basic ingredient in the imaginative reconstruction of the island as a suffering place with benevolent people. Iacovides was often featured in television shows during the 70s, when TV broadcast was quite limited in terms of hours but also in terms of programming.

These circumstances increased the import of any television appearance which was considered something special and memorable. Iacovides’ photos were ubiquitous. For example, the Radioprogramma was one of the very few Cypriot magazines published in the 1970s and it listed the radio and TV programmes; a magazine that had wide circulation as it was bought by many people who owned a television set and who could spare the money (these were hard times). On many of its covers, the Radioprogramma magazine featured photos by Jack Iacovides thus making him a household name. Later in this chapter, I will return to the modes of dissemination of images that constructed archetypal images of what Cyprus is for its people. What is relevant to mark here, though, is that Radioprogramma was one of the printed media that both contributed to and, in turn, benefited from Iacovides’ canonical status.

One of his best known collections is a double volume anthology entitled Cyprus Through the Lens of Jack Iacovides (1999). Already, the title, that echoes Thomson’s Through Cyprus with the Camera, presumes that the reader will be delivered with ‘Cyprus’ itself through the pages of images, as if Cyprus can have one self. The volume poses as a comprehensive composition that will re-create the island as landscape, society, and culture. A subtitle of the book appears in the introductory pages that feature acknowledgements and credits (these pages are not numbered) and articulates verbally the artist’s intentions regarding the purpose of the images: ‘selections from a lifetime’s work reflecting the beauty, legends and traditions of my sweet, suffering country’. That Cyprus is sweet but suffering is a trope that has been warmly embraced by Cypriot ideologues because it promotes a blend of pride and misery; a kind of helpless victimhood framed by an innate but appealing picturesqueness. To enhance the effect of his compositions, Iacovides provides captions to the images. These are brief comments as if the viewer’s reading of the images needs to be directed in specific ways and led through clearly mapped pathways of perception. Sweetness and suffering have to be emphasized all the way and without equivocation.

In Cyprus Through the Lens of Jack Iacovides the choice of images and the captions are very problematic; or ‘parasitic’ to use Barthes’ term (1977a: 25). If the photographer’s intention is to offer us beauty, legends and traditions through photography then this is achieved through a clearly sexist agenda. The photograph I discuss at the opening of this section is not the only one depicting a young, desirable woman to serve as sustenance for the male appetite. There are more images where young women are depicted merely for the sake of male-defined physical beauty and their bodies appear in the photographs as available objects spread in order to delight and titillate the male gaze. We encounter one such image on page 28 where a young, dark haired woman lies on a white rock by the sea, wearing a black bathing suit. With eyes half closed she is soaking up the sun and the breeze not for her own pleasure, it seems, but to be observed in this moment of indulgence by the men who will feed on this photograph. Again, the caption relates the same clichés: ‘this pretty modern-day descendant of the Goddess Aphrodite with her dazzling beauty resembles a mermaid come ashore’ (Iacovides 1999: 28). However, the most peculiar and unexpected moment in Volume 2 takes place when the reader turns to the next page, 29, to find the image shift from a young, attractive woman lying on a smooth rock by the sea to what most Cypriots would recognize as the traditional figure of an ageing mother, aunt or grandmother, possibly in a village, wearing layers of sweaters and a head scarf. This older woman emerges from a crowd of chickens and robust roosters that are brightly coloured and frisky. She is holding a plastic bag (one of the most harmful utility items of industrial postmodernity), and she is bending her body slightly in her effort to apparently feed the chickens (although this is not at all clear in the photograph). If the images perform in terms of their composition and how the colours, objects and perspective arrange this composition, they are also performing along with each other; a contiguous narrative that weaves itself not merely in and out of the frames but also through various ideological strands. The succession of the image of a woman in a black bathing suit lying in the sun to the older woman amidst roosters and chickens suggests a bizarre contrast that renders the performance of images incoherent. And they would be completely unsound as a composition if it were not for patriarchy and male supremacy that provides the hinge that attaches both images despite their discomforting and awkward contrast. Susan Sontag posits the notion of power inherent in picture taking more cogently and polemically: ‘to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed’ (Sontag 1977: 14). Indeed, both women on Iacovides’ successive pages are connected in that they are violated and subjugated, depicted in ways that they cannot see themselves and turned into symbolic assets in gender transactions of postcolonial currency.

I revisit the troubling trope of ‘sweet and suffering’. In terms of the collection’s subtitle ‘selections from a lifetime’s work reflecting the beauty, legends and traditions of my sweet, suffering country’, I imagine it is safe to deduce that the woman sunbathing on a rock represents the ‘sweetness’ of Iacovides’ country, and, along with the woman I discuss in my opening paragraph of this section, she also represents legend and mythological lore, since she is a (sweet) Aphrodite (indeed, they both are descendants of the goddess, according to Iacovides). On the other hand, the older woman in the coop represents tradition, yet I am not certain if I should see her as an ageing Aphrodite or as completely independent of the Aphrodisian references. In terms of the suffering, one of its manifestations is to be found in the image of a robust, moustachioed man in vraka, the Cypriot men’s traditional pants. The man is seated on a donkey and he is caressing a large dog whose paws are touching the man himself. We are not told of the village where the photo is taken but we are offered the significant detail that ‘this man died far from here, uprooted by Turkish troops. His grief was worsened by the fact that he never saw his faithful dog again’ (Iacovides 1999: 18). That we are not told of the village where this man comes from renders him the archetypal male refugee who typifies a man’s pain and longing for his home. This humanity, manifest in the close attachment to animals (in this case the dog), and this range of emotions and attitudes towards life (sadness, loss, robustness, contentment) are not identifiable characteristics of the female subjects of Iacovides’ photography. The women are either direct descendants of the Cyprian goddess Aphrodite, forever young, beautiful, sexy and available to please the male heterosexual gaze, or aged and museum-like and with a confusing and confused relationship with our ancestral goddess. In this latter condition they evoke some vague nostalgia about a ‘better’ past when life was simpler and easier. The older woman in the coop is, as the caption reads, ‘a nostalgic picture from a bygone era’ (Iacovides 1999: 30). This nostalgic reference formulates an ideological comment that, paradoxically, allows the viewers of Iacovides’ photographs to settle even more comfortably in the suffering sweetness of our very desirable modernity that is berated for its detachment from what we perceive as our tradition.

Takis Demetriades: Human Monuments and the Picturesque

My second paradigm refers to the photographic contribution of Takis Demetriades, a pioneering figure in the Greek Cypriot photographic community. He was a founding member of the Cyprus Photographic Society in 1965 and, 37 years later, he also founded the Photographic Society of the Strovolos Municipality. In contrast with Iacovides, Demetriades is less commercial, fond of emotionally intricate compositions, and adept at treating black and white images artistically. His contrasts, particularly between shadows and light, are tinged by a delicate and artistic sensibility. In fact, even though Demetriades’ female subjects seem ornamental at times or deferring to the male order, he seems interested in creating an effect that goes a lot further than young women in bathing suits stretched out in inviting poses on some beach. Nevertheless, his images at times also claim to represent Cyprus as a picturesque place imbued with a pristine innocence, while his themes often cite colonial photography. In one of his characteristic moments, an aged couple looks away from the camera, focusing their gaze to the left of the photograph. The old man looks on with keen interest while the old woman (cultural orthodoxy would expect the average Cypriot to automatically assume that she is the wife) is slightly further back, touches him on the arm, embodying in her gestures the subaltern subject, certainly lacking in the agency that is expected even from an aged husband. That this image is characteristic and considered important is evident in that it is the cover of the collection The World of Cyprus 1960–1974: Through the Lens of Takis Demetriades (2006).

Demetriades’ skill to recognize and seize the moment and his talent in invoking empathy in his portrait compositions have resulted in very fine work. Regardless, he refrains from creating signs that stir optimism and is very cautious with any expression of sentimental exuberance. Although the Republic was born in 1960, Demetriades does not prioritize the creation of an artistic record of this important historical development and does not focus on moments that relate to it in some way. Other than offering the perspective of the male heterosexual dogma, the images seem to signify a mere place, a location rather than a country, as if its political entity is implied or of reduced significance. This is an intimation of Cyprus as a landscape, a part of a larger imaginary realm that defines its identity and cultural character. And, echoing the colonial photographer Thomson, Demetriades’ collection The World of Cyprus 1960–1974 offers the viewer encounters with figures that often coincide with Thomson’s. The village priest (Demetriades 2006: 31), the old grandmother clothed in black with the grandchild (pp. 33, 35, 37) this time in the specifically historical moment of 1964 fighting, the moustachioed, robust old man (pp. 67, 69, 75), as well as the older man representing the kind, sophisticated masculine maturity (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Takis Demetriades, ‘1970, Kambi: Grandfather Kyriakos! Michelangelo could have copied his face for one of the prophets he carved in stone’, from The World of Cyprus 1960–74 (p. 82). Credit: Takis Demetriades

Demetriades’ best moments are when he veers away from the colonial paradigm turning his gaze to a more introspective space that allows imaginative possibilities for the subjects photographed. For example, in one of his photographs from 1973, an old woman is brushing her sumptuous, grey hair with an almost mischievous look in her eyes and an expression of joy in what I perceive as her ageing but imposing sensuousness (Demetriades 2006: 103). Of course, the large cross on her chest is a salient religious signifier that checks the margins of any interpretation of her ageing looks and gendered performance. And, in another image from 1963 (p. 27), a young and dark haired man is seated on a stone ledge in a neighbourhood of Kyrenia. Demetriades captures another historic moment in this image; the moment when Kyrenia’s streets were electrically lit for the first time. The deepening shadows invite a certain pensiveness and a nostalgic feeling that is not merely decorative but induces a productive and critical contemplation of space, tradition, architecture and the young man’s attractive figure as part of the composition of this image (see Figure 7.2). These moments signify important departures from the orthodoxies that I critique in this chapter. However, in marking a trajectory only tangential to the established course, they remain moments that are somewhat private, telling of thoughts and feelings unrelated to the dogma that shapes postcolonial politics in Cyprus.

Figure 7.2 Takis Demetriades, ‘1963: Kyrenia Harbour: A Kyrenian takes a rest, gazing at the sea. The shadows which surround him come from the North, from “the beloved sea of Kyrenia”’, from The World of Cyprus 1960–74 (p. 26). Credit: Takis Demetriades

Cypriot Coffeehouses: Philippou’s Contrapuntal Readings

In their restricted perception and genuflection to certain aspects of colonial doctrine, Iacovides and Demetriades’ canonical works endow Nicos Philippou’s project Coffee House Embellishments (2007) with impetus and urgency. All the photographers I discuss so far have found the coffee house a photogenic and interesting feature. Demetriades photographed a ‘Coffeehouse in Agii Vavatsinias’ [sic] (2006: 39), almost one-hundred years after Thomson, and Iacovides has also turned his lens on the old men sitting outside the coffee house. In fact, these old men seated in orderly disarray outside the kafeneion (coffee-house), looking meek, innocent, and smiling kindly, have been adopted as an iconic representation of contemporary Cypriot culture. In fact, so warmly are these coffee house clients embraced that they are a very popular feature on tourist postcards, along with old women in black, and bare-breasted women lying about on hot beaches.

Philippou delves into the spectrum of the most revered masculine public space, the coffee house, with its representation of a male institution and its inherent connection to gender norms and a patriarchal social order. Yet his approach is radically different. Peter Loizos, in his preface to Coffee House Embellishments, articulates cogently Philippou’s break from established modes of referencing and representing Cyprus and its people:

    Philippou’s visual style is minimalist, understating, and even austere. It starts by a strong wish to break away from ‘picturesque’ images of coffee-shop life – the dignified elders, dressed in ‘traditional’ rustic garments, which are still displayed to convince possible tourists that Cyprus will indeed still today offer rural nostalgia, and contact with an ever-vanishing but never-quite-gone rustic simplicity.

(Philippou 2007: 11)

Indeed, by its sheer focus on a male establishment that goes mostly unmarked and unquestioned (like the literary and the photographic canon itself ), this collection of images reveals a range of objects and their arrangement that perform an unconventional and unorthodox Cyprus at the very heart of its most conventional, secular establishment. That they are called ‘embellishments’, introduces a somewhat campy echo to an exclusively macho and decidedly masculinist setting. During their evidently long history, these photographed objects must have witnessed numerous debates by the kafeneion patrons on East and West, and on Cypriot identity. Nevertheless, as they adorn the walls, furniture, countertops and corners of coffee houses, these embellishments remain firm in their shifting multitude of significations revealing a fascinating variety of different, often conflicting, narratives.

As Edward Said defines it in his book Culture and Imperialism (1994), the contrapuntal seeks to recognize and accept cultural difference, not abolish it or sublate it under the over-arching sign of the white Western middle-class male. Philippou’s work is ‘contrapuntal’ because it suggests a reading of Cyprus’ cultural scenes that assumes recognition of cultural difference while identifying it on the very stage of masculine theatre: the coffee shop. The semiotic process through which this is accomplished is intricate. Many of the images depict signs that point unequivocally to a left-wing ideology; images of Marx and Lenin on the wall. Others thematize religious symbols and icons that are immediately recognizable as belonging to a Maronite coffee shop. In other photographs, the coffee shop wall is covered with pictures of heroes from the 1955 Greek Cypriot uprising against the British colonial regime. Already, in Philippou’s work, we are not forced to stand ‘under the over-arching sign’ of the European Cypriot male imperative. A pluralist Cyprus with a variety of communities and ideological systems emerges from the embellishments. I am particularly taken by the photograph of the Maronite coffee shop since the Maronite community is rarely represented in popular ideas of Cypriotness and has never qualified for inclusion in the nationalist, post-colonial paradigm. In fact, the effort has been to obscure it as much as possible, conceal it so that its Eastern Arab derivation (reputed to have been Lebanon and Syria) would not taint and embarrass the blue and white dogma of national Cypriot heritage, endorsed by British imperial power and advanced by the local nationalists.

Figure 7.3 Nicos Philippou, from Coffee House Embellishments (p. 53). Credit: Nicos Philippou

Author’s note: The portrait of the Western European nuclear family on a picnic (top right of the photo) hangs in the coffeeshop as the archetypal ideal of modern industrial society. I remember these images in my childhood; images that were indicating to us (Cypriots) how to smile, how to dress, and how to go on picnics as a nuclear family. In Philippou’s image this portrait is interestingly defused by being placed away from the main focus (top right) of the photograph that depicts a range of disordered images of various sizes ornamenting an ordered and tidy coffeeshop counter.

Figure 7.4 Nicos Philippou, from Coffee House Embellishments (p. 84). Credit: Nicos Philippou

Author’s note: Maronite and Orthodox iconography along with a pictorial clip of Rome, in tandem with technology (manifest in the microwave showing in the bottom left); this polyvalent synthesis points to the blurring of various boundaries (including religious) producing the effect of a healthy heterogeneity and indeterminacy that often characterizes lived Cypriot culture.

Conclusion

What often motivates and sometimes even haunts me in my academic research is the compelling need to reconcile the gap between the Cyprus of my childhood and of the present. I am not referring to some exercise in nostalgia but a focus on the gap itself as a telling void. This gap is populated by emotion and sentimental attachment that filter experience and memory. Affect might be the apt theoretical term. This disparity of my childhood sense of Cyprus and the contemporary images that have superimposed themselves over my early memories is not at the service of some vague and whimsical disposition. What makes my childhood sense, as I call it, the measure of comparison for my adult experience is mainly the contemporary anxiety over the island’s identity. The Cyprus I remember is ‘oriental’ while that of the present fiercely and defensively advocates its Western affiliation and Hellenic/ European heritage. Iacovides’ contribution to modernity is to delight us, supposedly, by identifying for us the young Aphrodites and presenting us photos of cherry trees in bloom. Demetriades has offered us a kind and empathic look at aged men and old, heterosexual couples that appear meek and harmless, black-clad and sanctified by age. In both canonical photographers, the Cyprus of the present is a place, not a country, and comforts its insecurities and imbalances in politics and culture with (heterosexual) masculinity and ageing. In Roland Barthes’ terms, the signified of these photographers’ images is ‘Cyprus’ or Cyprioticity (to adapt Barthes’ Italianicity from his essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ (1997b: 34–5)). It is precisely this referent of Cyprioticity that made the images of these photographers circulate as luxurious bilingual publications and ubiquitous wall calendars published by the major banking corporations of the island. In contrast, Philippou’s Coffee House Embellishments delineates a Cyprus that has been obliterated in political discourse and emerges through his photographs with the density and complexity of Cyprus’ cultural and gender traditions. While sensitive and celebratory, Philippou’s portrayal also offers a nuanced and telling exposure, ushering a critical aesthetic that intercepts the shaping of Cyprus’ cultural legacy.

I return to the opening description of an image in my Iacovides section: the photographer poses this image as indisputable evidence of his meticulous research, sensitive self-interrogation on what makes a Cypriot woman, and the timid deployment of subtle desire. Thomson’s ugly and dark Cypriot woman who nevertheless embodies some kind of classical beauty graduates into a ‘goddess Aphrodite’, white-skinned, gorgeous according to male taste, and signals her availability by surrendering to the photographer’s lens, hungry for sun and male gaze.

In the process of conducting research for this chapter, I have encountered several unexpected and, at times, unnerving moments. Iacovides’ ‘Aphrodites’ have been such a moment. I had been familiar with his photography but did not recall these openly sexist images where the young woman’s body sees its ultimate role in providing fodder for male, heterosexual rumination. When this research was at an early stage, I presented it at a Photography conference in Limassol and one audience member, a man, sought to vindicate Iacovides with comments along the lines of ‘this is what he knew and for that time it was acceptable; Iacovides was simply responding to the needs of his time’. This is a common objection to critiquing the masters of Cypriot photography. This defence claims a certain kind of critical immunity for the artist, who is to be regarded as pure and virtuous, a product of his time and not an agent of change. In this approach, while the artist is at the mercy of his (my use of the male pronoun is intentional) social and cultural circumstances, he lacks any effective agency and, therefore, reproduces sexist images because of no other available option. Yet, these arguments wilfully underestimate the power of art to perpetuate ideological beliefs. And, paraphrasing my epigraph from Susan Sontag, a photographer’s subject choices are embedded in the ‘usually shady commerce between art and truth’. Rather than merely mirroring reality they construct reality itself while engaged in the complex transaction between art and truth (Sontag 1977: 6), and engaged in dialogue with the imperial metropolis.

Another unnerving moment was Andreas Malecos’ introduction to John P. Foscolo’s album on Cyprus. In his effort to sketch the political and cultural climate of Cyprus at the time when the Franco-Levantine photographer arrived on the island, Malecos uses a quote from Sir Garnet Wolseley, High Commissioner of Cyprus:

    ‘Wherever one goes here is the same: the face of the Island is stamped with relics of a past prosperity that has been destroyed by the Moslems. It is said that wherever the horse of the Turk treads nothing will ever grow afterwards, he can pull down and destroy but he is not only incapable of creating but he cannot even succeed in keeping alive the creations of others’ thus [sic] wrote Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first British High Commissioner and military Governor of Cyprus in his diary on 24 July 1878, practically the first day he stepped onto the island.

In the context of colonial politics, Wolseley’s comments seem aimed at justifying the colonial project by depicting the Ottomans as barbaric and uncivilized, enemies of humanity, in contrast with the civilizing mission of the genteel British Empire. Yet, it is shocking that Malecos, a Cypriot editor, adopts these statements as an established, general and accepted truth without any comment about the colonizing project that Wolseley represents. Because the British High Commissioner’s statements suit perfectly (or, perhaps, help create) the Turcophobia that has become a dominant master narrative for modern-day Greek Cypriots, they are manipulated so as to introduce a volume of photographs taken during British colonial rule, and which the republic accepts and employs for the purposes of compiling its own ethnographic and aesthetic project. Thomson dedicates his volume Through Cyprus with the Camera to Sir Garnet Wolseley, who proudly poses in a very flattering portrait on the dedication page of Thomson’s volume. Instead of reprinting the same portrait, Malecos does the next best thing: he opens with a quote by the British High Commissioner.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert and Nicos Philippou for their valuable feedback that helped me shape my thoughts while writing this chapter, and Philippou for his kind permission to reprint two of his photographs for this chapter. Also, I want to thank Takis Demetriades for allowing me to use his photographs here. His help, however, goes further. Despite his fame and recognition, Demetriades remains an extremely kind and generous artist, always ready to offer his insights and his knowledge. I am grateful not only for his copyright permission but also for his teaching. Most instructive, though, is his own passion for art; a passion that is moving and compelling.

References

Barthes, Roland (1977a). Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath, London: Fontana Press.

———(1977b). ‘The rhetoric of the image’, in R. Barthes, Image, Music, Text (pp. 32–51), trans. S. Heath, New York: Hill & Wang.

Cyprus Explorer. Available at http://www.cyprusexplorer.globalfolio.net (accessed 28 October 2011).

Demetriades, Takis (2006). The World of Cyprus 1960–1974: Through the Lens of Takis Demetriades, Nicosia: Armida.

Foscolo, John P. (2003). Cyprus of J.P. Foscolo, in A. Malecos (ed.), Nicosia: Cultural Centre Cyprus Popular Bank.

Hajimichel, Mike (2006). ‘Revisiting Thomson – the colonial eye and Cyprus’, in H. Faustmann & N. Peristianis (eds), Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and Post-colonialism, 1878–2006 (pp. 61–78), Mannheim: Bibliopolis.

Iacovides, Jack (1999). Cyprus Through the Lens of Jack Iacovides, Vol. 2, Nicosia: Jack Iacovides.

Philippou, Nicos (2007). Coffee House Embellishments, Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

Pratt, Mary L. (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge.

Said, Edward (1979). Orientalism, New York: Vintage.

———(1994). Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage.

Sontag, Susan (1977). On Photography, London: Penguin.

Thomson, John (1985). Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878, London: Trigraph.

EIGHT

En-Gendering a Landscape: The Construction, Promotion and Consumption of the Rock of Aphrodite

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

‘The beach is pebbly, and the modern Aphrodites who have posed here for photographs have paid with many a bruise.’

(Travellers’ Guides: Cyprus 1989: 166)

A landscape is not simply a physical location devoid of meaning but a socio-cultural construction shaped by past events, uses, myths and narratives (Pritchard & Morgan 2000a). When it comes to a popular landscape that has cultural significance for a country, selected events, myths and stories are often reinforced through visual representations in promotional and other material. In the case of the beach of ‘Petra tou Romiou’ (meaning the ‘Rock of the Greek’) or else ‘Rock of Aphrodite’ in Cyprus, Aphrodite’s myth, reinforced through promotional material, transforms the location into a feminine, pure, idyllic location which subsequently influences people’s attitudes, expectations and experiences.

This chapter examines the socio-cultural construction of the Rock of Aphrodite, how the landscape is en-gendered through the myth of Aphrodite, how it is represented in promotional material, as well as how its construction and promotion influence the way tourists consume the site photographically. This is achieved by examining a variety of visual and textual resources: guidebooks, TV spots, postcards, official websites, user-generated photographs and comments posted on Flickr and Picasa (two of the most popular online photo-sharing applications), in addition to photographs and videos produced as part of onsite observation.

Construction: Legends, Cameras, Moon Rocks and Other Stories

Legend has it that the ‘Rock of Aphrodite’ marks the birthplace of the ancient Greek goddess of beauty. Even though the nearby city of Paphos was associated with the worship of Aphrodite since Homer’s time, it is not clear when the specific location acquired the status of Aphrodite’s birthplace. Ancient travellers do not explicitly mention any particular place while the anthropologist J.L. Myres points to a different possible location closer to Aphrodite’s sanctuary (Karageorghis 2005). While the specific site was mentioned briefly in earlier guidebooks, the location slowly gained more popularity. Indicative of this is the fact that from 1902, the year the photographer Foscolos circulated the first illustrated postcards in Cyprus, until 1930, only two postcards among hundreds featured the Petra tou Romiou (Lazarides 1987). Nowadays the location is considered a must-see-sight and there is no guidebook or postcard stand without an image of it. Some travel writers even consider it as the ‘most famous spot in Cyprus’ (McDonald 2004: 177).

Aphrodite seems to be known as the goddess of beauty and love despite the fact that several complex versions of the goddess exist. As Papadakis (2006) points out, Aphrodite pre-existed in the form of the Eastern goddess Astarte; was also known as the goddess of war and in some cases was even presented as a hermaphrodite. Interestingly, the rise of Aphrodite as the ultimate female classical Greek cultural symbol of Cyprus is connected with socio-political events and the Greek Cypriot sense of national identity (Papadakis 2006; Paphitou 2010). Due to its association with the goddess of love and its presentation as a pure, idyllic location, the Rock of Aphrodite (and not Petra tou Romiou) was voted in 2011 as one of the top ten most romantic spots in the world by Lonely Planet’s book ‘1,000 Ultimate Sights’ (Phileleftheros 2011).

Located on the southwest coast of the Paphos region, the Rock of Aphrodite attracts thousands of tourists yearly who subsequently return home with postcards, souvenirs, and their own photographic representations of the location. The Cyprus Tourism Organization’s website (n.d.) offers the two main legends associated with the location:

    According to legend, this strikingly beautiful spot is where Aphrodite rose from the waves and the foaming sea and was then escorted on a shell at the rocks known as ‘Rock of Aphrodite’ or ‘Petra tou Romiou’ in Greek. The Greek name, Petra tou Romiou, ‘the Rock of the Greek’, is associated with the legendary Byzantine hero, Digenis Akritas, who kept the marauding Saracens at bay with his amazing strength. It is said that he heaved a huge rock into the sea, destroying the enemy’s ships.

Aphrodite’s legend feminizes the location by associating it with beauty, love and sex while Digenis’ legend exemplifies what are commonly considered to be male characteristics such as bravery and strength.

Even though the location is called ‘Petra tou Romiou’ by locals and the name appears in all the material produced by the Cyprus Tourist Organization (CTO) and the majority of tourist guides, most tourists remember the location as the ‘Rock of Aphrodite’. When searching the two most popular online photo-sharing applications Flickr and Picasa in July 2010, 1,664 photographs were displayed when searching for ‘Petra tou Romiou’ while almost double (2,400 photographs) were displayed when searching for ‘Aphrodite’s Rock’. Since more people chose to label the location ‘Aphrodite’s Rock’ than ‘Petra tou Romiou’, Aphrodite’s legend seems to be more dominant than that of Digenis, at least in tourists’ minds. This does not come as a surprise since Cyprus is heavily promoted as the island of Aphrodite, and thus her birthplace acquires a special, and marketable, cultural significance.

The narratives (where available) that accompany the images posted on Flickr and Picasa are similar to the ones offered by the CTO. As a matter of fact, these legends are often copied word by word directly from the CTO’s website. However, one more ‘legend’ emerged from the comments on these online albums, a legend that involves visitors themselves. According to one user: ‘Legend has it that should one swim around the prominent rock three times, naked and under a full moon they will find true love.’ Another, mentions that if one swims naked around the rock three times, he/ she will find ‘eternal youth’, and yet another declares ‘eternal beauty’. In any case, this last ‘unofficial’ legend is probably a most recent construction. It steers away from grand mythological narratives or extraordinary male heroes and favours Aphrodite’s associations while placing the visitor in the spotlight.

The myth wants Aphrodite to emerge from the waves just like Botticelli’s famous painting ‘Birth of Venus’. The guidebook Touring Cyprus makes the following suggestion:

    And if the learned explained that the eternal brightness of the foam by Petra tou Romiou is due to the abnormally high rate at which local marine organisms disintegrate, shall we agree to file their comments in the pigeonhole marked ‘balderdash’, and listen to the supreme parallels of myth?

(Ward 1972: 120)

Indeed most guidebooks present the site as ‘a place for relaxation, for swimming and for contemplation of the legend’ (Thurston 1972: 269) or as a ‘place of pilgrimage for romantic couples, particularly at sunset when a gentle breeze ruffles the surface of the “loud-moaning sea”’ (McDonald 2004: 177).

The guidebook Everybody’s Guide to Romantic Cyprus (Keshishian 1972) features a photograph of a young woman standing with her ankles immersed in the foamy sea. We can see her profile and her long hair fluttering in the wind. In the background, the Rock of Aphrodite is bright white from the brilliant sunlight. This comment appears next to the picture:

    For many centuries pilgrims from all the corners of the world flocked to this spot in order to take part in the festivals and worship of the Goddess Aphrodite. This descendant of Aphrodite is seen here going to the same spot. Perhaps she wanted to pay homage to the Goddess of Love.

(Keshishian 1972: 76)

This image of the lonely woman gazing at the sea, the ‘woman-in-bikini’ or the ‘contemporary Aphrodite’ will be glimpsed repeatedly in postcard representations of the Rock as well as in tourists’ own performances.

Photographing a Rock

Viewing points are usually placed at a number of attractive natural locations in order to draw attention to the photogenic and encourage stopping and photographing (Urry 2008). The location of the Rock of Aphrodite has at least two such vantage points where one can park his/ her car and photograph the Rock from above. Guidebooks also offer photographic tips to their readers. For example, according to the Visitors’ Guide: Cyprus: ‘The best place for panoramic photographs is on the final bend above the rocks coming from Limassol, those travel-ling the other way will have to look back or stop’ (Bulmer 1995: 70). Similarly, The Rough Guide to Cyprus, mentions:

    Beyond Pissouri, both motorway and old road run through desolate country-side until, just over the boundary in Pafos province, the imposing shoreline monolith of Petra tou Romiou invariably prompts drivers to slam on their brakes at a strategic viewpoint and fish for the camera.

(Dubin 2005: 157)

The Travellers’ Guides: Cyprus not only advises tourists not to miss this photo opportunity but also reflects on the poses that some tourists might adopt: ‘The beach is pebbly, and the modern Aphrodites who have posed here for photographs have paid with many a bruise’ (Parker & Parker 1989: 166). However, in order to photograph the famous Rock, one must first locate it.

Locating a ‘Moon Rock’

An object or landmark and resultant photograph can function as a marker, a sign or a metaphor for something else (Culler 1981; MacCannell 1999; Urry 2008). Sometimes, the object of admiration is indistinguishable from its relatives – in this case, the Rock of Aphrodite from other rocks in the area. According to Urry (2008) one of the ways in which a division between the ordinary and the extraordinary is established is when we view an object that does not seem particularly extraordinary but signs indicate that it is indeed an extraordinary object. As an example, MacCannell (1999) and Urry (2008) offer the idea of a moon rock in a museum. A visitor can initially mistake it for an ordinary rock, possibly collected from someone’s back yard. However, when the visitor reads the accompanying label, he discovers that the seemingly ordinary rock comes from the moon. This knowledge immediately transforms the rock into an extraordinary and desirable object even if the attraction ceases to come from the object itself but from the label that marks it out as unique (Culler 1981). The Rock of Aphrodite is very similar to a ‘moon rock’. Not because it originates from the moon, but because it functions as a marker of the ancient Greek goddess’ birthplace, a place where the goddess can be imagined rising from the foaming sea and being escorted on a shell to the Rock of Aphrodite. Even the official website of the Cyprus Tourism Organization (n.d.) encourages the visitor to use his/ her imagination:

    It is said that in certain weather conditions, the waves rise, break and form a column of water that dissolves into a pillar of foam. With imagination, this looks for just a moment like an ephemeral, evanescent human shape.

In the case of the Rock of Aphrodite, a re-imagination of Aphrodite’s birth is essential to providing a fulfilling experience. As one Flickr user revealed, ‘It really felt like Aphrodite was still there.’ The rock formation functions as a marker that is definitely stronger and more arresting than the charming seascape that can otherwise be found in other locations along the coast of Cyprus.

Indicative of this effect is a 2010 scandal involving the town of Agia Napa. As part of a boat tour, tourists had the ‘chance’ to see and photograph the Rock of Aphrodite. There was a catch though. Instead of being located in Paphos, this rock was located in Agia Napa, another area of Cyprus quite far from the Paphos region. The owner of the boat obviously took advantage of the fact that the famous Rock is simply a massive boulder in the sea and organized tours around another rock that he labelled ‘Rock of Aphrodite’. Tourists who were familiar with the actual location from promotional material or had already been to the Rock of Aphrodite complained about this and the incident was subsequently investigated by the Cyprus Tourist Organization (Phileleftheros 2010). Characteristically, shop owners at Agia Napa stated: ‘It’s a pity. All these tourists, who had no idea where the Rock of Aphrodite is located, returned to their countries with photographs which they think they took at the Rock of Aphrodite’ (Translation from Greek, Phileleftheros 2010). That said, one can wonder why this is a pity. Can a rock formation become an important marker even when it is only a pretender? As a matter of fact, even at the actual location there is confusion about which is truly the Rock of Aphrodite.

A Flickr user comments on a photograph of the location that features a few rock formations: ‘It is said that Aphrodite (A Greek goddess) was born on one of those rocks (I’m not sure which one though).’ The location has at least four distinct rock formations that someone can potentially label as the Rock of Aphrodite. Interestingly, different online photo album users succeeded in identifying all four of them as the birthplace of Aphrodite. The confusion is unavoidable since the imagery found in postcards and promotional material usually includes three or four rock formations and it does not help tourists identify which of the rocks is actually Aphrodite’s birthplace.

Nonetheless, the different legends surrounding the rock and the photographic process itself demand the identification of one unique rock. A comment under a photograph of one rock formation reads: ‘The legend has [it] that it must be swum [a]round, so is this the actual rock?’ But another user, commenting this time on a different rock, indicates that ‘The rock on the far left is where the goddess Aphrodite rose from the sea – as opposed to the rock in the middle – which is just a rock (in Cyprus).’ Observation showed that most tourists appear to be content with identifying one rock as the Rock of Aphrodite and go about photographing it angst-free. Tourists might ask someone, consult a guide book or alternatively choose one rock formation and label it the Rock of Aphrodite. Regardless of which rock they choose, the result seems to be the same. The Rock becomes a ‘moon rock’, that is to say, a marker or symbol more alluring than the actual object.

I was told by officials at the Cyprus Tourism Organization that the actual rock identified as Aphrodite’s birthplace is the largest rock in the area but no explanation was given regarding why this is the case. This rock stands half submerged in water and half on land; a rock that cannot be swum around as folklore professes, a rock that is often ignored in the tourists’ performances observed at the site.

Promotion: En-Gendering a Country, a Landscape, a Rock

Since Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty and sex, gender becomes an important factor in presenting and promoting Cyprus as a tourist destination. As researchers have already pointed out, gender is an important aspect of tourism social science and deserves further investigation (Swain 1995; Wearing & Wearing 1996; Wolff 1993). This section explores the role of gender in presenting and promoting Cyprus and the Rock of Aphrodite as a tourist destination with the help of posters, TV advertisements and postcards. Special attention is paid to the image of the ‘woman-in-bikini’ or ‘contemporary Aphrodite’, an image found in most promotional material.

En-Gendering a Country

Nation states have often been cast as women (Pritchard & Morgan 2000a) and Cyprus is no exception. The Greek word for Cyprus, ‘Kypros’, is feminine and is appropriately visualized in art, advertising, satire and the media as a woman. Depending on the context, this woman takes on a different form and role. When promoting tourism she becomes a young local beauty (even though the models are rarely local), whereas when promoting the ‘Cyprus problem’ (Turkish invasion in 1974) she takes the form of a suffering older mother or a violated young innocent girl. In the case of tourism, the Cyprus Tourism Organization (CTO) traditionally uses images of women at the beach to promote Cyprus as an attractive beach destination.

Due to the high demand for beach destinations, Cyprus was successfully promoted in the 1980s as a sun and sea destination. However, as more countries entered the competition and tourists became more demanding, Cyprus partially lost its competitive advantage since it was indistinguishable from other beach destinations. Research has shown that this resulted in a weak brand name vulnerable to fierce competition from countries like Spain and Greece (CTO 2000). In order to strengthen its brand image and create name recognition, CTO’s 2000– 2010 strategic plan for tourism capitalized on what is considered to be Cyprus’ advantage over other Sun and Sea destinations: the great diversity of tourist experiences one can have in a small geographical area (CTO 2000). Cyprus was repositioned as a ‘mosaic of nature and culture, a whole magical world concentrated in a small, warm and hospitable island in the Mediterranean, at the crossroads of three continents, between east and west that offers a multidimensional, qualitative tourist experience’ (CTO 2000: 6). This repositioning proved to be effective and is repeated in CTO’s current strategic plan (2011–2015).

Today, CTO is careful to promote Cyprus as a cultural, spiritual and culinary destination aside from being a beach resort. This strategy was named ‘Sun and Sea Plus’ (CTO 2011) since tourists have the opportunity to also indulge in other leisure activities apart from the beach experience. Furthermore, due to the fact that CTO’s target market includes people of varying ages, lifestyles and life stages, the promotional material is carefully designed to include images of young couples as well as families. All the same, despite Cyprus’ strategic repositioning, images of women enjoying the beach are included in most promotional material.

The 2009 advertising campaign ‘Love Cyprus’ featured a young woman walking in crystal-clear blue water, leaving heart-shaped ripples behind her, while in 2011 a multi-million campaign ‘Cyprus in your heart’ followed. In one poster of this new campaign, the calm line dividing the sea from the seashore continues to complete the rim of a sun hat placed on a smiling woman. The title reads: ‘CYPRUS. From inspiring moments to memorable holidays in no time’ while the text under the image continues:

    Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, emerged from the turquoise waters of Cyprus. It’s no wonder that the Mediterranean’s most spectacular beaches emerge so immaculately with the brightest sun in the world. Enjoy Cyprus, from inspiring and everlasting moments to the most exciting summer experiences and from absolute relaxation to the warmest hospitality. Follow your heart to experience the island’s breathtaking beauty and you’ll find that everything in Cyprus is a mere heartbeat away.

In both campaigns there seems to be a strong connection between the myth of Aphrodite and the image of the woman at the beach. The text of the new campaign reinforces this connection. A billboard placed at the entrance to Larnaca airport – Cyprus’ main airport – during 2010 sums up the connection between Cyprus, Aphrodite, sun, sea and beach vacation (see Figure 8.1). The billboard features a lone young woman at the Rock of Aphrodite. Her eyes are shut as she lies on the beach absorbing the sun while a little heart-shaped cloud lingers above in the blue sky. The slogan reads: ‘Can’t wait to see you again’.

Perhaps, as Marshment (1997) notes, the woman in her swimsuit functions as ‘a signifier of the beach vacation’ (p. 20) with no comparable images of men and so is most effectively used to promote beach destinations. Nevertheless, only a slim, young white woman can signify a desirable seaside holiday (Marshment 1997), a fact that invites analysis using feminist, colonial and racial discourses (Crick 1989; Pritchard & Morgan 2000b).

Figure 8.1 Cyprus Tourism Organization, ‘Can’t wait to see you again’, billboard at the entrance to Larnaca Airport, 2010. Credit: Cyprus Tourism Organization

According to CTO’s marketing plan for 2011–2015, the promotional campaign of Cyprus should ‘take into consideration the need for emotional communication in target audiences, allowing the receiver to experience the anticipation of the trip and to create those feelings which will urge him to visit Cyprus’ (translation from Greek 2011: 66). The three TV spots produced as part of the ‘Cyprus in your heart’ campaign do exactly that. Consistent with CTO’s strategic and marketing plan, they present Cyprus as a place where one can experience feelings of adventure and fun as well as relaxation and spirituality ‘in no time’. A more careful look, however, reveals that experiences seem to be gendered and images of women are still used ‘to create those feelings which will urge him to visit Cyprus’. Let us examine one of these TV commercials.

On the screen we watch three young men ( filmed from below) jumping off a cliff into the sea. As they disappear into the water the words ‘From adrenaline’ appear on the screen. The image of a lone young slim woman walking along the beach towards the water comes into view and the words ‘to euphoria in no time’ are plain to see. An attractive woman in a bikini is then seen walking away from the sea. She pulls back her wet hair and joins a shapely man. On the screen we read ‘From the worship of the sun’. The next frame is that of the main hall of the archaeological site ‘Tombs of the Kings’. This unpeopled scene is accompanied by the words ‘to sacred places in no time’. The site fades into a shot of a woman in a towel approaching a pool at a luxurious spa and we read ‘From a relaxing day’. This scene is followed by a long shot of people dancing on the beach while candles illuminate the dark night. A medium shot of a barman and a couple laughing and enjoying their drinks is then staged while the phrase ‘to an unexpected night in no time’ enters the picture. Finally, the closing sequence (which is part of all three TV spots) begins with a dolly shot of the location of the Rock of Aphrodite during a dramatic sunset followed by a close-up of a local, young, attractive woman staring seductively at the viewer. At that point the woman dissolves into the shape of a specific Aphrodite statue which is exhibited in the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia. The figure grows to become one of the elements of CTO’s logo, incorporating the Aphrodite statue next to a heart-shaped radiating sun. Both of these symbols are supported by two blue waves on an orange background. In handwritten letters under the logo the slogan ‘Cyprus in your heart’ appears and a female voiceover repeats the refrain (see Figure 8.2).

The use of male or female models for the first three scenes of this TV spot contributes towards associating adrenaline, action, adventure and boldness with masculinity, while passivity, peacefulness and sexuality is associated with femininity. Actually, this distinction seems to appear quite often in tourist brochures (Swain 1995). The advert tries to incorporate all the different experiences Cyprus can offer by including images of spas, cultural destinations and night life along with images of beaches. The two other TV spots produced as part of this campaign are quite similar with many of the same scenes repeated, but, they also feature families with children since families make up one of CTO’s main target audiences. Nevertheless, all TV spots end with the same closing sequence: the Rock of Aphrodite at sunset, the local beauty and CTO’s logo. This finale presents Cyprus as the warm island of Aphrodite: a romantic, attractive beach destination with a promise that the visitor will keep her in his/ her heart. One can claim that both logos, ‘Love Cyprus’ and ‘Cyprus in your heart’, can have sexual connotations especially when juxtaposed with images of women. This is not something unheard of. Other beach destinations such as the British Virgin Islands and locations in the Caribbean have consistently used sexual connotations to help promote tourism (Cohen 1995; Pritchard & Morgan 2000b). Furthermore, women are most often used to portray the exotic nature of a destination and young shapely women are the most typical representation of such landscapes in guidebooks, brochures and postcards (Marshment 1997; Pritchard & Morgan 2000a). In conclusion, it seems that Cyprus’ promotional material uses the concept of ‘contemporary Aphrodities’ in order to promote Cyprus as a tourist destination.

Figure 8.2 Cyprus Tourism Organization, still images from one of the TV spots produced as part of the ‘Cyprus in your heart’ advertising campaign, 2011. Credit: Cyprus Tourism Organization

En-Gendering a Landscape, a Rock

Nature is often feminized since a natural landscape is often seen as a pure, exotic, passive and static entity ready to be viewed, explored and often exploited by an active, male, white gaze (Pritchard & Morgan 2000b; Rose 1996). Not all landscapes, however, are considered feminine in gender. As Pritchard and Morgan (2000a, 2000b) have shown, an ‘exotic’ beach destination is not viewed in the same way as a northern ‘adventure’ landscape. The former is feminized while the latter gives a masculine impression since it is associated with adventure, conquering and rites of passage. The Rock of Aphrodite neatly falls under the feminized beach destination category.

In order to examine how the location of the Rock of Aphrodite is represented, postcards of the location collected in the summer of 2010 were analysed. Fifty-four postcards were found in stores in the four largest cities of Cyprus – Nicosia, Limassol, Paphos and Paralimni. Researchers who examined postcard imagery have argued that postcards influence the construction and representation of destinations to a large degree (Albers & James 1983; Garrod 2009; Mellinger 1994). Furthermore, Enloe (2001) contends that selecting postcards might seem like an innocent act but ‘has become fraught with ideological risks’ (p. 19) mainly because postcards are often carriers of stereotypes. A content analysis of the postcards shows that the Rock of Aphrodite is presented as an idyllic location, with clear blue skies and blue waters (76 per cent), or alternatively, dipped in the orange-red colours of a romantic sunset (24 per cent). The photographs are most often taken from a cliff’s edge – and more particularly from designated viewpoints – (61 per cent) and do not include any people (78 per cent). As a result, the location is presented as exotic, romantic, and discovered for the first time. None of the postcards show any indicators of development such as the tunnel that connects the site with a coffee/souvenir shop, the shower facilities or the large parking lot.

Interestingly, if we exclude the postcards that incorporate people so tiny they appear ant-like, only six postcards out of 54 include a recognizable person. It is thought-provoking because they all follow the same pattern: a young, slim, white woman is shown in profile, usually in her swimsuit, staring calmly at the blue sea. Often, images of the body in postcards refer to the erotic (Markwick 2001) and here the reference is explicit. Going back to the idea of gendered activities, the photographers of these postcards opt to compose their models in passive sitting or lying poses. Only one postcard shows a more active woman riding a motorcycle. A more careful examination shows that three out of six of these postcards are produced by the same postcard company – John Hinde Ltd in Ireland. All three of them (one is a slight variation of the other) are perfect examples of the lone ‘woman-in-bikini’ theme. Intrigued by this observation, I set out to find who this man is whose postcards define so perfectly the popular conception of the location as well as how these images came about.

John Hinde (1916–97), a failed circus entrepreneur, set up the John Hinde Studio in Ireland in 1956, one of the most successful postcard publishing companies in the world (Burt 2011). He specialized in brightly coloured images of Ireland and Britain (Smyth 2011) but also produced postcards of exotic destinations such as Africa, the Bahamas, Malaysia and Cyprus. In recent years, the original John Hinde postcards have become cult items since a number of books and exhibitions featured his work (Smyth 2011). One of the reasons for this latest popularity is the fact that the influential British photographer Martin Parr is one of Hinde’s biggest fans. He claimed that Hinde was the reason he turned from black and white to colour photography in the 1980s (Burt 2011). Parr edited a book with Hinde’s photographs (Hinde & Parr 2005) and also included many of Hinde’s postcards in his book ‘Boring Postcards’ (Parr 2004). According to the John Hinde collection’s website, the John Hinde Studio produced 124 postcards of Cyprus. There seem to be three postcards of the Rock of Aphrodite. One of them includes a dramatic sunset while the other two are the perfect examples of the woman-in-bikini mentioned above (see Figures 8.3a and 8.3b).

Hinde appointed three photographers to help him out with assignments: Edmund Nägele, Elmar Luwig and David Noble. Edmund Nägele was 21 years old when Hinde employed him in 1965 (Burt 2011). A few years later (around 1969), Nägele was sent to Cyprus to produce a series of photographs. He is the author of the photograph appearing in Figure 8.3a, which features a woman lying on the beach clad in a bright red swimsuit. According to personal e-mail correspondence with Edmund Nägele (2011), the woman was from South Africa. They met in Nicosia where she was vacationing with a female friend and they travelled together for a few days since he was in need of a ‘person/s to clutter up the foreground (to be coloured brightly by Mr Hinde later)’. At the Rock of Aphrodite the photographer asked the woman to pose in a bikini because it seemed like ‘a good addition to the historic theme of the place’. Nägele goes on to explain that, in addition to Figure 8.3a, one more image was produced:

    After several shots with the 4X5 inch Plaubel camera, I jokingly suggested that Venus probably did not emerge from the sea in a bikini and if we could try & shoot the scene a bit more realistically. To my surprise, there was no argument.

Back in Ireland, when Hinde saw the photograph of the nude woman immerging from the waves, he rejected it as inappropriate with two words: ‘Christ, Edmund.’ (Personal e-mail correspondence with Nägele 2011.).

It was customary for Hinde and his photographers to plan every detail in the photograph: the lighting, flowers, boats and especially the people. According to Nägele (2010), ‘and then, with everything in place, and “pretty girls in the foreground”, there was just one chance to get the shot’. As a matter of fact, ‘pretty girls in the foreground’ arranged like props was a favoured theme in many of John Hinde’s postcards regardless of the country or location featured.

Figure 8.3a Edmund Nägele and John Hinde Studios, ‘Birthplace of Venus, Paphos, Cyprus’, c. 1969. Credit: John Hinde Studios

Figure 8.3b Elmar Ludwig and John Hinde Studios, ‘Birthplace of Aphrodite’, c. 1974. Credit: John Hinde Studios

Elmar Ludwig is the author of the second postcard that again features a lone, young, beautiful woman at the Rock of Aphrodite (see Figure 8.3b). Ludwig, who visited Cyprus sometime around 1974 (personal e-mail correspondence with Nägele 2011) also found this theme as the most appropriate for the location. Pritchard and Morgan (2000a) view the image of the lone woman at the beach as ‘a paradise for the normalized male gaze – an attractive young woman sitting alone – by implication awaiting the arrival of the male tourist or mourning his departure’ (2000a: 128). On the other hand, perhaps female viewers are invited to imagine themselves enjoying the calm landscape just like the women in the postcards. In any case, no images of males gazing at the sea were found. It is safe then to speculate that the images of women are considered more appropriate to accompany the Rock of Aphrodite than those of men.

Apart from ‘pretty girls in the foreground’ Hinde also favoured dramatic changes in colour. Hinde and his photographers were using large format film for the production of their postcards and Hinde himself oversaw the colour-separation process by sending his transparencies to Milan, Italy with careful instructions for colour and other manipulation (Burt 2011; Nägele 2010). Nägele (2010) continues,

    they [in Milan] would eagerly remove objects of lesser desire; telephone posts and TV-aerials scored especially high. More desirable items included people and cars, thus the scribbles became frantic: ‘make jumper red’ and ‘change colour of car to yellow’. Why red or yellow? Simple, it made the finished cards stand out on the rotating wooden display stands and make our competitors tear out their hair.

This attention to colour is obvious also in Figure 8.3b. The woman wears a yellow bikini while her jumper is bright red.

Consumption: Perceptions and Performances

Tourists’ photographic performances might be adjusted according to what a location represents. Edensor (2000) mentions that ‘ideas about what sites symbolize may generate myriad forms of performance on a single stage, in which different roles, scripts, choreographies, group formations, instructions, and cues are followed’ (2000: 326). Furthermore, Shields (1991) believes that stereotypes and clichés associated with specific locations create a conglomeration of place-image which he calls ‘place-myths’. These ‘place-myths’ inevitably influence performances. I visited the location of the Rock of Aphrodite four times during the month of July in 2010 in order to observe tourists’ performances. I used a camera to produce both still photography and video documentation. Since many tourists were using their cameras, I appeared to be just another tourist acting in the same way, and thus the observation was unobtrusive. The Rock of Aphrodite indeed seems to invite specific performances and choreographies due to Aphrodite’s association with love, beauty and sex.

Roles related to the site are scripted, adopted, acted on and captured for future consumption with the help of the camera. One of the fascinating performances repeatedly observed at the location is that of a woman posing as a contemporary Aphrodite emerging from the waves (see Figure 8.4). The photographer (who is usually male) and his subject are engaged in an active and collaborative process to produce a desired, ideal photograph. The subject, aware of her body and self-image, is trying to find body positions to correspond to the beautiful and sexy image she wants to project. The photographer, aware of the desired result, is constantly moving around, changing positions and points of view besides giving instructions.

In the four video stills and photographs presented in Figure 8.4 each woman posing seems to embody the theme of the ‘woman-in-bikini’ so often found in posters, guidebooks and postcards. In these cases the woman-in-bikini stops being an unknown, abstract version of femininity and becomes a specific, named partner, friend or mother. With this physical embodiment through performance, tourist photographic representations become intertwined with personal experiences, narratives and memory.

Along with onsite observation, I examined images posted on Flickr and Picasa. A typical example of the photographs taken by tourists is Martin and Julia’s photographs of their 2009 trip to Cyprus. Of special interest is the fact that Martin, the camera holder, apart from postcard-like photographs of the location and the mandatory facing-the-camera-and-smiling snapshot, also documented a specific choreography commonly observed at the site: that of arranging ‘love stones’ (see Figure 8.5). A hill opposite the Rock of Aphrodite is dotted with white stones arranged in heart shapes whose interiors are inscribed with lovers’ initials. Tourists will arrange the stones in a heart shape, write their initials in the sand or with stones, and then photograph the result.

Figure 8.4 Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert, photographs and still images from ‘Contemporary Aphrodites’, 2010. Credit: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

Normally, tourists will take cues from other tourists about what is considered appropriate behaviour and what is worth photographing at a site. It was observed that tourists copied other tourists arranging ‘love stones’ while adding their own little touches. As we can see from Figure 8.5, Martin and Julia noticed and photographed the hill. Subsequently, Martin photographed Julia while she was arranging the stones as well as the completed heart-shaped stone arrangement containing their initials. The couple became more creative when they decided to photograph their kissing shadow projected on to the arrangement.

Figure 8.5 Martin Wipper, ‘Arranging “love stones”’, photographs posted on Flickr, 2009. Credit: Martin Wipper

Inappropriate Performances

It was observed that tourists would consciously avoid having other people in their photographic frame. In the examples in Figure 8.4, the ideal image would be of an ‘Aphrodite’ at an empty, idyllic seascape, not a crowded tourist location. More often than not, tourists would focus on their own photographic processes and ignore others. Occasionally, however, they did notice other tourists and remarked on their behaviour. A comment on an unpeopled photograph of the location posted on Flickr reads: ‘When I arrived here there was a woman of advanced years posing topless in front of the rock while her husband took photos!’ Another comment on a photograph of a woman taking a picture of a man posing on a rock reads: ‘An unusual choice for a man to be having [his photo] taken at Aphrodite’s Rock, the birthplace of Aphrodite, the God[dess] of Love’. Both comments indicate that people have specific ideas about how someone, in this instance an elderly person and a male, should be photographed in a space associated with beauty, youth and femininity. Although some performances are considered appropriate, others emulating the same actions but by different actors are simply not deemed appropriate for the specific location.

It is important to note that the observation and Flickr examples presented here are highly selective in order to support an argument. In reality tourist performances are much more diverse and include those that emphasize family links and friendships (for more on various performances, see Stylianou-Lambert 2010). Children and groups of people are also featured in tourist photographs of the location. Nevertheless, the fact that the above performances take place highlights what perceptions and associations tourists bring with them to the location and what choreographies are considered appropriate. For example, sexual posing is probably not considered appropriate on mountaintops where demonstrations of strength and victory might prevail or in front of a cathedral. Be that as it may, it is considered perfectly natural at Aphrodite’s birthplace.

Conclusions

Tourist photography is divided into two main categories: photographs produced for tourists and photographs produced by tourists (Chalfen 1979). These photographs have a public and a private orientation respectively. Public images have external meanings, are intended for mass consumption (Berger 1980), and are often associated with the creation and re-creation of stereotypical images (Albers & James 1983). In our case, we have seen posters, TV spots and postcards which use images of contemporary Aphrodites (preferably in a bikini) on sunny beaches to promote Cyprus and the Rock of Aphrodite. This stereotypical image successfully takes advantage of Aphrodite’s association with the sea, beauty, love, romance and sex. On the other hand, private images contain personal narratives and meanings and are intended for private consumption, even if they appear to have global circulation as in the case of online photographic albums. In contrast to photographs produced for tourists, vernacular tourist snapshots have attracted limited attention (Robinson & Picard 2009), especially those found online. The analysis of a set of photographs from the Rock of Aphrodite posted on Flickr and Picasa as well as onsite observation made it obvious that the landscape’s cultural meaning influences photographic performances.

Still, the fact that the socio-cultural construction of a feminized landscape can influence its photographic consumption does not mean that the experiences of different tourists are the same. Regardless of the fact that the resulting photographs seem similar in terms of composition or posing, the narratives and meanings attached to them differ. The meaning of a photograph is determined by the social and personal identities of its actors. Wearing and Wearing (1996) make a distinction between the promotion of tourist destinations as image, which ‘incorporates the fleeting, the ephemeral, the voyeuristic elements of the tourist gaze as well as suggesting a commodified pre-determined mass experience’ (p. 236) and the tourist destination as a form of social value. Social value ‘refers to the meanings attached to places by groups of people’ (Wearing & Wearing 1996: 236). The social value of a landscape representation can include, apart from the purely visual element, active interactions between myths and perceptions of place/ space not counting social interaction among other tourists (family, friends and other tourists) or with hosts (local residents, service providers). As postcards take on a life of their own which is separate from their creators’ intentions when written-on, sent, kept, collected or discarded, so tourists’ photographs assume a life of their own which is independent of promotional imagery when viewed, printed, shared, discussed and saved.

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NINE

The ‘Photographic Pietà’: A Model of Gender, Protest and Spatial-Temporal Dislocation in Modern Cyprus

Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

‘Do you mean the silence. But all photographs are silent. Don’t be facile, you might as well say all mothers

are women. Well aren’t they? Of course but that tells you nothing. Question is

how they use it – given the limits of the form.’

(Carson 1998: 66–7)

The disappearance of persons is not a phenomenon limited to modern warfare. But the photojournalistic image of a bereaved or worried person holding the photograph of a relative has only recently become common. The image has a number of natural prerequisites that put it in modern time: the invention of the camera, a global media, and a widening understanding of individual human rights. While people have posed for photographs holding other photos since the popularization of photography as a medium, it was not until well into the twentieth century – and specifically in Cyprus and Argentina – where the images of missing persons began to be held up to the photojournalist’s lens. The terms of this kind of picture making are different. In the past the photographed photo was usually a declaration of family: a sort of pictorial family tree. But when a photojournalist captures a photograph within a photo, it is part of a discourse with the larger public that poses a question and seems to demand justice. In this chapter, I work on several levels to describe, contextualize and explore this kind of image, which I call the photographic Pietà. To do so, I build on social science observations that Sant Cassia makes in his work, Bodies of Evidence (2005), where he discusses the modalities and strategies contained within photography used in the context of Cypriot intercommunal strife and the war of 1974. I create parallel discussions of distortion in audio recording and photography in order to expose and reinforce ways that repetition modifies a prototype, both perceptually and actually. This is in addition to, but importantly different from the kind of perceptual and theoretical modifications to a prototype that take place during mass printing and this distinction will be made clear in the chapter. The scope of the study broadens into an examination of how modification through repetition adds meaning to the discourse between disempowered parts of society and the mainstream, and how it seems to assist the cause of missing persons in general.

A Seminal Recording: Historical Distance and Embedded Distance

In 1969, American composer Alvin Lucier produced an acoustic work, I Am Sitting in a Room, in which he records his own voice, reading. After that, he plays the recording, and re-records it. In the first instance he says:

    I am s-sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the r-r-resonant frequencies of the room rreinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my sspeech with perhaps the exception of r-rhrh-rhhhythm is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the-ee natural rrresonant frequencies of the room, articulated by speech. I regard this activity nn-not so much a demonstration of a physical fact, but-t-t more as a way to s-s-ssmooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

(Lucier 1969)

By repeatedly recording playback, Lucier exposes the subtle shift from present to past, while exploring one of the characteristics that recorded sound and photography share: temporal dislocation, or the ways in which the past can seem to become part of the immediate present. Playback is sound from the past amplified in the present from an audio recording; just as a still photograph is an instant of light from the past, printed and viewed in the present. Lucier also explores the interactions between sound and environment in resonant frequency: as each recording is embedded in the next, some sound waves accumulate and are reinforced in the new version, while others are gradually filtered out, depending on the size and features of each space in which sound is played and recorded, the recording device, and other mechanical variables. A similar recording-to-environment relationship might be found where the image in a photographed photograph is more or less distinct, depending on how close the original is held to the camera, variations in lighting, and mechanical and other variables relating to the camera and photographic process. We can look at a specific set of distortions that develop in the context of embedded recordings, whether made by light or sound, and we can distinguish two kinds of temporal dislocation: Historical distance, which on a straightforward level presents the separation of the past from present; and another kind, embedded distance, which reveals the importance of both mechanical process and environment in time.

Historical distance is noticeable in Lucier’s work, which exposes the rapid and cumulative passing of time; and, in the time since it was made (1969) the work itself has become a landmark experiment in Western acoustic history and theory. Embedded distance is quite different, however, because it happens in the recording of a recording. The distortion that takes place makes the second recording sound different from the original – acoustically differentiating the past from the present. In most of his performances of this work Lucier’s voice is ‘destroyed’ within about fifteen minutes, or just about as many repetitions of his statement. In each step of his process the subjective qualities of his voice and the ‘irregularities in . . . speech’ (by which Lucier probably meant his stutter) are gradually erased. In symbolic terms, Lucier’s experiment shows the individual voice – the person – as it is gradually and mechanically converted into an acoustic generalization. Lucier calls this ‘a form of amplification by repetition’. He says,

    as sounds move out into space they can be observed as various-sized wavelengths, so you can see how directly the dimensions of a room relate to musical sounds. If the dimensions of a room are in a simple relationship to a sound that is played in it, that sound will be reinforced, that is, it will be amplified by the reflections from the walls. If however, the sound doesn’t ‘fit’ the room, so to speak, it will be reflected out of phase with itself, and tend to filter itself out. So by playing sounds into a room over and over again, you reinforce some of them more and more each time and eliminate others.

(Lucier 1995: 96)

Lucier describes the acoustic essence of embedded distance here: it is a distortion that happens when the recorded past is overlapped within a recording of the present – where the prototype is re-contextualized in a new original – and the prototype dissolves as a result.

Historical and Embedded Distance in Photography

Theoretically, historical distance commences from the moment any recording – whether of sound or light – is made. Photography almost always presents an appreciable sense of temporal dislocation, which is often part of photography’s charm, or its aura ‘a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’ (Benjamin 2008: 23). Roland Barthes recognizes historical distance in the Winter Garden photograph, in which his mother was a child: ‘no anamnesis could ever make me glimpse this time starting from myself ’ (Barthes 2000: 65). Baker’s Jubilee in Philadelphia (Figure 9.1) is a street photograph of bakers carrying sticks of bread in a parade that marked the end of the Spanish American War (1898). In it, historical distance is cued not only by the content of the image, but also by the tone, texture and format. Embedded distance is only seen when photographs appear in, or as the subject of other photographs, so there is no embedded distance in the Baker’s Jubilee. Embedded photographs have a set of qualities that parallel the course of embedded voice – they also dissolve – and this will be the subject of further investigation in this chapter. Outside of experimental actions, most embedded photographs are usually featured because of their historicity; in other words, the embedded images are often of people, often younger generations demonstrating their lineage to the camera by displaying a picture of a group of older relatives. It is a typical urge – to show a photograph to a photographer – typical enough to have been featured on the cover of the Sontag’s On Photography in its 1989 paperback issued by Anchor Books. As a result of this stylistic understanding, the visual qualities of embedded distance do not attract attention, and this leaves room for it to be interpreted or deployed in a political fashion, both intentionally and unintentionally.

Figure 9.1 William Harvey Doering, ‘Baker’s Jubilee Philadelphia PA USA’, 1898. Credit: Library Company of Philadelphia

If I look at the photographic portrait as an experiment parallel to Lucier’s solo voice, then one photograph should be embedded inside another until the original seems to disappear. When I photograph embedded printed pictures directly, filling the frame each time, the prototype disappears in about twenty iterations of the process. It becomes smaller, less detailed, lower contrast, and lighter: the same qualities that are associated with spatial distance in the basic rules of atmospheric and linear perspective. The process is speeded up to four iterations by contextualizing the original with the holder (see top of Figure 9.2). If a digital image is directly photographed from a computer screen, filling the frame each time, the destruction of the original takes place in about twenty steps but the visual result is very different: the distorted original image becomes frontal, it is enlarged, the colours are high-contrast and saturated (see bottom of Figure 9.2). Lucier (1995), recounts that his wife Mary conducted a visual action along with I Am Sitting in a Room, where she made a Polaroid picture of the chair Lucier sat on during the recordings, then Xeroxed it until the heightened contrast and enlargement obliterated the image and it became black. Her outcome is similar to the digital process. Both traditional print and new media scenarios of the experiment are comparable to aspects of Lucier’s transition from the personal voice into a mechanically abstract version of the original. But since the subject of this chapter usually takes place in print and not in digital media, the discussion that follows will focus on the nuances of printed photographic imagery and embedded distance.

Figure 9.2 Elizabeth Hoak-Doering, ‘Embedded portraits’, 2010. Credit: Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

Embedding heightens the perceptual effects of temporal dislocation. In addition to that, where an embedded portrait seems to diminish, to become de-personalized and distant, the individual it represents also seems to disappear. And, just as the resonant frequencies in Lucier’s work ‘smooth[es] out the irregularities’ in his voice, the distinct personality of the embedded picture dissipates as it is simultaneously framed and re-contextualized in successive generations of photography. This framing and re-contextualization sets up a power difference, in strength of pictorial quality and agency. Within what I call the photographic Pietà, the image of the ‘holder’ (usually a woman) is typically larger, and in higher contrast and better focus than the image held (usually a man). Importantly, the holder chooses to bring a portrait into a space for a reason. These power differences sit inside the format of the photograph, where the feminine holder of the embedded image is visually more powerful than the masculine image of the person held, and re-photographed. But having said that, there are also power dynamics that are external to the photograph, wherein the ‘holder’ and ‘held’ are ‘beheld’ by the media and then by the media’s audience.

The Photographic Pietà in Cyprus

    Is it possible that one knows nothing of young girls, who nevertheless live? Is it possible that one says ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’, not guessing . . . that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?

        Yes, it is possible.

(Rilke 1958: 29)

The Pietà is a motif where a mother holds the dead body of her son. The paradigmatic use of this motif is in paintings, and particularly sculptures of the Lamentation of Christ, where Mary holds the dead body of Jesus. Michelangelo’s (1499) Pietà is the quintessential example of the motif, but the Pietà is not just religious. After the World Wars artists also used this motif in a secular (although referential) way to symbolize a nation or a community in mourning, especially in towns and cemeteries on the Western Front. These include the Monument of Strasbourg, dedicated to inhabitants who died in both World Wars and a high relief memorial in La Targette (France) where a soldier holds another soldier; both memorials are unattributed (see Ysebaert 2012). In another form an angel, usually the Archangel Michael, replaces the mother figure. An unforgettable example of this version is Walter Hancock’s Angel of the Resurrection (1950), a memorial and cenotaph to the Pennsylvania Railroad workers who fell during the Second World War, 30th Street Station Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

The photographic Pietà is a contemporary version of this motif where a woman is photographed holding a photograph of her son or husband. Since this kind of embedment ordinarily occurs when a younger generation is demonstrating an older generation of family, the photographic Pietà twists around the usual time-order of the holder to the embedded image. In addition to that, as Sant Cassia notes (2005), sometimes this dislocation is complicated further by women who have aged in relation to the photograph she holds: a photo of her fiancé could look like her son. The present discussion is limited to the majority of such pictures in which women hold images of men, which Sant Cassia (2005) typifies as ‘Penelopes and Vigils’. It leaves for further exploration the many variations that include children holding images of adults and vice-versa, men holding images, and women holding pictures of women (Sant Cassia 1998–9; Sant Cassia 2005; Andreas Manolis photo archive).

The photographic Pietà functions in visual culture differently from the classic Pietà. In addition to its religious modalities, the classic form mobilizes notions of national sacrifice. As such, the classic Pietà is usually mounted on behalf of a place or organization, and any individual commemoration is often found on a cenotaph that accompanies the work. By contrast, the photographic Pietà is individually specific: a particular woman holds a portrait (or portraits) of a particular person (or people), usually but not always men. Occasionally the women are named and their stories are known, but their faces are always uniquely recognizable and intentionally exposed. The iconic image of a mother holding a picture of a relative appears in media coverage of, and after modern warfare in societies that have local and international media coverage. Therefore, it is essential to understand the Cypriot vigils in the context of other manifestations of the photographic Pietà, which vary from dissent to patriotism, and in terms of the ways photographic or graphic images substitute for, or recognize the existence of missing individuals. Sometimes the photographic Pietà reinforces official government narratives as in Cyprus and the United States of America, but it is equally instrumental where official government narratives are denounced as in Argentina (Sant Cassia 2005) and Asia (Mugiyanto et al. 2008). In the 1970s three main groups emerged that began using photographs of their missing relatives to communicate through the media: Greek Cypriot Relatives of Missing Persons, the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo (Argentina) and Prisoners of War/ Missing in Action (POW/MIA) mothers (USA). Since then, the use of a personal photograph within a media-publicized vigil can now be found in other parts of the world: Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, East Timor, Indonesia and Kashmir to name but a few (Mugiyanto et al. 2008). The common factor among all these groups is the use of the personal photograph to create political awareness of missing persons, and to communicate this to a larger public. But the photographic Pietà functions differently within each group, possibly revealing perceptual differences among these cultures with regard to photography.

Vigils in Argentina by the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo explicitly aim to expose the government’s silence about the disparecidos – civilian victims of forced disappearance during the Dirty War of 1976–83. There is no agreed-upon number of disparecidos from the Dirty War, but some estimates range between 9,000 and 30,000. Mothers of the disparecidos gather on Thursday afternoons at the political hub of Buenos Aires, the Plaza del Mayo, in front of the presidential palace, wearing white scarves and carrying or wearing photographs of their missing relatives. Their scarves are embroidered with the names of missing persons, symbolizing baby’s blankets, and these notorious headscarves became the symbol for the group. They have received international accolades for their activism for human rights and inspired songwriters like Sting and U2 among other artists and performers. Given the constraints of this chapter, the profound works and experiences of the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo can only be summarized. However, these large-scale actions are acknowledged and referenced as vital points of contrast to, and similarity with Cypriot actions on behalf of persons missing due to political upheaval (also Sant Cassia 2005: 267, 273).

In the USA, POW/MIA Mothers are among many well-organized American support groups for relatives of American missing servicemen. More than 83,000 military personnel are currently listed as POW/ MIA from modern American wars; this number excludes current and recent military engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere (United States Department of Defence Prisoner of War/ Missing Personnel Office). As opposed to the Mothers of the Plaza del Mayo, these women maintain personal vigilance that demonstrates their patriotism: they do not protest or stage vigils, instead they perform in a way that reminds civilians about the sacrifices that military families make. The POW/ MIA emblem is a white image on a black background: a silhouette of a serviceman and a watchtower, a line of barbed wire and the slogan, ‘You Are Not Forgotten’. This emblem is commonly on a flag, which itself becomes a symbol; for example, an automobile sticker of the POW/ MIA flag. Interestingly, but beyond the scope of this chapter, the graphic silhouette was inspired by an individual serviceman.

When the mothers of the POW/ MIA participate in public acts of commemoration they tend to use the symbol rather than photographs of their individual missing relative(s), thus the photographic Pietà here is partially transformed. The POW/ MIA mothers approach the classical interpretation of the Pietà: as a patriotic mother and a model of sacrifice for the nation. Yet, these are named individual mothers – not idealizations – who appear with a symbol of the cause, rather than with a personal photo. The POW/ MIA mothers present themselves to be compliant with sacrifices and to honour military life, trusting their government and the aims of the military, which project slogans such as ‘Keep the promise’, ‘Fulfil their Trust’ and ‘No one left behind’ (US Department of Defence Prisoner of War/ Missing Personnel Office). The difference in the way these mothers use symbols rather than photographs of their missing may be tied to cultural-perceptual differences about photography, as will be shown later. Importantly, the American missing are servicemen and women: They were lost while on military duty, and this is different from the Argentine missing who are civilians. Cypriot missing are both civilian and military.

In this context the Cyprus photographic Pietà can now be looked at comprehensively. Many of the images used in researching this chapter come from Andreas Manolis, who has worked as a press photographer in Cyprus since 1975. Since, then, Manolis has been following demonstrations, vigils and funerals on both sides of the UN Buffer Zone, among Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. This chapter focuses on a phenomenon that is common in post-war Greek Cypriot, and not Turkish Cypriot media. The subjects of the photographs here discussed are all Greek Cypriot; this is emphatically not to imply that there are no Turkish Cypriot missing from events before and during the war in 1974 and the intercommunal fighting that intensified around 1963 (see Sant Cassia 2005: 149). Officially, 494 Turkish Cypriots disappeared during the period 1963–74 (CMP 2012). Nor is it to imply that there is a cultural difference in the Turkish Cypriot affective response to missing family members. Instead, the media coverage of Turkish Cypriot missing reflects an official narrative about the Turkish army invasion of 1974, and it demonstrates that Turkish Cypriots were expected to remember – and in a different way from Greek Cypriots – to forget aspects of their recent history (Papadakis 1993). The official Turkish Cypriot stance on their missing persons is that they are martyrs who died for the sake of establishing a separate Turkish Cypriot state (Sant Cassia 2005). Greek Cypriots now claim 1,464 military and civilians who disappeared during the invasion in 1974 (CMP 2012). This number becomes smaller as mortal remains are returned through the efforts of the bi-communal Committee for Missing Persons (CMP), beginning in July of 2007. The 31 January 2012 report states that 286 individuals have been identified through DNA testing to date: 253 Greek Cypriots and 61 Turkish Cypriots (CMP 2012). In contrast with the official Turkish Cypriot framework of martyrdom, the official Greek Cypriot narrative is that these persons are missing and possibly living. As will be discussed later, aspirations for the return of Greek Cypriot missing persons is sometimes officially conflated with aspirations for the return of the north part of the island and a future as a re-unified Cyprus (Sant Cassia 1998–9, 2005).

The photographic Pietà is linked with a group of Greek Cypriots who self identify as Cypriot Relatives of Missing Persons. While not all of these people take part in public demonstrations and vigils, there are roughly two groups who do; and they differ in the intensity and in the ways that they stage their vigils. The general group is known as the Pancyprian Committee for the Return of Missing Relatives and Undeclared/ Missing Prisoners of War (Pankypria Epitropi Syngenon Adiliton kai Adhiloton Aichmaloton), and it is a mixed group of families and relatives – both men and women – of the Greek Cypriot missing, who are usually from working and middle class families (Sant Cassia 1998–9: 274). Of these, there is a contingent known colloquially as the Mothers of Cyprus – Oi Manadhes tis Kyprou – a smaller group of women who are known for their stubborn petitioning, regularly except on religious holidays, at the UN Buffer Zone checkpoints and other strategic places. The Pancyprian Committee for the Return of Missing Relatives and Undeclared/Missing Prisoners of War uses as its emblem the image of a woman holding a photograph, revealing a close link between the photographic Pietà and the driving force behind the cause. This symbol functions as a logo, but it is not manifest in such a diverse and profound way as the symbol of the POW/MIA.

Sant Cassia (1998–9) relates how the post-invasion government symbolically conflated the loss of territory in Northern Cyprus with the cause of Greek Cypriot missing persons. Thus, people participating in vigils also play a part – perhaps unintentionally – in an official narrative of waiting for return of property. At the same time, Sant Cassia recognizes that there were few other routes for marginalized people to express their concerns to the political elite other than by public demonstration. I would emphasize that, by saying that the symbolic image was co-opted, and that the Cypriot relatives of the missing may or may not trust that the government is acting in their interests; they may or may not be concerned with the reunification of the island and return of land under military control.

In July of 2007 the bi-communal Committee on Missing People in Cyprus began exhumations, DNA identification, and return of mortal remains, at which point the official discourse that symbolically linked missing property with missing people had to change. As with the return of mortal remains, so the government began to talk about compromises in the return of territory. This was during the time of the direct talks between the leaders of the two communities (beginning in 2002) and the Annan Plan referendum (2004). Along with this change in political climate vigils became less frequent, mortal remains are gradually being returned to families and absolute faith in the government’s official narrative about the so-called Cyprus Problem (unresolved land and human rights disputes from 1974, and the continued presence of United Nations Peacekeepers) seems to have softened. Demonstrations by the families of Cypriot Missing never reached the point of large-scale protests that crossed social and economic strata, nor did they directly confront the government’s opacity on the plight of the missing as directly as the mothers of the Argentinian missing do. Instead, these vigils balanced patriotism with criticism by posing existential, subjective questions to institutions: to the Cyprus government, foreign powers and the United Nations. Although strident, their demands were posed within the frameworks of government and civil society at the time.

The photographic Pietà reflects a shift in focus from group to individual iconography that may relate to people understanding their entitlement to make claims according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which was crafted in the aftermath of the Second World War. As such the photographic Pietà is an indicator of a contemporary world-view that came about as a result of the Holocaust. It also reflects changes in the camera: Sontag (2003) believes that before about 1940 cameras were not portable enough to take pictures of individuals in varied environments, and so the photographic Pietà evolved along with photojournalism: not only in terms of what can be photographed, but also in terms of a new critical relationship between subjects, their agency and role in picture-making. The photographic Pietà is a performative motif that is most effective when the object of a demonstration, whether large or small.

The Embedded Image: Perception and Religious Overtone

In all cases of the photographic Pietà, the embedded photo is not held as a memento mori, an image of the dead, but instead it is a portrait of a missing person whose fate is unknown. Sant Cassia describes this state of unknowing as ‘having an existential ambiguity’ which is different from the classic ‘liminality’ that anthropologists use to describe the transitory state between life and death (Sant Cassia 1998–9). This is a radical departure from the classic Pietà, and suggests one reason why the motif is less frequent in the Turkish Cypriot community where the missing are understood to be deceased. And, as previously explored, the missing person’s disappearance, or half-existence, is emphasized by both embedded and historical distance. The motif of the photographic Pietà poses a question (‘where is he?’), it demands justice (‘bring him back’), it demands answers (‘how?’ ‘why?’), and it stands in contrast with the anonymity of numerical statistics. The women who carry the portraits vitally participate in Barthes’ assertion that a photograph actually contains and projects luminous elements reflected from the subject of the image: it ‘belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscape’ (Barthes 2000: 6). For the woman holding the picture, the photograph is a living memory, which supports Barthes’ thesis that portrait photographs are literally animated by a presence founded on the activity of light in photography. Anyone who sees the portrait of a missing person must bear its sometimes-overwhelming ghostly presence: ‘the Spectrum of the Photograph . . . retains . . . a relation to “spectacle” and adds to [the photograph] that rather terrible thing which there is in every photograph: the return of the dead’ (Barthes 2000: 9).

What is the subject of the photographic Pietà? In the classic Pietà the subject is the mother’s mourning, while the focal point is the dead body. In the photographic Pietà this is complicated because, while the held picture is the photograph’s raison d’être, its strength as a focal point is diminished because it is embedded: historically, physically and visually distant (see Figure 9.3). However important the picture is to the woman holding it, or wearing it, the viewer is not particularly able to gather much information about the individual in the portrait, nor would such details be likely to determine a character without memories that may be attached to them.

Figure 9.3 Andreas Manolis, ‘Observation post by police barracks, embedded images from a demonstration at Ledra Palace roadblock’, late 1970s. Credit: Andreas Manolis

Embedded photos of missing men are often but not always black and white: an official military or passport photo or wedding picture, or a school photo. Collars and close shaves, a modest smile – these are usual characteristics of the embedded pictures, which usually conform to practical and professional standards of formal photography. But these are personal photographs; they come from people’s homes, their albums. Sometimes these are the only photos that remain after the upheaval of a war, but given a choice, a formal picture seems to have been more desirable even though less indicative of the man as a particular character. Formalities add to the effects of embedded distance; adding to the erasure of the individual, even though ‘the very muteness of what is, hypothetically, comprehensible in photographs is what constitutes their attraction and provocativeness’ (Sontag 1989: 24). These icons of men are provocative in the way that they stand in for a particular person; the way they seem to emanate, or perhaps encapsulate his ghost. Even though we as viewers can glean little about the individual, we are probably not expected to. By implication, we are expected to respond to the idea of losing someone whose portrait we would so tenderly hold ourselves.

The three main examples given here of the photographic Pietà – in Cyprus, Argentina, and the USA – are all Christian societies, although respectively Greek Orthodox, Catholic and predominantly Protestant (Pew Forum report 2007). It is interesting to look at the religious faiths of these societies and reflect on the deployment of the photographic Pietà in relation to variations in Christian beliefs about iconography. Greek Orthodox people, for example, often compare the practice of kissing icons (veneration) to kissing a picture of a loved person.

    All [such] honor was directed to the one portrayed in the icon, and not to the painted materials themselves. In making this distinction . . . they were recognizing a common human phenomenon. Whether . . . in the way one responds to the picture of the emperor, or in the way a young man might treat the picture of his girlfriend back home, people distinguish between the picture itself and the one portrayed, and yet they do not hesitate to treat those pictures with special honor, as having a unique connection to the ones pictured in them.

(Payton 2007: 189–90)

The Catholic practice of veneration changed slightly with regard to religious art and objects after Vatican II:

    The net result of . . . evolutionary developments was that the church building housed a whole series of foci for people who visited the church outside the time of the liturgy or even during the liturgy. It was not uncommon in the past to see people at side altars or burning candles before an image even during mass. It is precisely because churches lost a certain sense of focus that the 2nd Vatican Council foresaw a return to the fundamental needs of the church.

(Cunningham 2009: 97)

Nevertheless, accepted understandings about the Incarnation make Catholic and Orthodox churches more similar than different in the ways believers interact with religious art and material, including the sacramental bread and wine. This is particularly so when they stand in comparison to Protestants. For Orthodox and Catholics, the bread and wine are believed to become, through consecration, actual elements of the body of Christ. Veneration of icons and religious artefacts reflects the idea that God can be manifest in human flesh (Jesus), and by extension God’s divinity can be manifest in other consecrated materials such as bread, wine and holy objects. This departs from the position of the iconoclasts (and thus all Protestants) who believe that the sacrament is only symbolic, and likewise the position of post-Vatican II Catholics who were counselled to focus more on liturgy than on veneration.

Differences in the way the photographic Pietà appears in Orthodox/ Catholic populations compared to predominantly Protestant populations may speak to minor differences in the accepted understanding of a photographic portrait. That is, that Orthodox and Catholic people may read into a photograph something closer to Barthes’ proposition that photographs hold the light, and life of the deceased (Barthes 2000). By contrast, Protestants and some post-Vatican II Catholics are much more likely to show restraint toward religious imagery, and caution in expressing such an embodied understanding of a photograph; suggesting, perhaps, another reason for the POW/ MIA mothers to be photographed with the symbol of the cause rather than a photograph of their relative(s).

Sontag, in On Photography, speaks to Barthes’ subject-referential notion of the photograph (Sontag 1989). She gives a critique of the shifting frameworks of meanings that contextualize a picture and points out that veracity in photography is contingent – not just on the processual play of light – but on many things: The cameraman’s truthfulness, the subject’s truthfulness, the original context and purpose, the context of the photograph in the present, and the viewer’s experiences and inclinations. Reading the photographic Pietà in line with Sontag’s concerns, the subject and focal point are a woman, and what she is doing with that portrait (see Figure 9.4). If the context of the embedded image is the subject of this journalistic icon, then it is a clear inversion of the power structure in societies that are traditionally dominated by men and where women struggle for equal rights.

Figure 9.4 Andreas Manolis, ‘Observation post by police barracks, Ledra Palace roadblock’, late 1970s. Credit: Andreas Manolis

The Media Frames the Pietà

The photographic Pietà is demonstrative: Photojournalists capture and format the image, and the media amplifies it, along with the cause. This is probably not intentional, according to the photojournalist Andreas Manolis: ‘[the women] are not looking at me. They are looking through me’ (personal conversation, 30 September 2010). And, as opposed to photographs that become embedded, which are personal possessions, the photographic Pietà is not personal. If, as Sontag says, ‘[t]o photograph is to confer importance’ (1989: 28), then being photographed holding a photo confers importance to the embedded photo, but even more to the demonstration, parade, or protest which features it. The embedded picture of the missing person describes a temporal, physical and metaphysical distance from the present demonstration, which also features banners, posters, signs and stickers that explain and solidify the cause. In these performances a woman hopes that her face will tell a story with human appeal, so that the embedded image may add authenticity to the story.

As embedded distance effects a portrait’s disappearance, so the woman holding the portrait participates in a theoretical enactment of her relative’s disappearance. She, along with the embedded image, provokes a tension about the im/ possibility of upholding the traditional feminine gender role of mourning over a body (Sant Cassia 1998–9: 272). At the same time, the photographic Pietà suggests a truncated grieving process for missing persons that is uplifted by and, in a way, created by the media. The exhumations that have taken place since 2007 result in a transformation of the photographic Pietà, where burials change the value of the portrait photograph: the iconic embodiment of life seems to fade as existential ambiguity diminishes with the gradual return of mortal remains.

Reproduced: External versus Internal Repetition

If there is cooperation between the media and the photographic Pietà, then Walter Benjamin’s notion about the authenticity of a reproduced image needs close reading in this context. He says,

    Uniqueness and permanence are as closely entwined in the [original] as are transitoriness and repeatability in the [recording]. The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose ‘sense for all that is the same in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics. The alignment of reality with the masses and of the masses with reality is a process of immeasurable importance for both thinking and perception.

(Benjamin 2008: 23–4)

Here Benjamin is working with the notion of multiples of an original, where an ersatz image is reproduced for both popular and ephemeral consumption and where this process has a negative impact on our sense of uniqueness in general. Benjamin’s concerns about mass production of images – and Sontag (2003) shares these – apply to the photographic Pietà only externally; its existence as a many-times-seen trope in international media dealing with human rights. Benjamin’s thoughts on mechanical reproduction – the manufacture of many copies of an original – stand in contrast to the mechanism of embedded distance, which is a discussion of multiple generations of an image. The embedded picture is always already second generation in the media, no matter how many copies of it are printed. It has been argued in this paper that this embedded distance articulates individual loss. The uniqueness that would be compromised, read within Benjamin’s framework, is not that of the missing person, but rather the uniqueness of the context, the uniqueness of such a demonstration. Within the same reading it could be contended that the sheer number of this type of image appearing in the press diminishes the originality of each demonstration, whether in Cyprus, Argentina or elsewhere.

Benjamin’s warning about the loss of authenticity through mass production, however, does apply where the photographic Pietà is appropriated as propaganda. When the Cyprus Government used versions of the photographic Pietà for its own purposes it became an icon of the Greek Cypriot agenda for resolving the Cyprus Problem, and as such it was aimed at educating foreigners and students, and for instilling patriotism. This use of the photographic Pietà unhitched it from individual identities and personal claims for justice and human rights. Meanwhile, according to Dr Maria Hadjipavlou, ‘institutions of the state, the church and the media played up the [role] of women to promote the nationalist project, which is partly to dehumanize the enemy and project its barbarity; and to abstain from any responsibility in the creation of this human and political issue, especially in the long delay this entailed after 1974’ (personal correspondence, 5 September 2011). These ‘poster-ready photographs . . . [became] the equivalent of sound bites’ (Sontag 2003: 86), that were used in order to promote the larger Greek Cypriot national agenda, which attempted to mobilize international outrage about the injustices of the Turkish Army invasion and continuing occupation. In using these images symbolically, repeatedly, and for the realization of its own ends, the government co-opted and diluted the specific demand for the return of missing relatives. This also problematized the way many Greek Cypriots feel about the cause for Greek Cypriot missing and about the association of Relatives of Missing Persons in particular. Sant Cassia suggests, on a somewhat positive note, that claims to having a missing relative could function as a way for marginalized classes to exercise connection to the political elite, since their own experiences embody and substantiate the Greek Cypriot official narrative of loss and imminent return (Sant Cassia 1998–9: 270). And yet those who did not agree with the government’s approach to solving the Cyprus Problem could point to the Relatives of Missing Persons as having been made tools of propaganda where, reading into Benjamin, they let their personal realities became statistics, even if cautiously or strategically so. Sontag rebukes these cynics, saying, ‘[to] speak of reality becoming a spectacle is breathtaking provincialism’ (2003: 109). Sant Cassia both identifies the cynicism and locates its origins in practice:

    With relatively few exceptions, the westernized middle classes do not demonstrate much, and having a missing son/ father appears more as something to be concealed rather than displayed. They are also more resigned to their death. It is these people that the UN and other diplomats meet on the Nicosia cocktail circuit. It is easy for them to conclude that the issue is a cynical political ploy and divest it of its internal political dynamics and cultural resonances.

(Sant Cassia 1998–9: 274)

The perception that the Cyprus government instrumentalized the Relatives of Missing Persons for advancing its own agendas may be correct, but it is also true that the women involved with the cause have been politically vocal in ways that no others had been in modern Cypriot history until recently. Often, the photographic Pietà appeared in local and international articles about the Missing as part of the Cyprus Problem. And in many examples, these images were used to advance the cause, where publicity was done by hand, literally, by handing out flyers that deploy the photographic Pietà and by writing letters. Sontag, twenty-six years after she says that photography risks making the reality of war banal, reconsiders, saying: ‘there is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority’ (Sontag 2003: 110). Reading her statement into the photographic Pietà, this kind of photograph still cogently articulates the demands posed by Relatives of Missing Persons because of the existential reality that it depicts. It is visually accurate, the fruit of planning, and it is a record of actions that take place within a society that offers very few stages for women’s voices. This is particularly the case with a smaller group within the Relatives of the Missing who took a slightly more stringent and proactive approach to demonstration: Oi Manadhes tis Kyprou (the Mothers of Cyprus).

Oi Manadhes tis Kyprou

Originally banding together by exchanging telephone numbers in a help-network of women searching for family members at hospitals and prisoner exchange points in 1974 and 1975, these Greek Cypriot women went on to demonstrate and present their cause in major international forums and to deliver humn rights petitions to institutions such as the United Nations in New York, Buckingham Palace, No. 10 Downing Street, the White House, and other local and international seats of power. They wrote letters to and met with local politicians and world leaders; all in addition to attending regular demonstrations in Cyprus (see Figure 9.5). Until 2003 this group frequently stood in a small group at the Ledra Palace Hotel roadblock and handed out informational pamphlets about the events of 1974 to foreigners who would cross there, from the south to the north. The pamphlets, using recognized examples of the photographic Pietà, explained the Greek Cypriot position on the war in 1974 and the Turkish occupation of the northern part of the island, and outlined the infractions of invasion and occupation recognized by the UN Security Council and committed by Turkey. The Manades tis Kyprou were acutely focussed on the restoration of human rights that pertain specifically to people missing and dead during the course of war. Since 2003, and especially after the exhumations began in 2007, these activists and the other members of Relatives of Missing Persons of Cyprus have become less visible in public and in print – partly because some of their concerns are being addressed, but mostly because they are ageing.

Figure 9.5 Andreas Manolis, ‘Demonstration by relatives and supporters next to Ledra Palace’, 12 July 2002. Credit: Andreas Manolis

A Theoretical ‘Acoustics in Still Photography’

Demonstrations by groups of individual women, standing camera-ready and displaying pictures of missing relatives on the front of their bodies portray torn families, evoke ghosts, expose the frayed (even if relatively new) concept of human rights and scream for attention. Photographs of such demonstrations transform the individual voice – the person – into an acoustic generalization and a visual icon. The voice in the photographic Pietà originates inside the frame of an image by contrast between subject and embedded content; in the contrast between the silent missing man and the demonstrating woman holding his photograph up to the public eye. Her political and actual voice, in doing so, resonates externally in the performance space created by the demonstration and in particular when the media captures and reproduces her image as the photographic Pietà. In this way, the sound of an individual woman’s voice for her missing relative is both actuated and consumed by the context of the demonstration. The destruction of the individual perspective is self-actuated – an extension of Lucier’s experiment – when the individual takes part in a mass demonstration, the individual’s experience becomes an icon in the mass media. And as the resonant frequencies of a room alter an individual voice, parts of it are ‘amplified by repetition’ (Lucier 1969: 96), so the concerns of an individual about a missing person, in the context of a demonstration become a general action about missing persons. One woman’s voice in the photographic Pietà becomes amplified and filtered into a dynamic, acoustic generalization that is unified for the return of Greek Cypriot missing persons.

Conclusion

The Greek Cypriot photojournalistic image of a woman holding a photograph of her missing relative is the prototypical photographic Pietà, but it is not the only example of the motif. Other cultures also use this method of demonstration as a central element of political demonstrations which are reified by the media and which shadow aspects of religious belief. Both embedded and historical distance result from this media interface and they operate to heighten the perceptual impact of the existentially absent. This may not be intentional, but the mode of demonstration has spread into other media-observed parts of the world. Whether the photographic Pietà is perceived to be efficacious or over-used in the media could be a subject for further scientific study. Importantly, the motif articulates some concerns of underrepresented segments of society, particularly women.

The nature of sound recordings in successive generations provides a step toward understanding the impact of embedded photography, and the sensory semantics that come from it. These links between the acoustic and the optical are theoretical as well as practical. Distortion in acoustics parallels the way a re-photographed photograph becomes less distinct, in the sense that the individual in an original picture and the unique first recording of a voice are blurred by repeated recording. But it is exactly this interplay of distortion and repetition that, in a given space, takes on added meaning. In the case of acoustics, the space is a particular architecture that resonates at specific frequencies and eliminates others. In the case of the photographic Pietà, the space of a political demonstration conflates personal losses into the cause of missing persons. The way the embedded portrait is featured inside the composition of the photograph, or varies in terms of centrality to a political demonstration, may indicate culturally different perceptual realities concerning photographic portraiture. Such perceptual realities are associated with beliefs about the proximity of the portrait to the individual portrayed, and may also relate to variations on acceptance of the Christian faith’s notions about transubstantiation. Both Sontag’s and Benjamin’s queries about banality and mass reproduction are relevant where the photographic Pietà is co-opted for ulterior political ends. But in its own context, the photographic Pietà is right for mass reproduction. It is an image that is constructed to lose its individual authenticity externally – in the context of a demonstration – as the cost of amplifying the cause of missing persons. Meanwhile, there is a wholly different kind of internal reproduction taking place through embedment, and here the individual functionally dissolves too, but in a very different manner; one which adds to the impact of the photographic Pietà. This chapter is a beginning, a way to describe the photographic Pietà as a contribution to photographic theory, and an attempt to find women’s voices in Greek Cypriot politics.

Acknowledgements

Maria Hadjipavlou, PhD, University of Cyprus

Ruth Keshishian, the Moufflon Bookstore, Nicosia

Yannis Kyriakides, composer, Royal Conservatory of Music in The

Hague

The Library Company of Philadelphia

Andreas Manolis, press photographer, Cyprus

Mrs Panayiota Pavlou Solomi, Limassol

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THE ART GAZE

Contemporary Art Photography

TEN

Tracey Emin’s Photographs and Films of Turkey and Cyprus

Jennifer Way

‘I’m not English, that’s for sure . . . A part of me comes from another place.’

(Emin as quoted in Smith 2011: 29–30)

Contemporary artist Tracey Emin has received a lot of popular and critical attention concerning her participation in the young British artist or yBA phenomenon and the subsequent trajectory of her career leading to her status as an acclaimed artist (Corrin 2000: 647). As part of its B[ritish] P[etroleum] British Art Displays, in 2004 Tate Britain dedicated a room to selections from her oeuvre, in response to which at least one critic noted her canonization: ‘It’s official: Tracey Emin is not only a Young British Artist – now she’s a Great British Artist’ (Leitch 2004: 3). During 2007, two events cemented this achievement. She became a Royal Academician, and she represented Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Yet, as is the case for many of her yBA peers, scholarship about Emin’s art remains quite limited in scope and depth. Primarily, it dwells on themes of self-reflexive emotive expression, autobiography, trauma and sexuality. Consequently, questions about how ‘the London-centered localism of the new Brit Art “scene” gradually became the touchstone of an official institutional ideology’ (Mercer 1999–2000: 53) and, for that matter, whether ‘the new British art [was] predominantly white and London-based in its cultural reference’ (Betterton 2000: 16) have not been considered in regard to Emin or her art.

In response, I revisit a major albeit understudied theme in Emin’s oeuvre – her engagement with place as ‘a socially meaningful and identifiable space to which a historical dimension is attributed’ (Stewart & Strathern 2003: 4). Building upon the Museum of Modern Art Oxford’s broadly conceived exhibition, Tracey Emin: This is Another Place (2002), I consider how Emin’s art intersects specific locations from her own life and the lives of members of her immediate family – her father, mother and twin brother – with heritage and memories she associates with them. This material, I suggest, serves as the primary ‘historical dimensions’ she attributes to places, thus rendering them as ‘meaningful location[s]’ (Cresswell 2004: 7). Two examples introduce us to places that are central to my discussion.

In Exploration of the Soul, 1994, a small edition book that Emin wrote about her youth, she recalls,

    It was 1962 – she was married and Dad was married – but of course not to each other – this wild roaming Turk – who had hit the London property scene in a big way – had swept her off her feet – with the promise of three days a week or nothing – she changed her name by the deed poll – from Cashin to Emin and settled for three days a week.

(Emin 2003)

Here, Emin prefaces remarks about living at the Hotel International on Fort Crescent in Margate, which elsewhere in the same book she characterizes as ‘a vast territory – a kingdom – our domain’. In focusing on her parents she begins to map their place-based identities. She mentions her father who hails from Turkey but wanders, her mother, presumably from England, who changed her surname to his, and the London real estate business. In the graphic typography of her quilt called Remembering, 1963–2002, she revisits her family in a public space remarkable for its ethnic discord.

    The new black/ Walking through the streets/ The year was/ 1963/ London/ They spat at her/ But this is England Darling/ Very blond/Very English/ They shouted nigger lover/ How would you feel/Afraid/My mom was eight months pregnant/We were six/The roses were in bloom/Mummy we asked whats a WOG/ She said/Western/Oriental/ Gentleman/ Like magic/ Somehow so exotic/ Oh what lovly [sic] little mulatto babies.

(Remes 2005: 102–3)

The staccato rhythm of the phrasing punctuates slurs about her father that Emin recalls being flung at her mother, herself and her twin brother. They sonically map London as an urban place freighted with such ethnic dissonance that it splinters her mother’s belonging to England – ‘this is England Darling’, ‘Very blond/ Very English’ – from her father’s exoticism – ‘Western/Oriental/Gentleman’ – and Emin’s and her brother’s racial difference – ‘mulatto babies’.

Together, the narratives render London, England, the West, Turkey, and the Orient as ‘meaningful location[s]’ that constitute as well as index Emin’s and her family’s identities. In what follows I focus on selections from her published writing, photographs and films. Together, they demonstrate Emin similarly treating Turkey and particularly Cyprus as places having great consequence for her life. However, what sets this work apart is the way the themes engage primarily with Emin’s father, Envar Emin (1921–2010), who emigrated from Cyprus to England during the mid-twentieth century.

Ethnic Identity, Roots and Routes

Rebecca Bryant notes that in recent history, Cyprus the nation has been conflated with family. ‘In such a way, all members of the nation can consider themselves to be its children’ (2002: 509). Yet, the converse does not hold true for Emin. Although she is the daughter of an émigré, the references to Cyprus that Emin makes in her work do not emphasize a political state or nationalism, or suggest that she considers herself a member of a politicized second generation expatriate community. The distinction is important because ethnicity informs Emin’s representations of Cyprus. Ethnicity accounts for who someone is based on their belonging to a family if not also a larger social group relating to a place and its cultural heritage and memory (Hiebert 2009). For Emin, the Mediterranean serves as an integrated place having great personal, familial significance and some cultural importance in relating her identity to her father’s. Before examining Emin’s work, it is useful to review how consistently she and others have ethnicized her self in regard to Turkey and Cyprus, often tacitly through her patrilineage. Of note is that on these grounds, Emin troubles the possibility that ‘the new British art [was] predominantly white and London-based in its cultural reference’ (Betterton 2000: 16).

This happens from the beginning of her career. During 1989, in response to the Eastern Art Report’s interview with her as one of ‘two young Turkish artists living in England’, Emin stated, ‘I’m half Turkish (my father is Turkish Cypriot), and I think I take a lot from the East – especially the colours. I like the materials which are used in Turkey. I like miniature paintings; it’s a source of inspiration. In a bigger sense it’s a spiritual thing’ (Two Artists in London 1989: 18). In 1995, Artforum described Emin as ‘half British, half Turkish, half a twin’ (Corris 1995: 84). In 1999, when the Tate Gallery interviewed her as a short list candidate for the Turner Prize, she explained, ‘“Emin” this is my surname . . . in Turkish. I am half Turkish-Cypriot [in Turkish] Emin means staunch, secure, loyal . . . very loyal, very faithful, which I am.’ (Emin 1999). A decade later, in an interview with Mark Lawson for BBC Four she said, ‘I’m not Anglo Saxon only half of me is Anglo Saxon’ (14 March 2010). Occasionally Emin is described as the exotic ‘new black’ subject whom she evokes in her quilt, Remembering, 1963–2002.

    First impressions (physical). She is immensely exotic, erotic, unEnglish. Dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired, with a long face and long fingers, she looks Turkish-Cypriot like her father rather than English like her mother. (In fact her father is almost black – he thinks one of his ancestors was Sudanese). She has the sort of hourglass figure – big bust, tiny waist, big hips – that is quite rare in England.

(‘Just be Yourself ’, Barber 2001a: 24)

In addition to statements she makes in interviews, Emin writes her self-ethnicized identity into small edition and mass publication books in which she grounds first person narratives of growing up in locations indicative of her father’s family history or his presence or absence in her life. Still, rather than advance an ethnicized body ‘that is quite rare in England’ or an identity that is ‘not English’, ‘half Turkish’, ‘half British, half Turkish’, ‘half Turkish-Cypriot’ and not ‘Anglo-Saxon’, for the most part Emin and those who comment on this work generally stress her family and cultural heritage in relation to place. A key example is Strangeland, 2006, which she organized as a tripartite familial landscape sectioned as ‘Motherland’, ‘Fatherland’, and ‘Traceyland’. Photographs resembling family and travel snapshots appear in between. One critic noted that a particular passage underscores her patrilineage: ‘Grand-dad Emin had four wives; great-great-great-grand-father was a slave “in the Ottoman empire”’ (Feaver 2005: 67). Another insisted that Emin’s heritage through her father obliged her to express an insider’s experience of belonging to the Mediterranean.

    When she comes to examine her other ‘homeland’, her Turkish heritage, all of that focus is occluded by a strain of pure sentiment and, in narrative terms, a lot of bland inconsequence. She accompanies her father on a trip to his childhood home, recounts page after page of his self-serving stories about his addictions to alcohol and sex, leaves credulously unchallenged his tales of brooding warrior forbears, and generally succumbs to a tourist’s view of a picturesque old olive-picker.

(Dillon 2006: 126)

Meanwhile, in ‘My Life in a Column’, the columns Emin wrote in first person about her life and art for The Independent from 2005 to 2009, she reflected widely on her relationship with her father in the context of Cyprus.

    Sometimes, when my dad makes me angry, I just won’t see him for six months and then I hope that when I see him I would have missed him so much that the anger would have gone, but in reality nothing gets resolved this way. Like the island of Cyprus being divided in two (just for the record my dad speaks better Greek then he does Turkish) for years and years, the separation has only cost the people of Cyprus dear.

(Emin 2008b)

To be sure, the art world also conflates Emin with Britishness and even with Englishness while foregoing mention of her self-stated ethnic hybridity. Two recent examples use the Union Jack. The photograph on the cover of Tracey Emin: My Life in a Column (2011), Rizzoli’s anthology of Emin’s essays from The Independent, shows her outside on a boat or along a waterfront, enfolded in the flag. Running Naked is the title of the C-print appearing on the cover of Tracey Emin, Love is What you Want, the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2011. It captures a nude Emin from behind, running barefoot along a cobblestone street in East London while holding a large Union Jack aloft like a sail.

On the back cover, a smaller photograph shows her swaddled in the flag, standing on a rooftop, smoking. Several statements in the text, some from Emin, hint that how she belongs to Britain is a complex issue. After all, she asserts, ‘I’m not English, that’s for sure . . . A part of me comes from another place,’ and a scholar confirms, ‘Her fused English and Turkish-Cypriot inheritance and her double-edged role as both artist and model allow her always to perceive “another place” in “this”’ (Smith 2011: 29–30). Yet, in contextualizing her word play, the catalogue also positions Emin culturally and historically in the domain of being ‘really very British, reminiscent of something a bit Lawrentian’ (p. 23), meaning, like the English writer, D.H. Lawrence.

Because the photographs feature Emin’s person, they reinforce the prevailing idea that her embodied self serves as the central signifier for her works’ primary content (O’Keefe 2005: 18). Of relevance for my discussion is whether the Britishness they promote makes allowances for someone who declares that she is ‘half British, half Turkish, half a twin’ (Corris 1995: 84). For that matter, we may wonder what the photographs reveal about Britain’s history as an empire ruling the Crown Colony of Cyprus, from where Emin’s father immigrated to London. Also, how do they illuminate points of contact between the chronology of Emin’s own life and the historical arc of Cyprus becoming independent from the United Kingdom in 1960 and its subsequent civil struggles, division in 1974, the emergence of the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus recognized only by Turkey, and Cyprus becoming a member of the European Union in 2004?

Figure 10.1 Tracey Emin, ‘Tracey Emin, Love is What you Want’, 2011. Credit: Hayward Publishing, Southbank Centre, London

Figure 10.2 Tracey Emin, ‘Emin family in Turkey’, 1967. Credit: Tracey Emin

Uses that the art world makes of photographs featuring visual representations of Emin miss discussion about what they show or mean in regard to the ethnicized identity that she and others promote. This occurs even when the photographs are not contemporary. A case in point is Emin family in Turkey, 1967.

The catalogue for the retrospective exhibition Tracey Emin 20 Years (2009) says that it shows Emin at a young age attending a performance of traditional music and dance in Turkey with her father and mother (Elliott 2008: 18). Its publication could have served as an opportunity to examine the life chronology Emin and the art world construct for her, for instance, in relation to accounts of her family’s transnational travel. Examples of the latter have been published by art writers

    Tracey and her twin brother Paul were Envar’s ‘second family’ in Margate. He already had a wife and family in London when he met Tracey’s mother Pam, but instead of divorcing, he simply maintained two households and commuted between them. Both sides knew about each other: ‘My late wife used to adore Tracey’. When the twins were four, [1967] he drove them and their mother and aunt and grandmother across Europe to Turkey, installed them in a hotel on the Black Sea, then drove back to London to collect his other family, installed them in another hotel and spent two months shuttling between them.

(‘Show and Tell’, Barber 2001b: 8)

and by Emin:

    I’m in Turkey. It’s 1967, up in a village up in the mountains. My twin brother and I are looking through a gap in a fence. We are spying on children as they viciously throw stones at a donkey.

(Emin 2008a: 7)

        We came back and forth to Turkey quite a few times. Even though I was very young, crossing the Bulgarian border remains a memory fixed firmly in my mind. Darkness, fields, checkpoints, searches, floodlights illuminating figures. I guess people must have been trying to cross the border all the time. It was one hell of a drive. Once we stopped in Yugoslavia for a rest. No more than an hour. And as we all slept in the car, everything that could be removed, was removed: the luggage, the roof rack, the bumpers, even the bloody wheels. Highwaymen of the ethnic gypsy kind. Six months later, we had all our clothes returned, everything dyed, with crazy embroidery. All my Dad’s suit fabrics chopped up to make tiny clothes. Everything inside the suitcases totally reinvented. I often wonder what happened to the thieves when they were caught.

(Emin 2006b: 7)

Implicitly, the photograph poses many as yet unexplored questions. Who created and kept it? Did members of an extended family on Emin’s father’s or mother’s side participate in the event it depicted? Did either of Emin’s parents shape an itinerary for her and her brother in response to news of the region circulating in England? Commentary appearing in journals like the New Society were surveying political strife in Cyprus (Crawshaw 1964: 9) and the suffering of Turkish Cypriots (Carter 1966: 22–3), and concluding ‘[i]n the ordinary sense, it seems that there can be no satisfactory solution for the problem of Cyprus’ (Woodhouse 1967: 782–3).

Also in question is how the image corresponds to references that Emin makes to Turkey and Cyprus in her art. Pile and Thrift’s account of identity in relation to place and belonging moves us forward in exploring them. According to Pile and Thrift, identity is:

    hedged about with spatial metaphors, with what Gilroy (1993: 195) calls the ‘spatial focus’. Most particularly, of late, metaphors of mobility, transculturation and Diaspora have become current. These metaphors are intended to capture the possibilities of hybrid identities which are not essentialist but which can still empower people and communities by producing in them new capacities for action. The ethnic absolutism of ‘root’ metaphors, fixed in place, is replaced by mobile ‘route’ metaphors which can lay down a challenge to the fixed identities of ‘cultural insider-ism’, metaphors like Diaspora.

(Pile & Thrift 1995: 10)

‘Roots’, Pile and Thrift tell us, connote an essentialist sense of ethnicity that is ‘fixed in place’ and perceives the world through cultural insiderism. Conversely, ‘routes’ encompass belonging to a family if not also a larger social group relating to a place and its cultural heritage and memory (Hiebert 2009) through mobility and transculturation, Diaspora, hybrid identities and action (Pile & Thrift 1995). While some features of her writing, photographs and films connote ‘roots’, by and large, Emin relates them to Turkey and Cyprus and her father through ‘routes’.

Troubling Rooted Insiderism

In three projects – On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984, 1994, Turkish Tales, 1987, and The Perfect Place to Grow, 2001 – Emin insinuates that her father is a source for her ‘origins, roots, traditions, [and] identities’ relating to place (Anthias 1992: 27). At the same time, though, this work alludes to conventions in contemporary art practice and points to widely used forms of remembrance, her career and general developments in travel and tourism.

On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984 consists of six colour photographs pairing a young woman and a middle-aged man that Emin published on a single page in Frieze (1994: 41).

Several elements suggest the photographs are holiday snapshots made by an unseen third party recording Emin and her father on a trip to his homelands. The woman in the photographs resembles images of Emin published in the mass print media. Correspondingly, the possessive adjective ‘my’ in the title seems to point to her and imply that ‘my Dad’ signifies her real life father, which suggests that the men with whom she appears in the photographs represent him. On top of this, in Frieze, Emin presents the photographs in a grid-like composition evoking the arrangement of family snapshots in an album. As Stylianou-Lambert observes, ‘vernacular tourist photography is associated with crucial aspects of one’s life, such as memories, family, adventures, and self development’ (2010: 73). In addition, the project seems to illustrate recollections that Emin later published. ‘I’m in Cyprus, an island that for years has been divided in two, and I would say, extremely unhappily. The first time I came here was 1984. The civil war was still fresh in people’s memories, and everywhere had a very heavy military presence’ (Emin 2008b: 7). She notes her experience and explains why she was travelling. ‘I’ve only ever had seasickness once before in my life. I was with my dad, sailing from Mersin in Turkey to Cyprus. It was 1984, and dad wanted to show me the motherland.’ She also says they encountered bad weather; however, her father reserved a cabin where he ‘told me all these magical stories about my ancestors. My great, great, great grandfather was from the Sudan, a slave in the Ottoman Empire’ (Emin 2005: 43).

Figure 10.3 Tracey Emin, ‘On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984’, project for Frieze by Tracey Emin, 1994 (first published in Frieze 14, January/ February 1994). Credit: Tracey Emin

Still, as Pile and Thrift note, ‘mobile “route” metaphors’ can ‘lay down a challenge to the fixed identities of “cultural insiderism”’ (Pile & Thrift 1995: 10). By 1994, when Emin published the project, travel and tourism served as a major link between Britain and Cyprus (Scott 1995: 185). Also, like many tourists, when Emin visited places in Turkey and Cyprus where she had family or family history, she wanted to learn more. She later said that after the war she went to Cyprus and took a crash course in everything Cyprus (Lawson 2010). Furthermore, a major challenge to the ostensible ‘roots’ of the project is that the photographs do not specify the locations that its title promotes. For that matter, On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984 muddles the issue of who is depicted. The inconsistency of the visage of the men troubles the singularity and identity of the ‘Dad’ the title mentions, which raises questions about his or their relationship to Emin. Consequently, we may conclude that the photographs illustrate Emin on holiday with or without her father, meeting male strangers, acquaintances, friends or lovers. This storyline vexes the concept of family bonding that the title implies. It also undercuts expectations that as an insider to the region by virtue of her father’s history there, Emin published photographs documenting their trip.

Instead, the project alerts us that Emin uses photography like some of her peers – to explore how the significance of representations about personal themes and private, everyday life develops in the rhetoric of the photographic image and its attendant title connoting identities and meanings. When Emin published On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984, the still relatively new London-based international art magazine Frieze was receiving attention for its connections with the yBA. Accordingly, Emin’s project served a professional purpose. It helped to continue positioning her work in relation to themes in yBA art such as the implosion of public and private identity, social and cultural dislocation and a sense that reality is discursively constituted.

Emin’s compilation of prose and poetry called Turkish Tales, 1987, preceded On Holiday with my Dad in demonstrating that she could simultaneously promote and unsettle signs of insider familiarity with Turkey and Cyprus that one might expect, given resemblances between her life and her art. For example, Turkish Tales features an unnamed female protagonist journeying to Istanbul, Ankara and Mersin by car and comparing what she observes with her life in London. Also, she swims and meets up with her father, who seems familiar with the region. Yet, the stories equally emphasize the protagonist experiencing outsiderness, especially in her status as a tourist and regarding what she notices is unusual and unfamiliar in the ways inhabitants do things. In sum, Emin constructs her protagonist’s identity in narratives of personally felt dislocations. Turkish Tales, like On Holiday with my Dad, also puts forth a father whose location and identity, along with his daughter’s (or daughters’), remains unresolved.

Nor did Emin provide more details about the exact location or self of the man appearing in The Perfect Place to Grow, 2001. The built component of the multimedia installation consists of a raised, small enclosed structure resembling a beach hut or garden shed accessed by climbing a ladder. The short film Emin made on Super 8 and then transposed to DVD plays inside. Without identifying him as such, it shows Envar Emin, wearing only shorts and a sun hat, emerging from dense foliage to walk directly towards the camera. When he is very close he stops, and then he turns and retraces his steps. He does this twice, each time bearing a flower. The second time he says something, kisses his hand and waves to the camera. All of this occurs to a soundtrack of crickets.

‘Places’, McDowell wrote, ‘are made through power relations which construct the rules which define boundaries. These boundaries are both social and spatial – they define who belongs to a place and who may be excluded, as well as the location or site of the experience’ (1999: 4). To be sure, the references Emin makes to Turkey and Cyprus in her photography, writing and film ought to give pause to assertions that yBA art was overwhelmingly London-centred in its subject matter. On the other hand, they seem to put forth a binary logic organizing connections between England, if not London, and somewhere else. People, primarily Emin’s father, and sites in or in relation to Turkey and Cyprus appear less fixed, identified and defined, in other words, the less resolved, the greater is their remove from England. Yet, a facet of this logic may point beyond Emin. For example, it characterizes a lived situation for her father in Northern Cyprus. Scott asserts,

    For Turkish Cypriots, the issue of identity is bound up in the issues of legitimacy and visibility. The problem of visibility is partly that of maintaining and manipulating several identities at once: Turkish, Turkish Cypriot, and Cypriot; but it is compounded by the fact that there is no ‘legitimate’ Turkish Cypriot presence in the bodies which represent and pass resolutions on the future of Cyprus.

(1995: 26–27)

Intriguingly, On Holiday with my Dad, Turkish Tales, and The Perfect Place to Grow problematize not simply the whereabouts of their respective fathers. Through indexical markers of identity if not also existence – visage, presence and visibility – they bring their fathers’ identity into question. In doing so, they call to mind what Scott describes as a politics of representation that many Turkish-Cypriots experience. Within the historical trajectory of Greek and Turkish tensions in Cyprus, the importance of contexts for identity and concomitant lack of a consistent appearance and presence holds the potential to cause invisibility.

    The relationship with Turkey and the Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus presents a dilemma for many Turkish Cypriots, who see themselves as both ‘Turk’ (the generic term for Turkish) and ‘Kibrisli’ (Cypriot). Which element of this composite identity is stressed depends on the context. The recent history of Greek and Turkish relations on the island, and the fact that the Greek Cypriot government in the south are the sole recognized representatives of ‘Cyprus’, have meant that Turkish Cypriots are not visible as ‘Cypriot’, and has made the term ‘Cypriot’ problematic as a means of self-identification.

(Scott 1995: 209)

Patrilineal Autochthony, Tourism and Fashion Spectacle

Additional photographs and films reveal signs of Cypriot tourism and real estate development along with fashion in the references Emin makes to the topography of the Mediterranean Sea and Cyprus.

With Emin & Emin, Cyprus, 1996, Emin flirts with autochthony or belonging by being indigenous to Cyprus. The short film’s sequences of father and daughter swimming and returning to the shore encode the Mediterranean as a birthplace from whence came the family that the film’s title marks by doubling its surname. The theme of the sea featured in other work Emin made around this time. In 1997, reflecting on her childhood in Margate, she mused, ‘In London you see buildings, a road or a bus. In Margate, you look out at the beaches and the sea, and you could be anywhere in the world’ (Brooke 1997: 90). During the same year, in her installation, In my Family When Someone Dies they are Cremated and their Ashes are Thrown across the Sea, she alludes to the dispersal and dissolution of a familial self in an unnamed body of water. A decade later, in her column, Emin mentioned the topic of origin, return and regeneration. ‘Last word: every time I come to Northern Cyprus, I adopt a turtle [sic] My dad said to me: “Are you going to see if any of your babies have come back.” Turtles always return to give birth in the place they were born’ (Emin 2006a: 47). Here, she treats Cyprus as a place of family beginnings and lineage in the form of a descent that spirals back as part of the natural order. However, her short film attests to additional pathways of belonging to family and place.

For one thing, Emin’s being in Cyprus made her a participant in its push to develop a tourist industry beyond the immediate Mediterranean region and attract and maintain a market from the UK and Europe. Between 1988 and 1997, among Cyprus’ major tourist markets, the UK remained the largest (Sharpley 1998: 19), and the British press was even reporting a potential lack of hotel space (Skapinker 1992: 16).

Figure 10.4 Tracey Emin, still images from ‘Emin & Emin, Cyprus’,1996. Credit: Hayward Publishing, Southbank Centre, London

Additionally, the film’s emphasis on swimming in the Mediterranean for pleasure links it to a history of tourist references emphasizing the beautiful island setting. Scott explains, ‘One of the most common images associated with Cyprus is that of an “earthly paradise” . . . In descriptions by British writers the landscape of Cyprus is not just a delight to the eye, but a feast for all the senses’ (1995: 62). It is interesting how Emin personalizes the tropes. In her column she later writes, ‘What I like about this mirror image is not me but what else reflects back at me – an amazing strip of pure Mediterranean blue. I’m in Cyprus, home of my father, land of my ancestors, the place where Pontius Pilate died alone and Cleopatra took a bath. God, I feel beautiful here’ (2006a: 47). For Emin, beautiful Cyprus, an ‘amazing strip of pure Mediterranean blue’, mirrors her own beauty while aligning her with her father and his ancient past. Yet, her romantic intermingling of splendour in nature and self with belonging to place, family and family history is highly constructed. Scott elaborates,

    The Cyprus which is most widely known to foreign tourists – the island of Aphrodite, of antique sites, of holiday brochures, of Makarios and monasteries in the Troodos mountains – is primarily Greek; the campaign waged against publicity for Northern Cyprus as a holiday destination has largely kept it that way.

(Scott 1995: 30)

In question is not so much Emin’s promotion of a Greek versus Turkish Cyprus. Rather, the references she makes to Cyprus in Emin & Emin, Cyprus and her column convey elements that tourists, likely British tourists, knew and were meant to embrace. In another column she writes,

    I want to feel the magic of Cyprus. I want to imagine Cleopatra bathing in her pool. I want to think of her and Mark Antony making love as they watch the sun set behind the copper mines; the mines which once incarcerated Pontius Pilate; the copper mines which now lie derelict and disused.

(Emin 2008b: 7)

Together with the loveliness of the scenes Emin imagines and their ties to imperial power, so do salient features of Emin & Emin, Cyprus correspond to what Stylianou-Lambert reminds us are mainstays of Cypriot tourism’s promotional material – ‘Blue skies and water dominate the images. No signs of roads or other signs of civilization are included, while the landscape . . . appears to be free of people’ (2010: 74). Stylianou-Lambert studied legends that the Cyprus Tourist Organization proclaims about the Rock of Aphrodite, a key tourist site associated with beauty in nature and the body (2010: 73–4). Although Emin & Emin, Cyprus does not show the Rock of Aphrodite, it treats the Mediterranean like the Rock – as ‘a location where memories are constructed for future consumption, [and] family and self images are re-enforced’ (p. 74). Correspondences between Emin & Emin, Cyprus and the Rock of Aphrodite also follow from critics’ ideas about the significance of Emin’s self representations, for example, ‘In her video piece Emin & Emin, Cyprus, 1996 shot with her Turkish Cypriot father, she emerges like Aphrodite from the waves’ (Wilson 1999). By conflating Emin with Aphrodite and referencing the ethnicity of her father, the critic allows that Emin’s iteration of ‘rising from the sea as her birth’ (1999: 74) is tantamount to her performing her belonging to Cyprus autochthonically.

Interestingly, though, Emin omits features that could qualify the family harmony and natural beauty of the place. Emin & Emin, Cyprus presents Emin and her father swimming and emerging from the sea sequentially, not synchronically. By avoiding scenes showing her and her father swimming together, Emin puts off narratives involving their familial relationship, such as power of the life-giving father over his progeny daughter. Instead, it allows her to link herself to her father in the manner of separate and, perhaps, equal. This affords Emin the artistic and emotional room to conjure Cyprus in relation to her father while maintaining an independent representation of herself: one she might consider is as much or even more self-fashioned than inherited.

Furthermore, Emin omits signs of modernity and contemporaneity. In this respect, she shares company with the Scottish traveller John Thomson (1837–1921). During the era of British imperialism, in his book, Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878, 1879, Thomson fretted about decay in Cyprus based on a tacit belief that while the home country may advance or at least change, other parts of the world should not (Hajimichael 2006: 75–6). Living during a very different time, when Britain’s political devolution from empire to nation saw a resurgence of attention to Britishness in culture that Britain the nation often was glad to promote at home and abroad including through yBA art, Emin inclines to separate her desired Cyprus – ‘I want to feel the magic of Cyprus’ – from what she observes is its present day actuality – ‘the mines which once incarcerated Pontius Pilate; the copper mines which now lie derelict and disused’ (2008b: 7). To this point, she bemoans developers building villas to accommodate an influx of seasonal homeowners, vacationers and investors.

    Northern Cyprus has been left in a confused, driftwood state of no man’s land. Northern Cyprus, once untouched and unspoilt simply because nobody had the courage or permission to invest, is now fast becoming a hideous world of cheap and tacky villas. So much in this part of the world is not real. Breezeblocks are clad with fiberglass rocks, wooden doors are made of plastic and brass is painted aluminium.

(Emin 2008b: 7)

In her opinion, the proliferation of unnatural materials reflects not ‘Cyprus, home of my father, land of my ancestors’ where she wants to feel beautiful, rather, an island nation floating on a tide of investment – routed, bereft of roots.

In two other projects we can detect signs of Cyprus landscape mediated through tourism and popular culture. The short film, Sometimes the Dress is Worth More than the Money (2001), features Emin dressed in an elaborately decorated satin pink wedding gown. Money bills are pinned to the front of the bodice and across the skirt, referring to the traditional Mediterranean world practice of wedding guests queuing to pin money on the bride. In general, tourists and people outside of the families and friends of the bride and groom would not see this (Scott 1995: 213). And yet, during Emin’s lifetime dances were staged so ‘tourists [could] actually experience the “authenticity” of folk culture as it is also experienced by local people’ (Scott 1995: 216). The film also complicates how what is foreign becomes local. In the landscape of Cyprus Emin realizes an idea she conceived in Margate. ‘I saw this wedding dress in the window . . . and some shoes and flowers . . . I had to make a film about it. The shopkeeper must have thought we were having a shotgun wedding’ (The Tracey Emin Film 2001). Furthermore, the terrain across which she runs connotes Hollywood’s idea of the American West and the look of ‘spaghetti westerns’. In Sometimes the Dress is Worth More than the Money Emin amplifies connections with the latter by featuring the beginning soundtrack from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1966, a film that uses locations in Italy and Spain to conjure the American southwest and Mexico.

Figure 10.5 Tracey Emin, still images from ‘Sometimes the Dress is Worth More than the Money’, 2001. Credit: Hayward Publishing, Southbank Centre, London

A year later she showcased her father in a fashion photography project that as a guest editor she published in an edition of the Guardian Weekend. Entitled ‘Daddy Cool’, it reiterates her belonging to Cyprus through his indigenousness. Posing in ‘some favourite family haunts in his homeland, northern Cyprus’ (C73), including ‘[o]utside the house of Tracey’s Uncle Bilal, who had just been toiling in the garden’ and at ‘the [h]ouse in Girne where Envar stays when he’s in town’ (C74), Envar Emin, as ‘the less famous father of Tracey’, serves as the living evidence of Emin’s patrilineage. In this capacity, photographically, his presence in Cyprus roots Emin to ‘his homeland’. So successfully has this occurred, we may presume, that several captions identify sites in terms of Emin’s preferences, including ‘Kaplica, Tracey’s favourite beach’, and ownership: ‘Tracey’s plot of land in Girne, where Envar has overseen the building of a well’ (C74). Sartorially, the Guardian Weekend showed readers in London how they could purchase their own bit of Cyprus, too. Captions for colour photographs of sites in Northern Cyprus also list Regent Street, Conduit Street, Edgware Road, St James’ Street, Knightsbridge Green and Sloane Street as sites in central London where readers could purchase the smart garments modelled by Envar Emin.

Vulnerable Cyprus

‘As my dad becomes older, I feel Cyprus slipping away from me’ (Emin 2008b: 7).

In On Holiday with my Dad – Turkey, Northern Cyprus, January 1984, 1994, photographs pair Emin with men who share her space yet seem emotionally remote. Sixteen years later, for a column she devoted largely to Cyprus and her father, Emin published a photograph created by her then partner, Scott Gordon. ‘Me and My Dad, Cyprus, 2008’ depicts Emin and her father hugging against a backdrop of mountains in Northern Cyprus (Emin, 2008b: 7). It marks a period when Emin mentally shuttles between coming to terms with her father’s impact on her past, engaging with him in the present, and anticipating a future without him. Across this mutable emotional landscape, Cyprus remains a constant reference.

Columns from the period reveal Emin chronicling trips to visit her father there while remembering episodes from her youth that seem all the more raw for his absence.

    In 1996 I came to Cyprus to see my dad. We had a really brilliant time. Every day, I would go swimming and every night he would cook for me. My dad’s an excellent cook. He’s also teetotal, has been since my twin and I were born. But he still professes to be an alcoholic and says a spoonful of sherry truffle would send him over the edge. Anyway, every night we would eat, I’d get really drunk and talk, and my dad would listen. One day I told him about lots of things that happened to me when I was little. He just sat there and wept, tears rolling down his face. I cried and said: ‘Daddy why weren’t you there? Why didn’t you protect me?’ he said he was so sorry and that now he would always be there for me. But now I’m in Cyprus. I’m here for him. He’s 85 and getting slower (even though he did keep us dancing till 1 am last night). I wish he was younger. The same goes for my mum. I’m just starting to know who I am and they’re slipping away. But saying that – who knows when it’s time to go?

(Emin 2006a: 47)

As another example, after mentioning her roots in Cyprus, she shifts to the present to convey the distress that her father’s absence caused her during her childhood.

    My ancestral connection with Cyprus goes back a long, long way, but my now only real connection at the moment is my dad. He is 87 and he infuriates me. I can never see him without feeling angry. All the love in the world and all the forgiveness never stops me from asking him the same five words: ‘Why did you leave us?’ This conversation always comes up. I always feel that we are two extras in a play.

(Emin 2008b: 7)

In the same column, Emin’s anxiety increases as she anticipates the impact that her father’s eventual passing will have on her access to Cyprus.

    Every time I leave Cyprus, I have the same fear. When I board the plane I imagine that one day I will be boarding the plane with the body of my father and at the same time the door will close behind me. A door to a Mediterranean island that will then always remain closed.

(Emin 2008b: 7)

In contrast to Emin anticipating losing Cyprus, the text of the earlier ‘Cool Daddy’ project mentions an enduring connection – Tracey’s ‘plot of land in Girne’ (C74). Another reference to land surfaces in a journalist’s remarks about meeting Envar Emin. ‘He said he was off to Cyprus on Sunday to finalise the purchase of some land to build a holiday house for Tracey and his other children’ (‘Show and Tell’, Barber 2001b: 8). The mention of a holiday house indicates that through her father, Emin secured a legacy of sorts. As Scott explains, ‘[t]he way in which land is transmitted over the generations suggests that it represents more than just the property of the individual; rather, each generation is the custodian of the inheritance, the channel for passing it on to the future, if possible, adding to it in the process’ (Scott 1995: 114–15). This may have been critical for Emin. Absent a family through marriage or adopted children – themes she repeated in her columns – by owning land in Cyprus she could embrace a future that in some manner continued to index at least one of her parents and his heritage.

In addition to diluting the ‘magic’ of Cleopatra and Mark Antony ‘making love as they watch the sun set behind the copper mines’ (2008b: 7), perhaps owning land in Cyprus compelled Emin to reject signs of ‘a hideous world of cheap and tacky villas’ (Emin 2008b: 7) for another reason. In her view, the recent development there reduced Cyprus to a ‘confused driftwood state’ that no longer belonged to anyone – a ‘no man’s land’ (2008b: 7). The last phrase recalls land between trenches held by opposing sides during the First World War. It is conceivable that Emin had civil or political strife in mind because elsewhere in the same column she mentions ‘the Green Line – the line which divides southern Cyprus from Northern Cyprus, the Greeks from the Turks’. Then again, while she associates Cyprus with popular culture – ‘a strange set from an apocalyptic film’, equally, she characterizes it as an emotionally embattled territory resulting in ‘[a] void of terror and emptiness’, which we may interpret as her response to her father ageing.

Conclusion

Although some critics suggest that iterating roots through a networked state of routes loses Emin her status as an ethnic insider and diminishes the authenticity of references she makes to places, I have shown that in regard to Turkey and Cyprus, Emin accessed if not processed material that may have felt extremely authentic to her. Along the way, she marked her growth as an artist active in London during the 1990s and tracked her participation in widespread developments in British– Cypriot travel and tourism. Foremost, Emin engaged in a dynamic, changing relationship with her father.

The familial and emotional ties she articulated in relation to him vis-à-vis Cyprus cast her as a vernacular cosmopolitan living at the intersection of the ‘rooted’ and ‘the translocal, [and] transnational’, although it hardly follows that she is also ‘transcendent, elitist’ or ‘universalist’, traits that are sometimes associated with cosmopolitanism (Werbner 2006: 496). Instead, Emin’s situation aligns her with a trajectory of changes in ways of belonging to Britain. They span from the mid-twentieth century empire devolving into a nation during the Windrush moment, conveyed by immigrants from elsewhere who came to England, including her father, to one or more generations later. Since then, these immigrants’ children, including Emin, travel global pathways, sometimes living in former colonies and territories in the Mediterranean or visiting there to participate in family travel and leisure tourism, or holiday or retirement real estate markets, often seeking land-based as well as personal and cultural forms of ethnic and place-based inheritance.

For Emin, Cyprus facilitated identity work, and the works I discussed indicate she found the process neither simple nor easy. Hirsch and Smith write, ‘Acts of memory are thus acts of performance, representation and interpretation. They require agents and specific contexts. They can be conscious and deliberate; at the same time, and this is certainly true in the case of trauma, they can be involuntary, repetitious, obsessive’ (Hirsch & Smith 2002: 5). The consistency, with which Emin references Cyprus in light of her childhood or as part of what a fictive character voices or gestures, manifests a repetition that Hirsch and Smith associate with distress, which Emin rehearses profoundly. Recall the inconsistencies in the identity of the father and regarding his and his daughter’s location in On Holiday with my Dad. There is also the refrain of anxiety about losing her father and losing Cyprus through his death that Emin pens in her columns and evokes in films showing Envar Emin approaching yet leaving the camera’s stare and remaining inaudible (The Perfect Place to Grow), father and daughter swimming in the Mediterranean sequentially but not synchronically (Emin & Emin, Cyprus), and Emin in Cyprus, running across open fields wearing a bride’s dress covered with money – no father to give her away or groom in sight (Sometimes the Dress is Worth More than the Money).

The many references Emin makes to Cyprus traverse subjects and events that her work suggests have distressing aspects for their engagement with Envar Emin. In photographs, films and writing, they take shape in media having long respective and overlapping histories of serving memory by linking people and places through specific genres such as travel and vacation snapshots and films, father-daughter iconography, travel writing, journalism and journaling. Emin puts them to use in representing Cyprus as her ‘meaningful location’ (Cresswell 2004: 7).

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ELEVEN

The Art of the Buffer Zone

Haris Pellapaisiotis

Since 2005 there have been four substantial curator-led art projects which in one way or another have used the buffer zone in Nicosia, Cyprus as their site for art. The projects are: Leaps of Faith: An International Arts Project for the Green Line and the City of Nicosia Cyprus (2005), Manifesta 6 Nicosia (2006), Suspended Spaces No. 1 – Famagusta (2007–11), Uncovered: Nicosia International Airport Cyprus (2010–13). This chapter is an initial attempt to think critically of the curatorial intentions informing and underscoring these projects and to consider such intentions against the micro-shifts in political policies which have shaped perceptions and representations of the buffer zone. I want to raise questions about art and what it means for art to operate within a real geographical location where perceptions of place and space, as well as territory and mobility, are already laden with conflicting narratives and meanings of national identities.

The lack of critical response and analytical discussion in Cyprus around Leaps of Faith, Manifesta 6, Suspended Spaces and Uncovered is further cause for penning this chapter. I believe that these projects do warrant attention particularly in the context of the title theme of this publication, Photography and Cyprus: Time Place and Identity.

I begin by situating the buffer zone within the wider political context of Cyprus and refer to its different symbolic significance for Greek and Turkish Cypriots before moving on to discuss the four curator-led projects in terms of arts problematic, sometimes nebulous and entangled relation to politics of place.

Cyprus and the Buffer Zone

It is misleading to reduce the Cyprus conflict to a single date. However, 1974 marks a decisive, albeit an as yet unresolved moment in the political history of modern Cyprus. In 1974 the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) was further fractured into what the political commentator Costas M. Constantinou describes a different ‘territorial regime of authority and legal extension of governmental or military power’ (Constantinou 2008: 146). Prior to 1974 the jurisdiction of the internationally recognized RoC extended to the whole island with the exception of the UK Sovereign Base Areas; the RoC being the de jure government of Cyprus. The coup d’état in 1974 against the government of Cyprus by rightist nationalist Greek Cypriots seeking ENOSIS (union with Greece) led to the military invasion and subsequent occupation of the north part of Cyprus by Turkey. Since 1974 the island has been divided into the internationally recognized southern part controlled by RoC and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognized only by Turkey.

The buffer zone, also known as the Green Line or the Dead Zone, meanders its way across Cyprus. It is irregular both in its contours and broadness. In some areas it is as wide as several acres with farmers from both sides of the divide being allowed by the UN to enter into the restricted area to tend their fields or livestock, whilst in other areas, especially in Nicosia, the separation between the two sides is as little as a single house or less. What distinguishes the two sides of the buffer zone particularly in Nicosia is that on the Greek Cypriot side, the divide is characteristically recognizable by the signs of military conflict; gutted and uninhabited buildings, bullet-riddled walls, stacks of weathered sandbags or white painted oil drums serving as road blocks, whilst on the Turkish Cypriot side the divide is marked by a nondescript concrete wall; making one side highly picturesque, exotic almost, while the other is militarily pragmatic and forbidding in its presence. Crossing the buffer zone in 1992, the social anthropologist Yiannis Papadakis commented: ‘One side saw the Dead Zone as temporary, the other as permanent. On the Greek Cypriot side, the Dead Zone was marked by barbed wire that could easily be removed, whereas on the other walls had been built in the middle of the road’ (Papadakis 2005: 137).

With the military division of the island in 1974 passage from one side of the divide to the other became off limits to Greek and Turkish Cypriots respectively. This condition changed in the spring of 2003 when the Turkish Cypriot leadership opened certain points of the military zone thereby allowing for unfettered passage across the buffer zone. The first such point, where it became possible to cross on foot, was the Ledra Palace check point in Nicosia; so called because of the once luxury hotel of the same name located within the buffer zone, which now houses UN peacekeeping personnel. Within this stretch of the divide a number of other buildings, some derelict, others fully functional such as the Goethe Institute, are situated. Between 1974 and 2003 this part of the buffer zone was on occasion used, subject to special permission, for bi-communal events. Yet permission to traverse into the restricted area was rarely granted, particularly by the Turkish Cypriot leadership.

My own experience and attempts to use the buffer zone originate in 1992 when I organized the photographic exhibition Off Limits. The Ledra Palace Hotel was planned as an exhibition venue for what was to be the first photographic exhibition by Greek and Turkish Cypriots after 1974. The project was supported financially by the United Nations Association of Cyprus. The exhibition was intended to act as a window to the other side after almost twenty years of no contact. Off Limits had a simple premise, which was that dialogue needed to be initiated on an individual level of personal exchange, independent of official political negotiations. The location for showing the exhibition was chosen on the basis of its neutrality and practicality, as it could be accessed by people from both sides of the divide. Although the event was to be hosted by the then Secretary General of the UN in Cyprus, Mr Oscar Camilion, it was sabotaged on the day prior to the opening by the Turkish side; bi-communal events taking place under the UN auspices are required to have the approval of both sides. It was instead presented at the Cultural Centre of the Cyprus Popular Bank in the southern part of Nicosia. Kadir Kaba, one of the participating Turkish Cypriot photographers who resided in the north of Nicosia was refused permission to cross by the then Turkish Cypriot administration of Rauf Denktash. Although frustrating and disappointing, at the time this was unremarkable given that collaboration between the two communities were a rare, if not a non-occurrence. Off Limits was later shown in Nuremberg, Germany and Derry, Northern Ireland.

The Buffer Zone and Its Images

For Greek Cypriots, the buffer zone, in the years following 1974, gained symbolic significance as a tangible sign of the division of Cyprus. Under different presidencies of the RoC the image of the buffer zone had gained lesser or greater traction. For the left-wing government of Demetris Christofias, the division was referred to almost in passing and as a fact, rather than a political symbol. This is in contrast to the previous government of Tassos Papadopoulos, where the division of the city was adopted as a rallying slogan of his government’s foreign policy and diplomacy. The ubiquitous use of the term ‘The Last Divided City in Europe’ became synonymous with the way Nicosia was referred to and identified.

However, the image of the buffer zone as a symbol of Turkish political intransigence, a position which the Greek Cypriot political leadership had much relied on in the past, was seriously undermined in the spring of 2003 with the opening of selected army-controlled check points. This gesture by the Turkish army and Turkish Cypriot political leadership, appeared to be one of good will – of wanting to ease political tensions by extending a hand to the Greek Cypriot side at a time when crucial talks for negotiation and a solution were taking place. Even so, this change of policy by Turkey was viewed with circumspection by a substantial number of Greek Cypriots, who refused to cross the border on political grounds. Turkish Cypriots also viewed the opening with suspicion. In an article in Time Magazine, 2003, Mehmet Ali Talat, the head of the Republican Turkish Party, cast doubts as to the sincerity of the gesture by suggesting that this was a last tactic by the so-called Turkish Cypriot Government to ease the political pressure that had been building from Turkish Cypriots against the leadership of Rauf Denktash. ‘The government had run out of ideas’, he is quoted as saying. ‘They had to do something’ (Time Magazine 2003). The sense of suspicion felt by Greek Cypriots was further compounded when Tayyip Erdogan was reported to have ‘ordered moderates and hardliners [in Cyprus] to share power’ (The Economist 2004). According to The Economist, this political manoeuvre was intended to aid the longterm bid of the newly elected pro-Islamic government in Turkey to gain EU membership. Hence, the opening of the border was seen as a diplomatic and political manoeuvre on behalf of Turkey rather than the start of the erosion of nationalist intransigencies over Cyprus.

Regardless of the intentions behind the political manoeuvring, one thing became clear in 2003, with the opening of the border the buffer zone was being transformed from a ‘no go’ military border to a ‘threshold’ or an ‘in-between’ space. I borrow the term ‘threshold’ from architectural theorist Stavros Stavrides who describes a threshold as a negotiating space between two lands which are allowed a state of negotiation due to the very presence of a space which is seen to act as threshold (Stavrides 2002: 293). These two political representations of the buffer zone, border vs. threshold, have since 2003 been in tacit conflict with each other as the two sides attempt to respectively give their own identity to the same space at the same time. Art projects which have sought to use the buffer zone following the opening of the border are invariably caught in the political narratives and representations of the land which divides Cyprus.

Art, Politics and Place

The opening of the border in the spring of 2003 not only sparked a flurry of crossings from one side to the other, but also made it possible for Greek and Turkish Cypriot artists to envisage collaborations with each other and to discuss and plan projects face-to-face. This was a far cry from 1991 when Kadir’s photographic negatives had to be smuggled out of Cyprus to London to be printed. Since the opening of the border, Turkish and Greek Cypriot artists, architects, filmmaers, musicians and others have teamed together to produce common projects. The buffer zone has also attracted much academic research and has been used as a case-study. With academic interest the buffer zone also gained a new vocabulary and epithets, no longer militaristic or colloquial. It has been described as liminal space, suspended space, a porous border, a space of common, an in-between space.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to survey and respond in any meaningful way to the different activities connected with the buffer zone. Nonetheless, I will concentrate on the four major curator-led art projects which have made use of the buffer zone. Although different in their intended goals, Leaps of Faith, Manifesta 6, Suspended Spaces and Uncover, share certain common characteristics. Most notably the way in which each of these projects had sought to (re-)frame the local within broader universal perspectives on art. Unsurprisingly, the buffer zone has attracted curatorial projects which promote an art seen to be socially critical, with ‘interests in anthropological tools and resistance to the commodification of art objects’ (Kosova 2005: 30); in other words, a type of art practice linked to a combined history of avantgarde art and postmodernist thinking which propagates the concrete, specific and particular, in contrast to modernists’ attempts to promote art as a universal abstract language relating to the general. Within this framework the use of the socio-politically historicized site has gained preference over more neutral locations. By situating themselves within a real political space, artists are compelled to engage with the symbols, narratives and meanings which reside within the spaces of the place out of which they operate. It is also expected that artists placing themselves within such environments are seen to find meaningful ways by which their art may interrupt, challenge or disturb existing narratives which reside within that place. In other words the expectation is for the artist to produce work that is socially and politically relevant to the place within which she or he now situate themselves within.

But for all that, by setting what is deemed to be political art within a politically charged environment does not necessarily secure a more dynamically political outcome. On the ground, the signs are never quite as clear as they are assumed and the boundaries not as stable as they are anticipated. It is not surprising then to find the artist and theorist Victor Burgin, after his involvement with the project Suspended Spaces, warning that the convergence of art, politics and place may result in:

    a place of hesitation for those no longer sure of their direction, or a place of prevarication for those unclear in their intent, even the site of an evasiveness that preempts criticism: as the artist’s intention is ‘political’ then it is irrelevant to criticise the work on aesthetic grounds, but as the work is ‘artistic’ then it is equally irrelevant to require rigorous political analysis from it.

(Burgin 2011: 148)

Burgin’s comments are a reminder that the artist cannot simply function as a global political commentator without some sense of connectivity to place and locality. This does not mean that artists need be local in order to comment upon place but that by grounding themselves to a particular place, a particular social history and territory, artists take on the role of new narrative agents.

The following comments by W.G. Sebald might be helpful in clarifying the role of the artist as narrator of place, history and memory.

    The reader needs to be prompted that the narrator has a conscious and that he is and has been perhaps for a long time engaged in these questions … We’ve all seen images [Sebald refers to images of the holocaust] but these images militate against our capacity for discursive thinking, for reflecting upon these things and also paralyze our moral capacity. So the only way one can approach these things is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct confrontation.

(Sebald 2011

[information in brackets added by Pellapaisiotis])

According to Sebald, it is through the story told by the writer or artist that the viewer or reader may rethink place, and it is then that we may also best hope to understand intentionality and agency in the artist’s work.

The four curator-led art projects to which I refer demand attention because embedded within each project there is evidence of struggles by artists and curators to cope with the overwhelming narratives which define a place and its histories. Furthermore these four projects allow us a glimpse into how art may be challenged, even compromised by the dynamic contingencies of place, with both artists and events becoming inextricably entangled within realpolitik. The art itself may become usurped and framed by the very narratives which it seeks to interrupt, challenge or disturb.

A Leap of Faith

Leaps of Faith was the first and arguably the most successful art event to date to make use of the buffer zone and the area around the divided city of Nicosia. The project was the brainchild of Rana Zincir – a Turkish Cypriot who by her own definition is a social engineer – and was curated by Katerina Gregos (Greek) and Erden Kosova (Turkish). Leaps of Faith was successful from two standpoints; the breadth and quality of international artists taking part was impressive and organizationally the event was of a standard rarely experienced in Cyprus. The triumph of this project was that the organizers managed to accomplish something which under a different political regime, particularly in the north of Nicosia, would certainly not have been possible. The idea of Leaps of Faith was to ‘make the exhibition spill out onto both sides of the divided city’ with the buffer zone functioning as ‘a symbolic bridge’, explains Katerina Gregos in the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition (Gregos 2005: 10–1). No art venues were used to display the work, but instead works were located in public spaces or typical buildings around Nicosia. The buffer zone at the Ledra Palace crossing formed the link between the two sides with works developed specifically for the site. The otherwise sarcastically known Dead Zone, which lay dormant since 1974, was once more re-energized with new activity and sounds brought on by artists engaged in the construction of their works. The Dutch artist Marc Bijl had stacked a tower of speakers topped with megaphones – the type used in army camps – and flashing disco-lights which he positioned facing the Turkish checkpoint. From these, he blasted songs by the British 70s rock group Status Quo. Fittingly, stickers with I ♥ Status Quo were printed and arbitrarily stuck at different locations north and south of the city. Other works within the buffer zone included Kendell Geers’ (Belgium) neon sign that was set atop the Venetian wall and read, THIS I SNOT AM ERICA in addition to installations from Artlab (UK) and Call # 192 (Cyprus), plus Panayiotis Michael’s road sign with the words ‘REMEMBER ME’. More artworks and exhibition spaces extending to both sides of the divide were used and included contributions from artists Phil Collins (UK), Dan Perjovschi (Rumania), Susan Philipsz (UK), Hussein Chalayan (Cyprus), Minerva Cuevas (Mexico), Akram Zaatari (Lebanon) and Sigalit Landau (Israel), amongst others. Greek Cypriot participation from artists was reticent and sponsorship from the main state art funding body, the Cultural Services, which is under the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Cyprus, was conspicuously absent.

The organizational achievement of the event must be seen partly in the context of a succession of changing political tactics over the buffer zone by the Turkish side. It is possible that Leaps of Faith was tolerated and accommodated by the Turkish army and the Turkish Cypriot political regime because it was perceived to contribute favourably towards a broader political objective. Then again, it could be that the organizers of the event had fortuitously exploited a slacking in political control over the use of the buffer zone. It is not my intention to speculate on either of these scenarios, but to indicate how art became subject to the micro-political shifts and changes affecting the buffer zone.

Was Leaps of Faith intended to be a political event? ‘Oh noooo, this is just an art exhibition’, Zincir exclaimed in the catalogue when the question was raised (Zincir 2005). If Zincir’s response sounds like an oxymoron, it is because both question and response are framed within the context of Cyprus politics. What I mean is that the question was not intended to refer to a broader debate on aesthetics, art and politics. Rather it was querying the narrative in terms of which side of the Cyprus political fence the event was propagating. Writing in the same publication, the curator Katerina Gregos explains that ‘if you did not propagate the official “master narrative” which posits either side as the total and unequivocal victim, then you were a traitor’. Gregos continues that ‘we were not there to propagate or replicate nationalist rhetoric from either side ... we wanted the artists to be free to engage with the city and its difficult but intense and challenging dynamics’, and not as she points out, to be ‘side-tracked by the Realpolitik and its dominance over all things Cypriot’ (Gregos 2005: 10–11).

The refusal to be seen to be taking sides, as Gregos writes, does not necessarily mean that the event was apolitical. After all, the curators deliberately brought together a very credible bunch of internationally recognized artists whose work is widely regarded as socially sensitive or directly political and they set them within a military divided city and asked them to respond to the complexities of the place. Whether the organizers, curators or artists wished it or not, politics marked the event by the sheer fact that the event was framed by the politics of its very setting.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to rephrase the question: How, was Leaps of Faith political and in what way was art implicated within this political context?

Additionally, Zincir, in her introduction acknowledges the politically symbolic implications of, ‘Greek, Turks, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots all working together’. She goes on to conclude that in her view a primary intention of the project was ‘a search for a new language, practice and discourse that may produce a more balanced and pluralistic expression of nationalisms, identities and futures’ (Zincir 2005: 4).

It is unclear whether Zincir, in her use of the terms nationalisms, identities and futures, is alluding to a politically counter position for a solution based on UN resolutions for a ‘State of Cyprus’ with a single international personality and single citizenship (Paragraph 11 of the Secretary-General’s report (S/23780) or, whether she is drawing attention to a broader humanistic issue: that of recognition and respect for differences of nationalities and cultures living in Cyprus in anticipation of an outcome of a solution based on the reunification of Cyprus under the UN resolution. Either way, I will circumnavigate the issue in order to draw attention to what I consider more relevant to the theme of this chapter.

Zincir’s comments imply the use of art as a means by which a desirable political outcome might be seen to be achieved. Art, in this sense, becomes subservient to some greater cause. Zincir is not alone in her rationale of art being utilized in this respect. Certainly in the context of Cyprus, the precedent was set long ago through various bi-communal programmes where the symbolic coming together of Turkish and Greek Cypriots under a common enterprise such as an art exhibition seemed to outweigh the quality or content of the work on show.

Regardless, two main features seemed to distinguish Leaps of Faith from other bi-communal events. Firstly, the organizers aspired towards framing the microcosm of ‘Nicosia and the Green Line’ within a broader international art context. Secondly, there were noticeable nuances of political and ideological differences, even tensions, between the leading players involved in the event, namely, Zincir, Gregos and Kosova. If for Zincir the event was about recognition of existing nationalisms and identities, what seemed important for Kosova was the questioning, even confrontation, of such positions. He writes that the intention was for artists to have ‘an engagement with present social conditions and cultural inheritance that shape a site or geography’. He, ‘wanted to operate politically against the Realpolitik’ (Kosova 2005: 30).

For Kosova what became important was for the artist to attempt to re-conceptualize through questioning and acts of defiance the space within which she or he operated. He draws attention to two works which seem to exemplify this view.

The Bosnian artist Sejla Kameric’s Crossing the Line involved a playful and irreverent intervention within civic space, which symbolically was intended to repudiate the idea of sides. It involved the overnight surreptitious painting of a ‘feminine’ pink line along streets with the purpose of linking the two sides of the divided city. The authorities on both sides caught wind of what was happening and put a stop to the action. They subsequently painted over the pink, presumably with asphalt grey or military green.

Amber Onar’s piece, which was part of the exhibition Outside the Projects, was dismantled by the ‘Nicosia Turkish Municipality (LTB)’ almost as soon as it was displayed. Onar used a building belonging to her family in the old part of Nicosia from which, literally overnight, an assortment of throwaway materials, clothes and bedding were hung, thereby defacing its façade, ‘reproducing the appearance of the existing accommodations of Turkish settlers living [in Nicosia] in poverty’ (Kosova 2005: 32).

Extrapolating from Kosova I would suggest that what he also seems to direct our attention towards is the possibility of the artists introducing within an already politically contested spatial environment an otherwise different spatial awareness – a type of spatial awareness of public space which emerges out of making art.

A Parallax View

Visiting the Leaps of Faith event in 2005 the curators of the much anticipated Manifesta 6 project, due to take place in Nicosia in 2006, must have formed an impression of a place on the brink of a major political, social and cultural transformation. The combination of the opening of the border in 2003 in conjunction with the Leaps of Faith event in 2005 would suggest that boundaries that were thought to be impermeable could now be transgressed.

With the arrival of the International Foundation Manifesta to Nicosia in 2006 we must add another understanding of space which has its pedigree in avant-garde art, as already implied by Kosova. The Manifesta 6 (M6) project proposed by the three curators Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel, was for an experimental art school that would run for the entire three months of the biennale. How the school was interpreted by the local community of artists and non-artists alike in Cyprus was very different to the way it was perceived by the curators. The General Coordinator of the project in Cyprus, Yiannis Toumazis, writing in the book Notes for an Art School – which was published in advance of the event and was considered part of the research material leading to the M6 School – states that ‘the absence of a top-tier art school has practically shaped the face of art in contemporary Cyprus’ (Toumazis 2006). I take the statement to mean that Toumazis favoured the creation of an art school based on the established progressive Western model that is bound to an institutional trajectory and a history of art representation. This is a widespread view amongst sections of the art community and tertiary education in Cyprus as something that is missing on the island. I want to suggest that the M6 School was misinterpreted by the local art community as a possible precursor to such a school.

In contrast to Toumazis, Anton Vidokle’s view of the experimental art school was of an open-ended and uncharted discursive space that is itself considered art. What this means is that the school was to find its form and possible direction through ‘questions about the role of public art institutions, about agency and the role of the artist’ (Vidokle 2008). This is a position far from the desire to create an institutional network. Vidokle’s perception of the school is indicative of wider attempts by present day avant-garde artists to imagine the space of art as agency for material and social change by wishing, not only to intervene symbolically into public space, but to appropriate public space into art. Hence, the school as was imagined by at least one curator, is identified with the ‘new’ in art, in the sense of looking forward, in anticipation of material and political change of space and place; the interface between public space and the space of art becomes the point of crisis. This is a utopian unitary vision of space that is intended to bring about new forms or possibilities that emphasize the theatre of art; art not as material object but as agency.

From a more prosaic perspective of a country still viewed as being in the process of state building, the art school was (and still is) perceived as a modernist institutional symbol of cultural progress and identity. As Toumazis indicates, the absence of the art school in Cyprus represents a lacuna in the network of institutions articulated and formed by the apparatus of state.

Between these two interpretations there is a gulf in terms of an aesthetic practice and more importantly there is a diametrically opposed perception of art’s institutional relation to the wider social community within which it is set.

The curators, it seems, were forgetting that Cyprus has neither history in avant-garde art, nor a past in attempts by artists to transgress or redefine bounded and accepted distinctions of public space set by the state. Rather, the historical legacy of art in Cyprus stems from a more incestuous relation with state institutions and the causes of state. Eleni Nikita, the former Director of the Cultural Services – the Government’s main arts funding body in Cyprus – who is trained as an art historian, writes in her introduction to Cypriot Art 1950– 1980 that in Cyprus the art was at the service of ‘strengthening and promoting national identity’; an identity which as Nikita makes clear was promoted through a ‘policy focused on the Greek civilization’ (Nikita 2009: 14). Nikita goes on:

    The National liberation struggle nurtured fear towards anything foreign to the local culture, which might possibly threaten or alter the long-established moral and spiritual values. This ideological climate influenced both the literary and the artistic creation on the island.

(Nikita 2009: 13)

Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the same sentiments of loyalty to the state were as strongly felt by the art community in Cyprus in 2006. However, following the rejection of the Annan Plan in 2004 during the Papadopoulos presidency, the issues of ‘national identity’ and ‘statehood’ dominated Greek Cypriot politics and consciousness. The arts once more needed to be seen to support national unity. For the local organizers it was incomprehensible to go against state policy, whilst for the curators it was incomprehensible that art operated within such close proximity to the state. The cultural disparity between the curators and the host organizers became a factor that persistently overshadowed the organization of the project and eventually led to the acrimonious split between curators and the local ‘host’ partners.

The fracture that had evidently emerged on aesthetic grounds was superseded by what became political differences. The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) saw Nicosia as a city in ‘a process of re-identification’, with Manifesta 6 intending ‘to serve as a catalyst for change’ (Fijen 2006: 4–5). Situating itself within a fragile and politically volatile environment in anticipation of a solution was certainly the gamble that the IFM was taking. The signs were there in 2003 for the IFM to think that a political solution was imminent and perhaps it was even encouraged to think this was the case by the local organizers. Nevertheless, by 2006 the political mood had changed. Locating a section of the project on the Turkish-held side of Nicosia, as Anton Vidokle insisted on doing, was seen as politically adverse to the then Cyprus government’s promotion of the buffer zone as a de facto military border.

Does this mean that Vidokle’s uncompromising position was wrong, idealistic or provocatively irresponsible?

As a member of the section of the school that was to be curated by Vidokle, I supported his position to house his section of the school north of the buffer zone. My backing had little to do with what became a scandal over bi-communality and withdrawn promises. I supported the uniqueness of the project in its aspiration to introduce within a politically fraught spatial environment an otherwise different perception of space which sought to remap and redefine a section of Nicosia regardless of the political division. I believed that by extending the activities of the school to the Turkish-held part of Nicosia, rather than undermine the authority of the RoC would have demonstrated its political maturity and stability as a state.

In a paper entitled ‘To Cross or not to Cross? Subjectivization and the Absent State in Cyprus,’ Olga Demeteriou (Demetriou 2007) argues that in the early days of the opening of the border the state was absent from the event. By this she means that the RoC had no political policy for crossing the border. She explains that when the state reasserted its authority it did so by de-politicizing the crossing, which saw the personal and the political collapsing into each other, Greek Cypriot citizens having to take political decisions unilaterally based on individual moral code. Similarly, the failure of the state to be present at the event was demonstrated once more in the case of Manifesta 6. The way the state eventually dealt with what was essentially an experiment in art, was through confrontation and its flexing of authority which ended in legal battles.

Our Exotica

The failure of Manifesta 6 in Nicosia had, it seems, brought Cyprus and the buffer zone to the attention of the international art scene.

In an essay written soon after the Manifesta debacle entitled The Grudge, Anselm Franke states that Cyprus appeals to the world of art ‘because its conflict mirrors Europe’s strongest ghosts: colonialism and nationalism’ (Franke 2006). Whilst Franke is right in stating that both colonialism and nationalism have largely dictated the history of Cyprus leading to its present political predicament, his observation is less accurate when referring to Cyprus and the world of art. If anything, Cyprus has been largely bypassed by the art world. To be more specific, the art world’s interest in Cyprus is not in the place per se and rarely in its artists, but is reflective of the art world’s fascination with and fetishizing of the signs and scars to be found in places of violent conflict.

Consider as examples the use of Ledra Palace checkpoint in Leaps of Faith, the reference to the divided city of Nicosia in Manifesta 6, the fascination with the ghost town of Famagusta in Suspended Spaces and the attempts to use the abandoned Nicosia airport by Uncover. These sites represent highly visible ‘moments’ of the buffer zone symbolizing military Cyprus.

The following description by Francoise Parfait of the ghost town of Famagusta in the publication Suspended Spaces, illustrates the point further:

    They were gripped by the macabre power of that monument-in-spite-of-itself, as well as the powerful impact of that seafront, with its thousands of windows open to the wind and weather, and by that vast expanse of land abandoned by History and circumstance. They were split between being spellbound and scared, between the fascination exercised by the buildings devoid of their occupants and the respect inspired by graves.

(Parfait 2011: 166)

The project Suspended Spaces was shown in Amiens, France but not Cyprus. It was conceived according to Parfait in 2007 when one spring-day three friends (French) found themselves on the beach in Famagusta overwhelmed by the sight of this ‘monument’ of a ghost town. The extract above expresses something of that first encounter. Suspended Spaces became ‘a collective experiment involving an intellectual and visual displacement’ of ‘thinkers, writers and artists’ (‘Foreword’, Suspended Spaces 2011: 8–11) whose subject is the coastal ghost town of Famagusta, Cyprus. The town was abandoned after the second phase of the Turkish invasion of the island and has remained empty since 1974. The project aimed to use Famagusta as a ‘metaphor of an aesthetic and political construct’ where ‘border areas and buffer zones – “suspended space” – are unsettling Europe’s geography’ (‘Foreword’, Suspended Spaces 2011: 8–11). The project consisted primarily of an international mix of contributors with the inclusion of some Greek and Turkish Cypriot artists.

Conscious of the mainly ‘outsiders looking in’ status of most contributors to the project, Parfait poses the question:

    What legitimacy can a group of artists and intellectuals, many of them foreigners, have in coming to these places and ‘making art’, based on this situation of conflict and political crisis? It is partly to answer this question, and by avoiding the naivety of a discourse on art claiming to be able to solve and settle conflicts, that the choice of artists was carried out (many international artistic ‘operations’ are initiated on the basis of this illusion, the closest example being the failure of Manifesta which was meant to take place in Cyprus in 2007).

(Parfait 2011: 171)

The way the organizers of Suspended Spaces sought to justify their presence and engagement as artists and intellectuals with what they described as a ‘situation of conflict and political crisis’ was by narrativizing history through ‘experience and not mere news and documentary’ (Coblence 2011: 162).

The approach to interpreting history expressed by Coblence is echoed by various contributors to the publication, most directly by Jacinto Lageira in his essay History as Art, where he writes: ‘If History is not a science, then is it not a literary form among other such forms, a discourse, a tale or narrative, as so many exist through languages and down the ages?’ He continues: ‘Facts are constructed, and fiction likewise … the writer does not make mistakes, what he says is neither true nor false: it is fictional’ (Lageira 2011: 98–9).

Lageira’s expressed mistrust of history as a synopsis of facts linked to conflicting ideologies and histories might be justified, particularly where the artist as outsider seeks to engage with historical sites. To paraphrase Sebald, if we are to accept the artist as a type of narrator of place, history and identity, then the artist needs to demonstrate through his own way of narration a sense of conscious awareness of what it means to be in place. In such instances then, the task of the artist/narrator becomes one of a broker. She or he open-up new oblique and tangential forms of narration which allow for the viewer/ reader to engage discursively with a sense of what it means to be in place. The artist can only offer us a subjective experience, not as witness to an event or a reporter of facts but as a narrator who effectively seeks to explicate her or his experience of being in place, a place that is alluring and distancing at the same time and a place already inhabited by ghostly narratives. The narrator’s task then becomes how to tell the story; the narrator being both the target of narratives already residing within place and an active agent of the story she or he tells.

To illustrate the point I want to introduce an extract from the project Walking Narratives (2009), where the very able and seasoned anthropologist Peter Loizos narrates a walk he took every morning whilst living and working in Nicosia after his retirement from the London School of Economics. The narration begins with Loizos’ ‘emotional and cognitive disorientation’ when he came to live in Cyprus. He goes on to describe his need for creating a sense of neighbourhood for himself that would give him the comfort of belonging to a community of the everyday and the need to ‘have a social relationship that was predictable.’ The walk comes to an end inside the buffer zone, but not the familiar parts of the buffer zone which have been iconized through so many photographs and artworks and which today serve as tourist sites.

    We are now entering the ceasefire zone, that’s why there is no photography, there is military on both sides, in the middle is the UN we will probably see a UN watch tower in a minute and all these extravagant untamed nature is because nobody has built here since 1974, or even earlier perhaps 1964 … I don’t know the military history of this particular piece of ground; it might have been an earlier point of conflict rather than later point. You’ve gotta know exactly what you are looking at in Cyprus – because different things destroyed different communities at different times. You mustn’t assume everything happened in one year – it didn’t! It’s [a] very important part of Greek (Cypriot) official propaganda to pretend that everything went wrong in 1974, whereas anyone who really knows the history knows that things started to go wrong in the middle 1950’s.

(Loizos & Pellapaisiotis 2009)

Loizos’ narration does not state but in a measured way draws attention to the signs embedded in the landscape which direct or challenge the way we may think about place. In contrast, contributions to the catalogue Suspended Spaces vacillate from exotic impressions laced with theories and erroneous historical accounts, written and presented as facts of history. An approach to narrating place which goes against the theoretical premise the project claims. Consider, for example, the following passage from the foreword to the book.

Figure 11.1 Haris Pellapaisiotis and Peter Loizos, ‘Walking Narratives/Peter Loizos’, audiovisual projection, 2009. Credit: Haris Pellapaisiotis and Peter Loizos

    The town of Famagusta in Cyprus is one such point – a partly closed town, emptied of its inhabitants in 48 hours, occupied by the Turkish army and guarded by the UN since 1974, the year when armed conflict between Greece and Turkey ended.

(‘Foreword’, Suspended Spaces 2011: 8–11)

The conflict in Cyprus has never been one between Greece and Turkey, but between Greek and Turkish Cypriots with Turkey intervening, invading and occupying the north of Cyprus in 1974.

In another instance the organizers held a workshop for the ‘thinkers, writers and artists’ involved in the project at the village of Tochni, unaware or perhaps indifferent to the place’s stained history and troubling significance for Turkish Cypriots. In August 1974, at the height of the invasion, ‘on the pretext that they were to be taken to safety in the Turkish occupied North, EOKA B men transported the men of Tochni on two buses, and they were never seen again. One man escaped the massacre but the mass graves have never been officially identified and the bodies exhumed’ (Sant Cassia 2005: 61).

Not surprisingly, Victor Burgin scathingly attacks fellow contributors to the project. He writes that they were ‘setting out to visit a site they were forbidden to see from a site to which they were blind’ (Burgin 2011: 147), the forbidden site being the more exotic and picturesque Famagusta.

The Buffer Zone as Museum

Before concluding, I wish to refer to recent attempts for the use of the buffer zone by the ‘art project’ UNCOVERED. This is a three-year project (2010–13) curated by Basak Şenova (Turkey) and Pavlina Paraskevaidou (Cyprus). It is conceived as an artistic intervention at the unused Nicosia International Airport. The airport lies abandoned inside the buffer zone since July 1974 and is off limits to the local population. The project according to the organizers aims to ‘widen the art-based intervention … to the peace-negotiations process’ (Uncovered 2011).

In 2011 the organizers staged the exhibition Uncovered: Nicosia International Airport Cyprus 2010–2013 followed by the publication of Book 1 of the same title. Originally the exhibition opening of their project was to take place at the airport itself, but it seems they had to re-locate to a less ambitious site, an abandoned house within the buffer zone at Ledra Street check point. The exhibition was a collection of contributions by different artists, Turkish, Greek and Turkish Cypriot and included installations of found objects or replicas from the old airport, photographs, sound installations and video interviews.

The aims of the exhibition as stated in the catalogue were:

    UNCOVERED examines how control mechanisms have been operating on the island on multiple levels via the airport. The project explores how this space, frozen in time, indicates and exposes the operational and organizational logics of control that have evolved on the island over the past decades.

        UNCOVERED also questions the politics of space as exercised on the island, challenges the validity of control mechanisms, and asks questions that move beyond the ubiquitous mnemonic to pain in order to ultimately reclaim the island’s ‘commons’.

(Şenova & Paraskevaidou 2011: 9)

I cannot say whether UNCOVERED achieves any of the stated claims, but the exhibition unwittingly manages to demonstrate how diffused of symbolic political significance the buffer zone has become since 2006. The collection of artefacts, relics and symbols gathered from the airport and relocated in another part of the buffer zone seem to present us, if anything, with an already rehearsed vocabulary and arrangement of signs further extracted from this now tired site. The de-contextualization of objects from their original setting and, therefore, their desaturation of pathos connected to their location and memory, does not – as the organizers originally wished – extend their symbolic significance towards wider discourses about space, place and ‘commons’. Rather, it renders the objects and documents in the exhibition to static lifeless museum artefacts. Intentionally or not, it is within the context of the politics of the museum as a space of preservation of memories, histories and cultures which the exhibition manages to raise issues. If a bi-communal settlement is ever arrived at, what happens to the buffer zone?

Should parts of the buffer zone be preserved in the form of a museum of conflict? What should be preserved and how? Should nationalist symbols, so prevalent and present on both sides of the divide, be kept as a way of understanding history specific to place, territory and beyond? Or, should disagreeable signs be erased; out of sight and out of memory? Who will define for whom how the history of place should be remembered? What role should art and artists play in the reconstruction of history and identity of place?

How Do I Talk about Place When I Talk about Place?

Those familiar with Raymond Carver’s work will recognize the pastiche use of the title of his short story ‘What We Talk about When We Talk about Love’ (Carver 2003). The four characters in the story attempt to put into words what love means to them, only to find that their certainty about love slips away from them. In a very different context W.G. Sebald warns that some things cannot be approached directly because the layers of narratives and images which define our knowledge and understandings of these things militate against our capacity to think about them discursively.

Perhaps from afar the buffer zone seems beguilingly inviting to curators and artists who wish for art to be seen to be political. They may even be seduced into thinking that their engagement with the buffer zone is comparable to being involved in politics only to discover that close to the ground, as Loizos cautions, the devil is in the detail. Or, as Sebald’s alter ego in Rings of Saturn observes, ‘This then … is the representation of history. It requires falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was’ (Sebald 2002: 125).

As successive curators and artists choose to make use of the buffer zone as a site for art it becomes appropriate to ask: What new perspectives do projects such as Leaps of Faith, Manifesta 6, Suspended Spaces and Uncovered give us that enable us to rethink discursively through art-paradigms our relationship to historical events which give shape to place?

At a panel discussion, organized by the UNCOVERED team, the debate shifts to monuments and symbols of nationalist dissonance used by one ethnic-group against another to signify different histories and nationalist values. The panel, made up of curators, art theorists and social scientists discuss how in a post-conflict Cyprus such monuments, designed to impose their authority of nationalist identities, be replaced with counter images that are less malign. From the floor I raise the question: Is it the role of art to be so concerned with the signification of public monuments or should artists and curators seek new ways and forms by which our relationship to place, identity and history is thought, expressed and recorded? Is it not the task of the avant-garde in art to redefine tradition and to offer alternative tropes and paradigms for talking about place?

References

Burgin, Victor (2011). ‘Facing history’, in Suspended Spaces No. 1 – Famagusta (pp. 146–55), Paris: BlackJack Éditions.

Carver, Raymond (2003 [1981]). What We Talk about When We Talk about Love, London: Vintage.

Coblence, Francoise (2011). ‘Anamneses’, in Suspended Spaces No. 1 – Famagusta (pp. 156–65), Paris: BlackJack Éditions.

Constantinou, Costas M. (2008). ‘On the Cypriot state of exception’, International Political Sociology 2: 145–64.

Demetriou, Olga (2007). ‘To cross or not to cross? Subjectivization and the absent state in Cyprus’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (December) 13(4): 987–1006.

Fijen, Hedwig (2006). ‘Foreword’, in Notes for an Art School (pp. 4–5), Amsterdam and Manifesta 6 in Nicosia: International Foundation Manifesta.

Franke, Anselm (2006). ‘The grudge’, in A. Vidokle & T. Zolghadr (eds), I Can’t Live Like This (pp. 14–17), Printed Project 6. Available at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/13459942/Printed-Project-6---I-Cant-Work-Like-This----Anton-Vidokle-and-Tirdad-Zolghadr (accessed 30 November 2012).

Gregos, Katerina (2005). ‘Getting to know the other side’, in Leaps of Faith: An International Arts Project for the Green Line and the City of Nicosia, Cyprus (pp. 10–5) (exhibition catalogue), Istanbul: Kolektif Production.

Kosova, Erden (2005). ‘Cowboys and Engels’, in Leaps of Faith: An International Arts Project for the Green Line and the City of Nicosia, Cyprus (pp. 30–2) (exhibition catalogue), Istanbul: Kolektif Production.

Lageira, Jacinto (2011). ‘History as art’, in Suspended Spaces No. 1 – Famagusta (pp. 98–9), Paris: BlackJack Éditions.

Loizos, Peter & Pellapaisiotis, Haris (2009). ‘Walking Narrative’, translit. H. Pellapaisiotis, an unpublished A.V. project by H. Pellapaisiotis to which P. Loizos contributed (originally ‘Urban walker’ first shown as part of ‘A change of air’ exhibition, Kulturraustauschprojekt/LADEN Düsseldorf.

Nikita, Eleni (2009). ‘Cypriot art 1950–1980: spatial-temporal context towards a new reading’, in A. Michael (ed.), 1960–1980: Discourse with Contemporary Trends in Art and the Quest for Identity (pp. 13–19), Limassol: Evagoras & Kathleen Lanitis Foundation.

Papadakis, Yiannis (2010 [2005]). Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide, London & New York: I.B.Tauris.

Parfait, Françoise (2011). ‘An experiment in off-centering’, in Suspended Spaces No. 1 – Famagusta (pp. 166–75), Paris: BlackJack Éditions.

Sant Cassia, Paul (2005). Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of the Missing Persons in Cyprus, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Sebald, Winfried G. (2002 [1998]). The Rings of Saturn, London: Vintage Books.

———(2011). Patience (After Sebald), translit. H. Pellapaisiotis from W.G. Sebald in conversation with unspecified interviewer taken from the documentary directed by G. Gee, Artevents Ltd/UK Film Council.

Ş enova, Basak & Paraskevaidou, Pavlina (eds) (2011). ‘Foreword’, in Uncovered, Nicosia International Airport, Book 1, Nicosia (unidentified publisher).

Σταυρίδης, Σταύρος [Stavridis, Stavros] (2002). Από την Πόλη Οθόνη στην Πόλη Σκηνή [From the City as Screen to the City as Stage], Αθήνα [Athens]: Ελληνικά Γράμματα [Ellinika Grammata].

The Economist (2004). ‘Erdogan’s gamble: a shift on northern Cyprus may help Turkey’s European ambitions’, Ankara – from print edition 15 January 2004. Available at http://www.economist.com/node/2354543 (accessed 30 November 2012).

Time Magazine (2003). ‘Engineering an open line – Serdar Denktash’, in ‘The Cyprus conflict’ (June). Available at www.cyprus-conflict.net (accessed 30 November 2012).

Toumazis, Yiannis (2006). ‘Foreword’, in Notes for an Art School (pp. 95–6), Amsterdam and Manifesta 6 in Nicosia: International Foundation Manifesta.

UN Protected area Cyprus (2011). Nicosia International Airport Uncovered. Available at http://www.uncovered-cyprus.com/ (accessed 30 November 2012).

UN Security Council (1992). ‘Paragraph 11 of the Secretary-General’s report (S/23780)’, 3 April 1992. Available at http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/Cyprus%20S23780.pdf (accessed 30 November 2012).

Vidokle, Anton (2008). ‘Night school opening remarks’. Available at http://www.newmuseum.org/assets/general/nightschool/Anton_Vidokle_Night_School_Opening_Remarks.pdf (accessed 16 April 2009). This link is no longer available although its existence is documented on http://www.123people.de/s/anton+vidokle

Zincir, Rana (2005). ‘Introduction’, in Leaps of Faith: An International Arts Project for the Green Line and the City of Nicosia, Cyprus (exhibition catalogue), Istanbul: Kolektif Production.

TWELVE

The Archive as a Space for Negotiating Identities: Defying ‘Cypriotness’ in the Work of Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayiotou

Elena Stylianou

‘As a woman I have no country

As a woman I want no country

As a woman my country is the whole world.’

(Woolf 2003: par. 23)

When Virginia Woolf was writing about being a woman, she was also making a case about a more general sense of exclusion constructed from within foundations of ‘otherness’ and difference. However, in addition to non-belonging Woolf was here referring to an alternative form of identity that is not shaped by conventional forces, such as those of the family or the nation. Instead, Woolf ’s claim transcends such traditional categories by the imagined inclusivity in the whole world (Nava 2002). In a condition of metaphoric exile as the consequence of her sense of exclusion by being a woman, she positions herself in another space: in the whole world. In Woolf’s imagination, the notion of the ‘nation’ or of any geographically restricted location is transformed and mutated into a boundless world; a space that in its openness a priori allows for constant transitions ignoring identity constructions specific to existing social or political codes. Virginia Woolf’s sense of ‘worldliness’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’ (the two terms although different are here used interchangeably) is a product of her state of non-belonging, and in this way, an underlying state of un-placement also always co-exists. Thus, one cannot possibly look at cosmopolitanism (as a sense of worldliness or of being in and of the world) as an idealistic position, despite its romantic allusion toward universality and a world without borders. A simplistic adoption of the term remains inadequate in its vagueness to explain the ways in which individual or plural identities and a sense of belonging have been historically defined and transformed, or the ways in which the term defines and shapes contemporary artistic identity today.

This chapter will focus on the work of the Cyprus-born artists Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayiotou as examples of artists who although coming from the ‘periphery’ of the art world – an island in the Mediterranean – have become an integral part of the international art scene, always travelling and working in the in-between of large metropolitan cities. Concentrating specifically on their work with archives, the chapter will unearth issues relevant to a process of constructing one’s sense of artistic identity, which attempts to remain distinct from a particular home and closely connected to the notion of the ‘cosmopolitan’ artist. At the same time, the chapter will look at various historical examples in order to discuss ‘cosmopolitanism’ as a problematic term and a signifier of the politics of exclusions (rather than inclusions) within contemporary artistic communities. These artistic communities, even though ‘international’, ‘trans-national’, and ‘cosmopolitan’, mostly remain salient to Westernized aesthetic standards and criteria demanding artists to comply. Defying one’s sense of locality, although necessary within this framework, might also be misleading. What both Epaminonda and Panayiotou’s work brings about is the necessity for a shift toward a ‘new’ postmodern understanding of ‘cosmopolitanism’ as one which blurs the traditional categories of the inside and the outside by accepting both as existing and valid. The archive here becomes the means for achieving the end. More specifically, in the work of both artists the archive becomes an open space for challenging the ordering of knowledge, while simultaneously it also fails to neutralize those narratives that are relevant to the artists’ locale. In the end, the work of both artists points to the complexity of changing notions of identity in contemporary art practice and to the necessity of understanding ‘cosmopolitanism’ within a framework of constant negotiations between the local and the global/ international.

The Archive as an Open Space

‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory’ says Jacques Derrida in his Archive Fever (1996: 10). According to him the word archive derives from the Greek arkhē, which names at once two principles: of commencement and of commandment. The name arkhē refers to the point where all human things, history or nature commence – the beginning of everything. But, it also names the principles, the laws, ‘there where authority, social order are exercised . . . this place from which order is given’ (Derrida 1996: 1). Based on Derrida the archive also relates to the archons, the wealthiest and most privileged among all Greeks who commanded and held the privilege to make or represent the law. They safeguarded the official documents in their houses, which gave them the political power to form and to (re)-interpret the archive. In both approaches to the understanding of the archive, situated in the word’s Greek etymological origins, Derrida affirms that the archive is not only politically charged but also powerful in shaping history, values, principles and the law. In his opinion, it is only in democratic societies that one is allowed the opportunity to question or challenge the archive and its constructions. Derrida proclaims that, ‘[e]ffective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and its interpretation’ (1996: 10).

This power of the archive to affect the commands and to define the commencement of human experience has excited many artists who have repeatedly attempted to challenge and appropriate archives. Hal Foster (2004) has described this as an archival impulse. For Foster, it is the opportunity to discover and to re-make historical information, as much as the openness of an archive’s non-hierarchical spatiality that inspires artists. Indeed, both elements can be sources of great enthusiasm for artists. The possibility of creating new narratives through re-arranging old ones is as appealing an option as the lack of a particular structure, since classification systems are either non-existent, suffering from mis-organization, or ordered around fixed sets of categories prone to criticism. Foster’s observation that artistic work in the archive can in cases become ‘a gesture of alternative knowledge or counter-memory’ (2004: 4) explains artists’ motivation and describes the nature of their practice.

In the case of the two Cypriot artists considered here, the possibility of constructing alternative knowledge or counter-memory also seems to be the driving force for much of the work undertaken in or with archives. Epaminonda, on the one hand, is endorsing the power of the archive by the mere practice of creating her own collections: archives of found images that she then reassembles in collages, frames in clusters, or animates in video sequences. At the same time, she is undermining any archive’s claims to authority or accuracy through these exact juxtapositions of arbitrary and discarded material. Panayiotou, on the other hand, explores existing archives in his native country, Cyprus, to unearth themes rarely discussed and scarcely noticed. In both cases, the artists become a type of archaeologist, excavating narratives lost or hidden. In Epaminonda’s work these narratives connect with those stories left in the margins of historical records: images in lost books that she finds in markets, and objects detached from the context that originally would have placed them as part of a particular discourse or history. Panayiotou works in an almost contrary manner by directly looking at the official statements – at the place where the first laws or principles deciphering the character of a nation are safeguarded. Panayiotou turns his gaze and explorations toward the arkheion (archive), as that ‘place’ where according to Derrida, authority and ‘social order are exercised’ (Derrida 1996: 1). By doing so, the artist maintains a direct political dialogue with the mechanisms and rationality that have shaped Cyprus, the island’s memory and national character, and by extension Panayiotou’s own inherited values. A closer look at the archival work of these artists reveals their intentions, but most importantly it becomes an entry point for further discussing the formation of artistic identity in relation to the demands of a ‘cosmopolitan’ art world.

Haris Epaminonda: Constructing New Worlds

In the summer of 2010, the young Cypriot-born and Berlin-based artist Haris Epaminonda presented her work at the Level 2 Gallery of Tate Modern in London. Her work was entitled Volume VI and formed part of her ongoing series, Volumes, an extension of which was recently also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The exhibition at the Tate Gallery consisted only of a limited number of found objects and images, or photo pages from books that Epaminonda has been collecting with diligence and meticulous attention from her travels and various markets. In an earlier interview she describes her practice by saying:

    I always cared for discarded things. If nothing else, they offer a past; continuing a faint memory of what is no longer. Disembodied objects, reflecting the absence of the living thing, implying the presence of the more solid, that which once ‘was’ here, there – at least somewhere.

(Epaminonda 2005)

Epaminonda, intrigued by the mysterious outlook of all those objects that seem to have lost their origin, pays attention to the multiple ways in which they might gain a new existence and a new meaning by being part of constructed archives. Her work is not just about collecting, but it also has an element of archiving. This is revealed by the manner in which she pairs or groups her found material in order to organize gallery installations, the way her earlier collages are created from images found in 1950s and 1960s nature and travel magazines, and in the way that she selects and crops footage located from television soap series of the 1960s to create yet another form of collage, this time cinematic. This is also evident in her approach to titling or numbering her projects in sequences: Volume I, Volume II and Volume III exhibited at the Malmö Konsthall in 2009 as parts of the same show, and Volume VI at the Tate Modern. Each time she exhibits one of her volumes this is numbered based on a consecutive order as if adding to an existing archive of already-made categorizations. At the same time the word volume is a reference to a collection, comparable to old encyclopaedias, signifying the existence of a large quantity of information organized together following very specific criteria. It also stands as a metaphor for the significance of this material: it is of volume. A further display of such volumes positions Epaminonda’s work in close proximity to the historic displays of ‘attractions’, reminiscent of the first cabinets of curiosities; the Wunderkammer. Epaminonda seems interested in the feeling of wonderment and curiosity activated by such displays in the museum, which in its turn can be seen as another constructed archive that has the power to commence and to command.

Her practices echo artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Mark Dion who have also addressed the issue of ordering of knowledge and its legitimating by museums (Gibbons 2007). Her practices are especially reminiscent of Broodthaers’ The Museum of Modern Art: Department of Eagles, which developed within a wider framework of protest against institutional control over culture in the late 1960s and called attention to the ‘absurdity and rigidity of classification systems’ (Gibbons 2007: 121). Broodthaers’ humorous yet caustic gathering and display of objects, all relevant to eagles from different times and contexts, demonstrated no classificatory coherence according to Gibbons (2007). This reminds Epaminonda’s more recent archival practices: Volumes being one such example. In Volume VI, the display exhibited at the Tate Gallery, Epaminonda brought together image-pages from old books or magazines carefully cropped and framed, along with objects from around the world that she has collected from antique markets. Wooden carvings, statuettes and vases are displayed on self-designed painted pedestals and plinths in a shade of white or eggshell grey. These objects, although looking as if related, are disparate from each other and completely stripped from their original context (Tate Online 2012). Epaminonda arranges them in clusters at different locations in the gallery space and in ways that evoke a dynamic dialogue between these objects and the framed images.

A cluster of objects – placed on plinths and on the floor (Figure 12.1) – is displayed in a small, enclosed corner room constructed inside the gallery space with one side open for the viewer to observe. It looks like a window display but without a window, allowing the onlooker to lose himself in what seems to be a representation of an unknown, imaginary location. The objects and images which make up this gallery corner do not direct to a particular reference, although they might allude to a place slightly exotic: small wooden carved statues, an open book whose two pages are of a photograph of a rocky landscape, a small rug on the floor, three old weighing scales of difference sizes – two on the floor and one on a pedestal – are all in various hues of brown. Towards the back, another framed image of a mountainous landscape, this time black and white, is hanging on the wall above the installation and two more framed images are casually resting on the floor below. These frames, together with some of the objects on display, are not here for the viewer to closely observe – at least not as isolated artefacts. The view is often obscured and there is not enough space for one to move around or through this cluster but it is clear that these objects are part of the same art piece. Their colours, textures and materials, in addition to their placement in the confines of this space and formed in a cluster, create the impression that they all belong to the same place; one that is distant from the viewer both in time and location. Nonetheless, they are not isolated from the rest of the exhibition space. Instead, all of the displays relate or connect to this cluster, equally in their feature as found material, and in their reference to an unknown, imaginary location created by discarded and otherwise unrelated elements.

Figure 12.1 Haris Epaminonda, installation view of ‘Untitled #05 t/c’, 2010, as part of ‘VOL. VI exhibition’ at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London, 2010. Credit: Tate, London 2012

On another wall of the gallery space, a black and white image of a waterfall from a found magazine – the only indication of its previous reference is its page number, 57 – is paired with a coloured image of two tribal men. Their specific tribe is signalled to the expert eye by their haircut, the practice of painting or tattooing part of their faces from nose to neck, and their jewellery (Figure 12.2). The firmness with which the two men are holding onto their wooden sticks creates the impression that they have been walking their land with the assistance of these sticks for a long time, as possibly their ancestors did before them. The rather flat yet fertile landscape of the background could misleadingly locate them anywhere and at any historical moment. The only clue to the image’s genuine context is perhaps the pair of trousers and belt slightly showing on the second man, indicating that this photograph is more contemporary than initially thought, whereas hints of colonialism are also raised vaguely. The slightly tinted, yellowish paper on which this image is printed and its semi-matt surface are either the result of passing time or of artistic intention and prompt the viewer of the existence of the photographer and his or her aim to create a specific impression. The shot of the two men is close enough to assume that the photographer was not too far away, while the bearing of the men, standing, staring at emptiness or at something in the far distance, seemingly engrossed in their thoughts and experiences of the landscape create an image almost romantic. It is this type of mood that alludes to the romanticized colonial gaze, which along with the fashion of trouser seams and belt, plus the colours and technique of the photograph could further situate this image anywhere between the 1950s and the early 1970s. Although the images of the waterfall and the two men might be taken from the same magazine since the quality of printing looks very similar, the coloured one is better preserved and looks newer than the second. Moreover, the coloured page looks cropped compared to the second. Its page number is missing and the onlooker can only surmise what previously lay on both sides of the page and in front of the initial photographic gaze.

Figure 12.2 Haris Epaminonda, installation view of ‘Untitled #01 t/c’, 2010, framed found images (diptych), as part of ‘VOL. VI exhibition’ at Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern, London, 2010. Photo credit: Andrew Bruce, London. Artwork credit: Haris Epaminonda and Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul. Private Collection, Zürich

Epaminonda’s decision to place these two images together is telling of her interest in constructing narratives. The image of the two men is placed on the left and the image of the waterfall is on the right, creating an immediate dialogue between the two photographic subjects. The waterfall becomes an extension of the landscape of the image on the left and the two men appear as though they are staring at the waterfall. In a sense, Epaminonda is providing a possible answer to the viewer’s question ‘What are they looking at?’ The intense gaze and contemplative look of the two men is almost justified by this juxtaposition. The artist’s combinations, selections, and decisions regarding the final display of her found material, shape a visual structure that calls to mind the basic ways in which language is used: pieces (words) are put together to create a sentence and sentences are put together to develop a story. Taking this into consideration, one can better understand the reasons why she also describes her installations as ‘sentences’. Epaminonda in a conversation with Francesca Cavallo comments: ‘I see the connections and associations formed between the elements more like as in a poem, where words form sentences, and meaning is evoked without the need for immediate translation’ (Epaminonda as cited in Cavallo 2011). The lack of any form of explanatory text that would support, contextualize, or interpret her practices intensifies the viewer’s feeling that the task of interpretation is left to him/ her. The objects and the pedestals on which the objects are ‘exhibited’ are all vital to the way one might start reading the work, which relates to the classification systems of knowledge and to the museum’s role in this process.

Avoiding identification of the origin of each object or book page becomes part of the artist’s attempt to create new associations by adopting and simultaneously undoing conventional notions of the gallery space and of the museum display. Certainly, her displays might be mistaken as echoing ethnographic collections of the past or anthropological gatherings of ‘data’ from distant lands, once uncritically characterized as exotic and ‘savagely beautiful’ (Wilson-Goldie 2010: 126). However, on closer inspection, Epaminonda’s installations are trivial and almost indifferent to these traditions. Yet, they are not entirely dismissive of institutional critique, which reminds of Foster’s description of artists’ archival projects. He specifically says:

    archival art is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps ‘anarchival impulse’ is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.

(Foster 2004: 5)

Foster’s reference to an ‘anarchival impulse’ is interesting here as is his acknowledgement of the openness of such projects that can become a point of departure for reconstructing narratives. Epaminonda is an example of an artist, who in the process of archiving found material, discovers a means for re-constructing new narratives not only in relation to the museum display and the ethnographic collection, but also about her self. Rarely creating anything that directly references her locale, Epaminonda seems instead to belong to these exact imaginary locations, somewhere distant from us in both time and place. Even when cropping Greek soap movies in some of her videos, the references to her home country become lost in the process as she re-combines this material. To the naked eye her Cypriotness is nowhere to be found and Epaminonda seems reluctant to engage with it as an actual source for her work. One could, however, read this constructed exotic location as an indirect reference to her own country, that has also been historically exoticized by being in the margins of both the Western and the Eastern world, and which she acknowledges as having influenced her perceptions of the way she views things (Epaminonda as cited in Campagnola 2008). Consequently, it is not surprising that Epaminonda’s installations look the way they do. Cyprus is a small island: standing between the East and the West, a colony of many empires, wrecked by wars but rich in its long history, traditions, myths and archaeology, and whose most recent past is dense with absences and inconsistencies rather than informative references. Such a place can easily become a point of departure if not of reference for the artist’s aesthetic criterion, sense of curiosity, and love of narratives.

A similar level of sensitivity toward the construction of narratives is also revealed in The Infinite Library, a collaborative project between Epaminonda and the German artist Daniel Gustav Cramer. In this project, she does not react against any form of organization of knowledge; instead she adopts it as part of the creative process. In this way, she attempts to engage with complicated and charged issues, while at the same time suggesting that the means of constructing histories are barely neutral or truthful. Echoing Michel Foucault’s (2002 [1969]) convictions, The Infinite Library illustrates the immediate relationship between knowledge, power and subjectivity. Here the artists become the archons who gather and safeguard information, but who also organize it based on their own particular ways. This work exemplifies Epaminonda’s interest in the archiving process of re-organizing knowledge, while simultaneously she tries to remain honest to the dangers of any form of classification. In The Infinite Library the artists re-structure found books as repositories of knowledge and as archives of words and images, but most importantly of narratives and meanings. This shows the degree of liberty in organizing knowledge, and likewise, the fallibility of history as a singular grant narrative.

Libraries as archives could be read and re-arranged infinitely by using new combinations and associations, since their contents are often detached from the specificity of their origins. As Sekula argues, ‘in an archive, the possibility of meaning is “liberated” from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context,’ resulting in the archive becoming and serving as ‘a kind of “clearing house” of meaning’ (2003: 444–5). Infinite, the adjective of the art project, points to the degree of openness of any library in organizing, arranging and re-reading its contents, which subsequently offers the reader a type of multiplicity in engaging with the material and the meaning-making processes. This is particularly crucial in any process of understanding or defining a sense of ‘self ’. Unavoidably, the openness offered by the infinity of the archive’s content and hence its lack of boundaries, also evokes Woolf ’s initial desire for an infinite openness, translated as ‘cosmopolitanism’. Without boundaries or specific orientation, and with an infinite number of possible interpretations, there is no limit to the ways in which one could engage with a sense of identity. In theory, one could be anyone and anywhere. Whether this is ever practically possible or feasible is a discussion to which I will return later in this chapter by looking at historical examples of the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan’ identity.

Christodoulos Panayiotou: Re-Visiting Old Worlds

The same idea of openness or of infinite possibilities offered by the archive, in addition to the realization of the archive’s power to command and define ways of understanding one’s existence, are also deeply rooted in Christodoulos Panayiotou’s work. The Cyprus-born artist is currently living in the in-between of large exhibition cities, thriving on artist’s residencies and based nowhere in particular – at least not for a long period of time. Panayiotou, who recently earned the prestigious award The Future of Europe Prize by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig, Germany, is one of those artists who summon up the importance of travel. He lives where the art world exists and is always on the move. His work, nonetheless, is greatly shaped by his place of origin, Cyprus, into which he delves as if the country is a large archive, a memory bank of useful information. Cyprus ultimately becomes a resource for many of his projects, but one from which he often remains emotionally distanced. In a recent interview, Panayiotou affirms that experience and travel have trained him to observe at a distance and left him with an inability to participate in what he is observing. Yet, he acknowledges that his attention to details that remain hidden is itself a form of participation (as cited in Parpa 2011). In contrast to Epaminonda who creates her archives from discarded material, Panayiotou tends to focus on existing photographic archives and their established categories. Furthermore, he is interested in those minute particularities that have escaped the attention of the public sphere and/ or of the office that safeguards the archive, either by categorizing such photographs as irrelevant to the messages or narratives awaiting publication at the time, or deemed ‘faulty’ among the unknown photographer’s negatives. In general, he states that he is not interested in the process of archiving per se, but rather in revealing those ideologies that become apparent because of the archive’s failure to neutralize them (as cited in Parpa 2011).

A large part of Panayiotou’s artistic practice involves conducting research in the archives of the Press and Information Office (PIO) in Nicosia, Cyprus. The office, first established during British colonial rule in Cyprus toward the end of the Second World War, has served as the instrument for authoritarian propaganda throughout the years; either by the British or by Archbishop Makarios, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus after the island’s independence in 1960 (PIO 2012). In serving the ambitions of political forces until 1983 when the office was turned into a mainly public service place, the PIO has housed a large quantity of photographic and other material since 1960, which has remained safeguarded in the office’s archives (anything dated before 1960 was moved to the British archives). The PIO’s name itself exercises power as a vast archive of information that has been kept away from the public domain, or at least in the darkness. At the same time, the PIO also functions as a device for creating another type of archive through the process of press, which is circulated in the public sphere and has shaped public memory.

Panayiotou, in parallel with other artists, revisits this large archive in his attempt to ‘take on the position of a witness in the archive seeking to expose the control of memory on the part of institutions’ (Cross & Peck 2010: 129). He especially studies with diligence those photographs in the archive that often speak of the unknown photographer’s intentions and viewpoint and of the country’s interests and currencies at different time periods. He finds photographs that share common thematic content and arranges them in clusters that he usually presents either in the form of framed photographs or of slide show projections. He titles these photographic groups as a series of inventions: The Invention of Antiquity (2011), The Invention of Folklore (2011) and The Invention of Tradition (2011). The terms antiquity, folklore and tradition are indicative of his interest in exploring and challenging this language as decidedly problematic, highlighting the concepts as constructions. As such, they should never be taken for granted or accepted a priori. Here, Panayiotou unearths processes of inventing historical and political narratives by means of photography that is informed by authoritarian intentions. He also invents different types of stories through his grouping and exhibition display of these photographs, raising questions similar to the ones Sekula probes on photography: ‘How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs? What futures are promised; what futures are forgotten?’ (Sekula 2003: 444). These questions, according to Sekula (2003), refer to the ways in which photography creates an imaginary economy, but they are also questions which are often left unanswered if not entirely uninvited, especially when it comes to a photographic archive. Panayiotou’s work fully acknowledges the ways in which photographic archives, such as the one at the PIO, can form (or invent) particular social and historical memory through a process of selecting and organizing specific images according to a set of subjective criteria.

In the series of photographs titled The Invention of Antiquity (Figure 12.3) Panayiotou selects those that depict several governmental officials, such as politicians, priests and/ or military officials, while interacting with artefacts at the Archaeological Museum in Nicosia, sometime around the 1960s. Two sets of photographs are of specific interest. In the first set, these officials surround a small sculpture of Venus and in the second, they stare at a larger young Hellenistic male sculpture. In each case the photographer faced the museum visitors, thus capturing their faces and inevitably the back or the side of what they were looking at: the ancient sculptures. The juxtaposition of the sculptural body – as a remnant of the humanism of the Greek and Roman republic – and of the officials who were the initiators and pioneers of the Cyprus republic at the time the photographs were taken, is telling of how Cypriot identity and recent history have been formed and influenced by these two forces: the military and the Church, both acting as part of the political.

Figure 12.3 Christodoulos Panayiotou, installation view of ‘The Invention of Antiquity’, 2011, black and white print, as part of ‘I. L’achat du cuivre 13 mai – 28 juillet 2012, II. Rapporter le monde au monde 1 juillet – 28 juillet 2012’, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Brétigny, Paris, France. Photo credit: Aurélien Mole, 2012. Artwork credit: Christodoulos Panayiotou and Rodeo, Istanbul (images sourced from the Press and Information Office, Nicosia)

At the same time, this juxtaposition conveys the aspirations of those first officials to create a true republic, a democratic state built on the foundations of Western – and more notably of Greek – ideals and values. The desire to maintain a deep connection with Greece and to safeguard the island’s Greekness, as shown by the displays in the Archaeological museum, was inevitably doomed to fail in accommodating those minority groups that were part of the republic. Later historical events would prove this failure. The early and mid-1960s conflicts between the two most dominant communities on the island, Greek and Turkish Cypriot, the 1974 Turkish invasion and the subsequent partition of the island into ‘north’ and ‘south’ – a still pressing problem – exemplify the ills of these early infusions of a sense of Greekness into Cypriot identities, as much as their nature as mere inventions rather than accurate representations of the then newly founded state. Although it is unknown whether the photographer was aware of the power of these juxtapositions, Panayiotou appears to be more attuned to the particularities of the events depicted in these photographic sets. Other connections can also be drawn from these two sets of photographs when considered in relation to the present. The act of gazing on the male and female ideal nude of ancient times by individuals who currently personify conventionality, orthodoxy, conservative values and nationalism (again the military and the Church) is paradoxical, thus emphasizing the stark difference between the viewer and the viewed, as well as between what they represent.

In his work, Panayiotou unearths narratives or ‘underlying currents of power’ (Sekula 2003: 445) that might otherwise be difficult to detect. Sekula argues that such currents can only become visible ‘through the shock of montage’ (2003: 445), although any photographic exhibition always retains, reproduces and shares ‘both the authority and the illusory neutrality of the archive’ (2003: 446). The stories posed by any archive are by definition authoritarian since any type of system of classification is bureaucratic and the artist as curator in this case shares or adopts this form of authority (Sekula 2003). Panayiotou seems fascinated by the degree of such authority, which in these cases he does not refute or refuse, as is often the case with museum curators who want to maintain neutrality and an unbiased eye. Instead, the artist embraces the authority to re-arrange, select and present fragments of an existing official archive, and in this process, to problematize the more general conviction regarding the linearity or accuracy of historical records and the more specific history of the island to which these photographs refer. By doing this, Panayiotou problematizes his own roots and establishes himself as the authority to define his own history, sense of belonging and ultimate forces that might or might not shape him as individual. So, despite his arguments that he is just a distant onlooker, a cartographer of narratives already existing in the official archives, his selections, groupings and new-formed narratives are greatly influenced by his own understanding of Cyprus and the island’s culture and values. In a way, these photographic sets reflect the artist’s own interpretations of the island’s histories and the artist unavoidably can never possibly remain distanced in this process. Certainly, the degree to which one can define whether it is the images that reveal to him or the other way around – the artist imposing his own narratives onto the images – is difficult to identify. It is instead a two-way dynamic relationship between the artist and the image.

Viewed in this light, the official archive becomes a space filled with possibilities relevant to the potential readings of the history of the island, but also of the history of Panayiotou himself and the ways in which he relates to this island. In an earlier work titled I Land (2010), Panayiotou collects 160 images from the period when Archbishop Makarios III held office (Figure 12.4). I Land is the third of a series of works with similar ambiguous titles: the first is Wonder Land – based on photographic archives from the carnival in Limassol, Cyprus – and the second is Never Land – based on the archives of one of the most prominent newspapers of the island, Phileleftheros. In I Land, Panayiotou focuses on those uncaptioned photographs saved in the archives of the PIO and discovered alongside the official images of the then president of Cyprus, which mark the early years of the Cyprus republic. These are images that are rarely of the president. The images instead are of things and people that the photographer deemed interesting while being on a mission to trace the steps of the official persona. The title of the piece, I Land, is what is most fascinating here. Beyond being a direct reference to Archbishop Makarios’ own claim that ‘He was Cyprus’, and to the man’s actual impact on international opinion and on the politics of the island, I Land, can also indirectly reflect the artist’s own intentions. The viewer, for instance, could initially read this as an attempt by the artist to define himself as being the land or being of the land that these photographs record. But then, the act of placing the word ‘land’ immediately after the pronoun I indicates that one could also read ‘land’ as a verb: a type of action. Panayiotou here performs rather than portrays. Not only does he unload a series of hidden narratives (land as bringing to or unloading on land), but he also arrives (land as arriving at a place or condition) in a sequence of understandings through his research in the archives.

Figure 12.4 Christodoulos Panayiotou, installation view of ‘I Land’, 2010, 160 black and white slides, two synchronized slide projectors, Cubitt, London. Photo credit: David Morgan, 2010. Artwork credit: Christodoulos Panayiotou and Rodeo, Istanbul (images sourced from the Press and Information Office, Nicosia)

Interestingly, it is through this exact work of communion between the artist, the archive and Cyprus’ history and memory that the artist has gained increased prominence in the international art world. So, although he indeed exists in a state of in-between and of being in and of the world, Panayiotou retains a close connection to his country, the readings of which could never have been possible if he was from elsewhere. This leads to an urgent need to further investigate this recorded tendency of contemporary artists, including Epaminonda and Panayiotou, toward a sense of ‘cosmopolitanism’, as a sense of worldliness and being of the world, and which often remains indifferent to the term’s own complexities, compromising the importance of the influence of each artist’s origin and locale in art.

Defying Identity Boundaries

Although a better understanding of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ is beyond the aims of this chapter, an initial examination seems useful in order to illustrate comparable misleading assertions concerning universality and belongingness that many artists today might claim to experience or seek. These artists maintain that their sense of artistic identity is mostly defined by the fact that their work exists in the international art scene and is formed and informed by this framework and by their ability to exist, survive and excel abroad – or not at home; the latter is only a point of departure rather than return.

Historical writings by travelling intellectuals rooted in the philosophy of the Stoics and the Cynics insisted on putting a similar emphasis on the human subject rather than on one’s place of origin. They were the first to establish a notion of worldliness that reflected universal humanism and equality based on the human capacity to reason, emptying the notion of belonging from any romanticized sense of home (or return to that home). Zenon from Citium, Cyprus, declared that ‘there was no law, no compulsion, no council, no currency, no temples. All people, he argued, embody the divine spark and all were capable of logos’ (Fine & Cohen 2002: 138). Zenon imagined an ever-expanding circle of inclusions, which ultimately signalled the disappearance of the city-state by replacing the physically defined ‘territory’ with pure reason. In much the same way, Diogenes the Cynic replaced the enclosed spatiality of the city-state by claiming that ‘the only good government is that in the cosmos’ (Moles 1996: 107). Certainly, within such stated openness, a city-state’s physical borders dissolve into an undefined and apolitical space. ‘Where are you from?’ Diogenes was asked. ‘I am a citizen of the cosmos’ was the infamous response. Identifying himself as a citizen of the world, Diogenes almost claimed no responsibility or affiliation to the Sinopeans or the city, refusing to comply with its rules while at the same time being positioned as indifferent to any form of responsibility toward the city. So, being a citizen of the world is here a negative claim in relation to the laws, conventions, and the political life of the polis. Though Diogenes’ response continues to be a positive claim in relation to him, because he indeed did not dismiss the possibility of belonging – he did not after all claim, ‘I am not a citizen of any world’ or ‘I do not belong anywhere’– his sense of belongingness was based on the construction of his identity as being an outsider to the polis, yet an insider to the whole world in similar fashion to Virginia Woolf.

That said, one should not dismiss the fact that under the guise of reason, the Stoics produced a new class of ‘elites’. They were the people who did not belong to the rest of humankind because they did not live according to any law, thus attaining a level of reason unattainable to the ordinary. As Kristeva points out, ‘an elitism of the reasonable wise man was unfurled’ as a result (1991: 58). During the Enlightenment, philosophers and political thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempted to provide a new definition of worldliness through the concept of ethical cosmopolitanism. Turning the emphasis onto the human subject once again, by acknowledging the possibility to construct universal laws based on reason, ethical cosmopolitanism was ‘an intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity’ (Meeuf 2007: 741). Characteristically, ethical cosmopolitanism ‘was seen as a means of elevating an individual’s perspective above the provincial and nationalist views on world affairs’ (Papastergiadis 2007: 141). This was one of the reasons why travelling became increasingly important during the Enlightenment. Exchanges with others and understanding others had become an essential aspect of the education of travelling elites of intellectuals who saw themselves ‘living in the transnational “republic of letters”’ (Wollen 1994: 189).

Certainly, such ideals seem appealingly inclusive and concerned with difference, pitting against universal sameness. But, underneath this idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ still remains a Eurocentric and highly gendered project that when considered in relation to the contemporary art world and market leaves little space for optimism. In the end, the degree to which negating, negotiating or challenging and reforming one’s identity beyond national borders and within another formed space – the museum, the biennial, the art exhibition – fails to acknowledge: a) the impossibility of ever escaping the influence of those first borders within which one is born (after all, why would one strive to dismiss them if they are not still present and in the process of forming), and b) the limitations of the attempt to dismiss borders in exchange of others, yet constructed ones. This is not to say that Epaminonda and Panayiotou ignore the problematic nature of the border, existent and/ or constructed. On the contrary, their work seems to engage with sensitivity with these limitations – either in a more direct and conscious way as in Panayiotou’s case or in a subtler manner as in Epaminonda’s. Epaminonda specifically asserts: ‘I am interested in barriers as well as open access, an absence of any kind of blockade’ (as cited in Cavallo 2011) and the archive becomes for her this space that despite its apparent openness and potential is always of limitations. The archive is ultimately the space in which the artist can be simultaneously inside and outside: inside and sharing the forces that command and commence the organization of knowledge, and simultaneously outside of them by having the power to challenge these exact processes. In a way, the archive here becomes a metaphor for the art world which has always been an archival virtual space, expanding both in space and time, and of which one needs to always be both inside and outside.

Cosmopolitanism as an Illusive Turn

    No obstacle stops him, and all suffering, all insults, all rejections are indifferent to him as he seeks that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist but that he bears in his dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond.

(Kristeva 1991: 5)

A number of artists tend to migrate to art capitals, either to study or to exhibit, often losing communication with their place of origin or even deliberately getting rid of those elements that might connect them to a ‘parochial’ form of art practice, asserting and reinforcing instead the contemporary art practices of the centre. No one could ever possibly blame such artists for wanting to be of the international or global art community. Neither could one blame those artists who often accentuate conventional representations of national identities and cultural narratives and amplify ‘stereotypical differences’ (Wallis 1994), driven by assumed expectations of what they should be representing. At other times, artists from the ‘peripheries’ are often asked and/ or choose to be inside the global art world by taking part in its formation, while simultaneously remaining outside of it by being called to challenge its historical authority and constructed categories. This classification and organization of artistic practice as one of being either inside or outside the history of art has formed the art world as this vast virtual archive, defined, shaped and safeguarded by the archons of the art world: the curator, the critic, the art historian, the collector, but also the artist herself/himself.

Courbet, for instance, was one of those artists who throughout his life struggled with this binary, attempting to remain both an insider and an outsider in the art world. In his painting The Meeting (1854), the painter adopted the detail of the Legend of the Wandering Jew. The Wandering Jew impersonates the notion of the outsider, the stranger, the foreigner. The wandering principle is deeply inscribed in Woolf’s words, in the philosophy of the Stoics, and of many contemporary artists who constantly travel. In the painting, the artist as the outsider, the one whose destiny is to keep wandering, is presented meeting with the bourgeois man and his servant. Yet, the portrait of the artist is also of a peasant who wrapped up in vanity wants to conquer the art world in his own right. But before Courbet reached this stage and a later complete deterioration, finally dying of ‘alcoholism and political shell-shock’, there was a young Courbet, one who was still becoming, well aware of the difficulties of his choice ‘to live the life of the savage’ (Clark 1988: 24). In one of his letters to his patron Alfred Bruyas (the rich patron portrayed in The Meeting in the same place as the central bourgeois) in November of 1854 – the same year he completed his portrait as the Wandering Jew – Courbet wrote: ‘Behind this laughing mask of mine which you know, I conceal grief and bitterness . . . In the society in which we live, it doesn’t take much effort to reach the void’ (as cited in Clark 1988: 24). In a way, Courbet was familiar with the lack of a sense of belonging and his increasing torment was due to his desire to be of Paris and its art scene and simultaneously not of it. Kristeva further describes such experiences, similar to the one of Courbet, saying that:

    [o]ne who is happy being a cosmopolitan shelters a shattered origin in the night of his wandering. It irradiates his memories that are made up of ambivalences and divided values . . . Such a strangeness is undoubtedly an art of living for the happy few or for artists [emphasis added].

(Kristeva 1991: 38)

Kristeva’s description of the cosmopolitan wanderer, who is happy to exist in the strangeness of ambivalent memories and divided values – inside/outside, local/global, travelling/rooted and so on – also describes part of the archival practices of both Epaminonda and Panayiotou. While the archive in their work becomes the allegorical open space for the continuous re-structuring of knowledge through artistic intention and for building new narratives through artistic intervention, both of these artists’ sense of identity and belonging is not as distinct or isolated from their place of origin as it might initially appear. Epaminonda, for instance, constructs new fantasy worlds that are unrelated to an easily identifiable place, through the juxtaposition of found photographs, framed and displayed as objects, found artefacts displayed on plinths or on the floor, and video projections. In a sense, she is redefining the narratives of her self through that process, declaring that she is an artist of her own space and not one that belongs to or is owned by a place. Her work can speak to anyone at all places and times.

‘There is no such thing as a Cypriot art,’ asserts Panayiotou in a personal discussion, to double Epaminonda’s more silent convictions. Even though the initial understanding of this assertion assumes a negation of any art as ‘Cypriot’, on closer inspection it is a declaration that indicates a wider tendency of contemporary art: to defy boundaries, especially the ones that remain tied to a particular locale. It is also a declaration that illustrates these artists’ awareness that the description of art as ‘local’ or ‘global’ is yet another symbolic construction of the Western world (Panayiotou as cited in Parpa 2011) that functions similarly to the elitist notion of being of the world defined historically by the Stoics, the Cynics or the thinkers of the Enlightenment: in ways of exclusion rather than inclusion. In this sense, any notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the travelling experiences of contemporary artists today and which stands in a binary to any sense of local-ness (in this case, of Cypriotness) is not the result of the postmodern condition. Albeit the ease of travelling, the lack of clear geographical borders, the possibilities offered by technology and online communication and information systems, and a possibly more inclusive art world than that of the island from which these artists come, a sense of ‘cosmopolitanism’ is interconnected with – if not being the mere result of – a sense of exclusion that is historically relevant.

Indeed, there might not be an art clearly Cypriot, in the sense of sharing common characteristics or formal elements. However, art as a form of expression and the product of artistic intentionality contains the artists’ own convictions, biases, tastes and desires that could never possibly stay immune to their local-ness. This is not to argue for such an event in a pejorative manner; far from it. It is rather to argue that such influence is a reflection of the complexities of artistic identities, the necessity of maintaining a position of an insider/ outsider in the art world, and the importance of acknowledging an artist’s origins and roots as adamant in forming and informing particular art works. In effect, any sense of ‘cosmopolitanism’ or ‘worldliness’ has always been infused with a sense of individualism and locality, and any attempt to defy localness can be misleading if not dangerous in ignoring the subsequent effect of exclusion.

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