Formerly a British colony, the island of Cyprus is now a divided country, where histories of political and cultural conflicts, as well as competing identities, remain contested. Cyprus provides the ideal case study for this innovative exploration, extensively illustrated, of how the practice of photography in relation to its political, cultural and economic contexts both contributes and responds to the formation of identity. International contributors, representing diverse disciplines, draw from photography theory, art history, anthropology and sociology to explore how the island and its people have been represented photographically. They reveal how the different gazes – colonial, political, gendered and within art photography – contribute to the creation of individual and national identities and, by extension, to the creation and re-creation of imagery of Cyprus as place. The questions this book asks and the themes and arguments it follows apply also to other places characterized by their colonial heritage. The intriguing example of Cyprus thus serves as a fitting test-ground for current debates relating to photography, place and identity.
Table of Contents
Nicos Philippou, Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert & Liz Wells
The Colonial Gaze: Colonial Views, Postcolonial Theories
John Thomson: Through Cyprus with a Camera, Between Beautiful and Bountiful Nature
The National Geographic and Half Oriental Cyprus
The Political Gaze: Memory, Politics and the Construction of National Identities
‘Imagining Cyprus’: Photographic Exhibitions on Cyprus andtheir Reception in Greece, 1950s–80s
Pride and Prejudice: Photography and Memory in Cyprus
Developing Identity: An Autoethnography of the Turkish Cypriot Photographic Subject
The Gendered Gaze: Framing Gender and Other Constructions
En-gendering Cypriots: From Colonial Landscapes to Postcolonial Identities
Stavros Stavrou Karayanni
En-gendering a Landscape: The Construction, Promotion and Consumption of the Rock of Aphrodite
The Photographic Pietà: A Model of Gender, Protest and Spatial-Temporal Dislocation in Modern Cyprus
The Art Gaze: Contemporary Art Photography
Tracey Emin’s Photographs and Films of Turkey and Cyprus
The Art of the Buff er Zone
The Archive as a Space for Negotiating Identities: Defying ‘Cypriotness’ in the Work of Haris Epaminonda and Christodoulos Panayiotou
Liz Wells is a distinguished writer, researcher, teacher and curator in photography. Her publications include Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity (I.B. Tauris, 2011) and she is editor of The Photography Reader (2003) and Photography: A Critical Introduction (2009, 4th ed.). She is a Co-editor for the photographies journal and since 2010 she has collaborated on several projects with Cypriot curators. She is Professor in Photographic Culture at the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, UK.
Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is a photographer, visual sociologist and museologist. She is the co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus. She is an 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’.
Nicos Philippou is a photographer, visual ethnographer and author of the books Off the Map and Coffee House Embellishments. He is a Co-editor of Re-envisioning Cyprus. He is currently lecturing at the Communications Department of the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.