Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Abdülhamid’s photographers, scattered in all four directions, came back with the images of palaces and bathhouses, buildings and monuments, city squares and fountains. What mattered were the buildings, not the people. Even in those rare instances when the citizens and not the cities were photographed, people were almost always shown in studio settings. In Abdülhamid’s photo archives, İstanbul was depicted without the people of İstanbul.

How did they live, what did they eat and drink, what made them cry and laugh, those so-called “ordinary” people who lived in the past centuries? Who knows how diverse, how unlike each other, and in their unlikeness, how so very much the same they were? The Sultan’s camera eye didn’t capture these. It failed to record the sounds of the street, the encrustation of everyday life, those seemingly immaterial details that actually give a culture its vitality and distinctiveness…

Excerpt from Ebru: Reflections of Cultural Diversity in Turkey (Metis Publishing, 2007).