Vintage Photography – Pascal Sebah

Pascal Sebah in Egypt

Vintage photography owes a great deal to the work of Pascal Sebah (1823-1886). There are few collections of vintage photography, amassed by the 19^th century Grand Tourists that do not include vintage photographs by Pascal Sebah or his son Jean Sebah. Vintage photographs, whether sumptuous studio portraits of ornately dressed models, sharp images of middle eastern ancient ruins and it’s peoples, grand panoramas or everyday carte de visit, those signed P Sebah or J P Sebah are some of the most collectable vintage photographs available today.

Pascal Sebah was based in the capital of the 19^th century Ottoman Empire, Constantinople (now Istanbul), where he opened his first studio in 1857. Sebah quickly established a reputation for the quality of his photography and printing, thanks to his darkroom technician, the Frenchman, A Laroche. Two years later Sebah was recognised by the Parisian Societe Francaise de Photographie for his photography and was awarded his first medal.

Sebah’s studio photography is regarded as some of the finest studio photography of the period. Vintage studio photographs by Sebah, of attractive models, beautifully lit, wearing sumptuous costumes, probably owes much to his collaboration with the painter and statesman, Osman Hamdi Bey. Osman Hamdi Bey dressed and posed models for Sebah to photograph, later using the photographs as reference for his own Orientalist portraits.

When he was appointed as director of the Ottoman exhibition in Vienna in 1873, Osman Hamdi Bey commissioned Pascal Sebah to produce a series of photographs featuring elaborately costumed models for the album, Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie. Sebah earned a gold medal for his photography, from the Viennese organizers and another from Sultan Abdulaziz of the Ottoman Empire.

Later that year Sebah opened a photographic studio in Cairo, Egypt.  Here he continued to produce beautiful studio photographs and some of the most well known photographs of Egypt’s ancient ruins, landscapes and people. In 1878 Sebah received a silver medal for his photographs of Egypt and the desert tribes of Nubia, exhibited at the Paris Expo.

It seems impossible research these School of Egypt photographers without eventually discovering a puzzle and Pascal Sebah is no different. In 1883 Sebah suffered a stroke. Sebah’s son Jean was then too young to take over the studio, so Pascal’s brother, Cosimi, stepped in to manage it. When Jean Sebah took over the running of the business in 1890, just eighteen years old, he began to inscribe the photographic plates, J P Sebah, apparently placing his own initial in front of his father’s signature. Adding to the uncertainty of who photographed what and when, Jean entered into partnership that same year with Frenchman, Policarpe Joaillier, renaming the studio and signing much of their subsequent work, Sebah & Joaillier. Compounding the problem, in 1899 Sebah & Joaillier acquired the substantial stock of the photographic studio Abdullah Brothers. Abdullah Fereres was then the most famous photographic studio in Constantinople, bearing the title “Photographer’s To The Sultan”, a privilage that then passed to Sebah & Joaillier.

Pascal Sebah died in June 1886, aged sixty-three and was buried a Catholic in the Latin cemetery in Ferikoy, where Jean Sebah would also be interred in 1947.

Sam Scribbler

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
ÖZENDES, ENGIN From Sébah & Joaillier to Foto Sabah: Orientalism in Photography 1999 Yap? Kredi Yay?nlar?, Istanbul
ÖZTUNCAY, BAHATTIN The Photographers of Constantinople: Pioneers, Studios and Artists from 19th Century Istanbul 2003 Yap? Kredi Yay?nlar?, Istanbul

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