Colonial negatives: The prohibition and commodification of photography in Sharifian and French Morocco

My dissertation reexamines the relationship between imperialism and visual culture through an analysis of photography in Sharifian and French colonial Morocco. I begin with a dramatic shift in Franco-Moroccan relations that came in the guise of a photography lesson in 1901 when Sultan Abd al-Aziz hired the French photographer Gabriel Veyre as his photography instructor. Although photography was invented half a century earlier, Morocco was the only country to ban it based on the interpretation of Islamic laws prohibiting certain uses of images until Abd al-Aziz decided to overturn this ban. I argue that the sultan used photography as a method of introducing European technology and modernity to his country and acted as an arbiter between an expanding European penetration and Moroccan tradition. My thesis offers a new interpretation of the relationship between the sultan and Europe in pre-colonial Morocco followed by the changes exacted upon Morocco by the French as well as the French responses to the colonial empire.;With the invention of the camera, the French government realized new methods of "objectively" studying colonies. While they originally relied upon photographers to document foreign lands throughout the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century photographs became common commodities. My study examines the commercialization of colonial imagery and the ways in which the French encounter with Moroccans shaped the photographic industry. In tracing the trajectory of such images from their production to their distribution, I demonstrate how colonial representations infiltrated France, created mass exposure to the empire in both the colonies and in the metropole, and the myriad interpretations of colonialism these representations offered. Although photography in Morocco originally served to aid the colonial project, I contend that it quickly took on new characteristics and served to complicate the traditional Orientalist discourse of the Maghreb in France. While most studies of colonial photography emphasize imagery that reinforces imperial ideology, my work integrates previously overlooked photographs in order to complicate the relationship between imperialism and photography. This dissertation examines how Moroccans created and circulated their own images and analyzes the ways in which Moroccan Jewish photographers acted as intermediaries between European and Moroccan conceptions of modernity.