Travel Images Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire | Elisabeth Fraser

Ottoman History Podcast

E473 | For centuries, people have been documenting their travels with images, which purportedly function as visual evidence for someone’s experience far from home. This was no less the case for Europeans touring through Ottoman lands, who created a whole industry selling pictures from their time abroad. In this episode, Elisabeth Fraser explains how Western European artists at the turn of the eighteenth century began to create a new type of popular media, the illustrated travel volume. But these were not small guide books to tuck away in your pocket, they were large-scale luxury publications for the discerning armchair traveler. The enormous size and high production quality of these books and the accompanying images means that they were not the work of a single person but rather a large team of artists. Reflecting on these questions of authenticity, Dr. Fraser discusses how her research aims to take up a more nuanced view of the complexities of cross-cultural encounter. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/08/fraser.html Elisabeth Fraser is Professor of Art History at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where she teaches classes on art and travel, cross-cultural collecting, and global material culture. She has recently edited a volume of essays, The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean, and is currently writing a book on Ottoman costume albums and their relationship to European print culture, Dressing the Ottoman Empire: Early Modern Costume Albums and Transculturation. Emily Neumeier is Assistant Professor of Art History at Temple University. Her research concerns the art and architecture of the Islamic world, particularly of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. She is co-curator of our series on The Visual Past. CREDITS Episode No. 473 Release Date: 25 August 2020 Recording Location: Tampa, Florida Audio editing by Maryam Patton and Emily Neumeier Music: “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Rondo Alla Turca (Alaturka Remix)” by Allerletzte, 2016 & “Aebali” by Kostas Gadinis, 1940 Bibliography and links courtesy of Dr. Elisabeth Fraser available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/08/fraser.html