Abdul Hamid II, the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was obsessed with crime-fiction. He was particularly fond of the Sherlock Holmes series, and personally invited Arthur Conan Doyle to his palace, just to give him a present. Hamid reigned from 1876 to 1909. He rarely left Istanbul, and instead commissioned photographers to report on the progression of his empire. One day, the sultan was reading a pseudo-scientific novel, which stated that any criminal with a thumb longer than the joint of their index finger was likely to murder. Approaching the 25th year of his reign, Hamid decided to celebrate with an amnesty. He demanded all murder convicts to be photographed with their hands on show, as a way to identify whether they should be freed.
“This really excited me, but I didn’t know whether these photographs still existed,” says Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, who first read about Hamid’s penchant for photography in the work of Reşad Ekrem Koçu, a Turkish writer and historian. In the mid-20th century, Koçu began compiling the Istanbul Encyclopedia: a dictionary of tales from the Ottoman Empire. Last year, to celebrate the digitisation of this work, Turkish contemporary art institution SALT invited three artists to interpret his work.
Gönenli was one of them, and went straight for the letter F, searching for an entry about photography (fotoğrafçılık in Turkish). There, she found a mention of Hamid’s photographs, which eventually led her to the rare items library at the University of Istanbul. Within his archive, she came across hundreds of photographs of prisoners, all posing identically. “I was stunned. Someone must have asked them to be photographed like this,” says Gönenli. She took copies of the images, and showed them to an expert in Hamid’s life, who revealed their true purpose.