Between past and future ruins: Post-Ottoman Niš in the album of Knez Milan Obrenović

Abstract

While historians of Southeast Europe have recently increasingly turned to photographs as primary sources, this article reads a late 19th century photographic album not as an (objective) representation of a city, but as a carefully constructed visual narrative with afterlives of its own. The album, created upon the annexation of the city of Niš from the Ottoman Empire, produces multiple temporalities: the “recurring” and “timeless” national authenticity of the village, shown through costumes and church ruins, is contrasted with the images of the city, which the album constitutes as “old” and photographs as “future ruins.” The latter serves to establish a temporal break between the Ottoman past and the pending Serbian modernization project. Today, the album embodies two distinct afterlives. First, the Ottoman city—and the Empire itself—which the album proclaims “dead,” continues to live only as an object of photography. Second, the album today represents an afterlife of the foundational ideologies and images of post-Ottoman nation-making in and beyond Serbia. The two afterlives are not without contradiction: even though it is used to proclaim the empire “dead,” the album represents an ambivalent material afterlife of the empire in the present (Walton, 2019), while the ambivalence of photography as a medium itself opens avenues for readings beyond the prescribed.