[Turkey]. - Lot 82

[Turkey]. SEBAH, Pascal. HAMDI BEY, Osman. DE LAUNAY. Les Costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Constantinople, Levant Times & Shipping Gazette, 1873. Three parts in an in-folio paperback volume (37 x 28.5 cm), (3)-319-VII pp. 74 plates, lithographed soft cover, green cloth spine (a few leaves slightly detached, some discreet foxing, minor soiling and corroded pages in the first few quires, edge wear, cover slightly soiled). Complete with plates of photographs by Pascal Sébah, printed in black phototypesetting, with printed ornate frames. Particularly rare first edition of this work published under the patronage of the Ottoman Imperial Commission for the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873. The text is by the painter Osman Hamdy Bey (1842-1910), appointed Ottoman commissioner to the Exhibition, and Marie(-Victor) de Launay, member of the Imperial Commission and the International Jury 1867 and 1873. The first part is devoted to European Turkey, including Greece, with 23 plates; the second to the "Ottoman Islands", including Cyprus, with 9 plates; the third to Asian Turkey, including Mecca and Lebanon, with 42 plates. Pascal Sébah (1823-1886), a French photographer of Syrian origin, worked in the Ottoman Empire, opening a studio in Constantinople in 1860, then a branch in Cairo in 1873. That same year, he produced these studies of types and costumes at the request of Hamdy Bey. These large-format shots, taken in his Istanbul studio, each show two or three people in their traditional costumes, and are first-rate testimonies. It seems that these images were never printed on albumen paper. These portraits are therefore known to us today only through the plates of this remarkable ethnographic and orientalist witness. Atabey, 551. Blackmer, 957. Colas, I, 523-524.