Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel
In 1896 the Ottoman sultan issued a decree that allowed Armenians—and only Armenians—to emigrate on the condition that they expatriate and never return to their homeland. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. More than a century later, Zeynep Devrim Gürsel encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives and began following the stories of the people they pictured—from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects, to the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants, and into the family albums of their children. An intimate history of one of the earliest uses of photography for border control and exclusion, Portraits of Unbelonging is an invitation to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times.
Stanford University Press
Publication Date: June 2026
