Visual cultures of the Balkans and the Near East

The `pictorial turn` has had significant impact on the human, cultural, religious and social sciences since the middle of the 1990s. Theory construction has been primarily oriented towards the western world, which is due to the fact that all the innovations which the technically repeatable image (lithography, photography, movie, television, and digital image) is based upon have been invented in the West. This is why one of the primary aims of this volume is the enlargement of theory construction by a different point of view - the Balkan and the Near Eastern one. The point of departure as well as the central research question of the analysis is whether the Balkans and Near East, which constituted a joint space of communication since early history (chapter 1) generated a joint visual culture. This ambition is related to the question, in which ways this regional tradition (these regional traditions) amalgamated with western visual cultures. The author comes to the conclusion that the visual traditions of the two regions show differ-ences as well as similarities. The differences are religious by nature. Islam and Judaism, based on the Second Commandment of the Old Testament, refused the depiction of God and all the creatures created by him. The Orthodox Church, however, equalized the icon with the holy word. The most important similarities consist in the rejection of three- dimensionality and the viewer`s perspective. These elements differentiate the Balkans and the Near East as a whole from visual representations of Latin Europe (chapters 2-4). One of the book`s central theses is that it was only photography which opened the door to the visual cultures of the West. It was rejected only initially by Orthodoxy but until approximately 1900 by Judaism and Islam. Despite its delayed acceptance photography contributed significantly to the secularization of religiously based modes of viewing, on the one hand. On the other hand, this lack of interest opened the space for the unrivaled construction of images of the Balkans and the Near East by photographers of the West. Consequently, a second thesis is that photography played a significant role in essentializing of both the regions in the sense of Balkanism (Todorova) and Orientalism (Said) (chapters 5 and 6). Except the intermediate period of socialism (chapter 8), the mentioned processes of secular-ization have not resulted in secularized societies but only in semi-secularized ones. This can be exemplified by various indicators. Thus, for instance, the reception of western modes of visual culture constituted an elite-project (Balkans, Turkey) or was rejected (Arab world) (chapter 7) until the middle of the 20th century. Until now, digitalization has led to ambivalent results: On the one hand, it has been strengthening fundamentalist religious fractions; on the other hand however, the same fractions reject figurative representations (chapters 9 and 10).