Figure 1.-- This portrait was entitled "ZANGAKI ... No 559 DEUX GUERIERS d' AFRIQUE 518". It was probably taken in the 1870s to be sold in Euope. There was great interest in Europe about African as European governments conducted the Scramble for Africa.

I know very little about these two Greek photographers. Very little biographical detail is available for George and Constantine Zangaki, beyond the fact that they were Greek brothers who were originally associated with the French photographer Hippolyte Arnoux. Even their dates are unknown. They were active from the 1860s to the 1880s, principally in Egypt and Palestine, and they appear to have been based in Cairo, possibly with a branch in Port Said. They seem to have taken photograpgs of the region for sale to Europeans interested in both the lands beyond Europe that the Europeans were colonoing, lands and people Africa Asia and the Middle East. The Zangakis specialized in African and Middle Eastern photography. Some of the images are staged studio portraits, almost theatrically. Scrapbooking was very popular at the time and Euroopeans liked to put images like this into them. There were no movies at the time and technology had not yet been debrloped for reproducing photographs in magazines and books. This photographs were still a still rare way of seeing far away places and people. It was kind of an early effort of what the National Geographic would later provide. The Zangakis did not provide totally to true to life images, but then again they creative was not entirely fictious either.

African Images

There was great interest in Europe about African as European governments conducted the Scramble for Africa. The portrait here is portrait was entitled "ZANGAKI ... No 559 DEUX GUERIERS d' AFRIQUE 518" (figure 1). It was probably taken in the 1870s to be sold in Euope. Here the interest was on the primitive. As far as we know, the Zanggakis never traveled to Africa. There were, however, an Africa presence in Cairo. There had been an important slave market in Cairo. The British supressed the Indian Ocean slave trade. And as Britasin became involved in Egypt as a result of Suez, it supressed the slave trade in Egypt as well and moved against the slave trade in Sudan which at the time was a kind of Egyptian colony.

Arab Images

We also see images with Arab themes. Here the interest was different. The Arab lands included the Holy Lands. Religious people wereevery interested in scenes of the Holy Land. Wuith the Arabs there was also an interest in the exotic. That brought forward a whole genre of artistic endevor--orientalism. It was the exotic mixed with the sensational--harems and veiled women. The Zangakis capitalized on this in their Arab photographs. Many of the women in the Zangakis photographs are veiled. These were not creations. The veils depicted actually existed. We are not sure, however, just how common they actually were.

Created: 4:33 AM 12/3/2006
Last updated: 5:20 AM 4/20/2018