A profound examination of how photographs can both sever and connect, tracing the paths of Ottoman Armenians across state and family archives.

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. The Ottoman state archived the photographs; the Armenian migrants received passports and left for European ports, most of them bound for the United States. Between 1896 and 1908, more than four thousand Armenians sat for such expatriation photographs. Almost two decades before photographs were attached to passports anywhere in the world, Ottoman Armenian expatriation portraiture is one of the earliest examples of the use of surveillance photography for border control.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel encountered these photographs in the Ottoman state archives in Istanbul, Turkey. Produced as documents of exclusion at a crucial moment in Ottoman and Armenian history, in Gürsel's hands they become invitations to learn from lives lived in radically uncertain times. Portraits of Unbelonging follows the stories of the individuals in these photographs over a century—from the bureaucratic files that unmade them as Ottoman subjects, to the ship manifests that tracked their migration routes and the naturalization records that documented their new lives as immigrants, and finally into the family albums and stories of their descendants living today. Written in conversation with these descendants, working across borders, Portraits of Unbelonging offers both a genealogy of the document-based global security regimes that govern citizenship and mobility today and an intimate history of unbelonging and belonging.

"With ethical sensitivity and clear storytelling, Zeynep Gürsel thoughtfully reflects on unbelonging and reintroduces human presence to images, lives, families, and futures once altered by a legal system aimed at enforced erasure. Compelling and emotionally impactful."—Bedross Der Matossian, author of The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century

"In this stunning book, Zeynep Gürsel intricately traces the connections between photography and expatriation, and between citizenship and transborder mobility. Written with care and shaped by a commitment to 'looking together' at an array of documents with the descendants of these early migrants, Portraits of Unbelonging repairs to wholeness scattered and fragmented histories. A methodological and conceptual tour de force."
—Sarah M.A. Gualtieri, author of Pathways to Syrian California

"A luminous and stunning work. The reader accompanies the author on a journey that unfolds as a brilliant and moving meditation on photography, citizenship, and belonging."
—Leti Volpp, coeditor of Legal Borderlands: Law and American Borders

"This brilliant book of photographic history is simultaneously a consummate act of scholarship and of repair. Zeynep Gürsel unfolds, image by image, the multiplicity of their concrete effects—and underlines the instability of citizenship, the power of family photographs, and the duration of longing for a home in a world of migration now even more 'at sea.'"—Laura Wexler, author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (2016) and the director of Coffee Futures (2009).