What the Camera Captured

I share a birthday with Abraham Lincoln, so I always perk up when I see an article about him. I also perk up because he was a great man, exactly the kind of statesman I recently wrote about.[1] What caught my eye was an article titled “The Problem with Abe Lincoln’s Face.”[2] Photography was making new demands of public faces, and Lincoln was downright unattractive. But he solved his problem by growing a beard – an image that is now “indelibly stamped in our minds.”[3]

Newfangled cameras were putting a premium on looks and giving people a new sense of being. As the article explains, photographs made people both more self-aware and more subject to scrutiny. Infinitely reproducible images amplified the effects. Although Lincoln had already benefited from Mathew Brady’s “commanding and dignified” studio portrait in 1860, the candidate added some self-help with his beard – and then won the United States presidency.[4] The rest is history, including emancipation (today is Juneteenth) and a still-unified United States (for now).

Photography, as a practical tool and form of art, came of age at the same time that Sayyida Salme did. The “age of pictures” was well underway by the time she got to Germany. Not only notable individuals, but also well-to-do families subjected themselves to photographic portraiture. We thus have a whole series of studio images of the new Ruete family, tracing the children from infancy to adulthood. As a pendant to her own writings, these precious snapshots add to the story of who this family was – or at least how it saw and staged itself.[5] It was my great privilege to share some of these images with the world for the very first time,[6] having received permission from my third cousin, Alexander von Brand, to include photos from his family collection in my books.

Had Sayyida Salme's story started a decade or two earlier, we would have no such imagery to stimulate our sensibilities[7] or capture the family’s bourgeois standing in society. Even after the finances dwindled, these family portraits must have been a priority: 1868, 1870, 1871, 1873, 1875 (perhaps for her trip to London), 1879 (after she started teaching Arabic lessons), 1884 (perhaps for the first return to Zanzibar), and sometime after 1885 (perhaps for the second return to Zanzibar).

Of all the images collected in my books, however, hers are the ones that truly animate our imagination. Especially the first ones, befitting a princess. That face, that marvelous attire! The abundant jewelry! The sumptuous headdress, and those finely draped textiles! Which begs the question: What percentage of Sayyida Salme’s name recognition, her fame, the fact that we still know her today, is directly attributable to her most iconic image, the one she used as the frontispiece for her Memoirs?[8] There she sits, adorned and assembled, looking you straight in the eye, inviting you to consider the royalty she came from and the regality she bore.

We have only this early series of images with her native attire. It was surely strange for her to put on Western clothes, but it was no doubt also strange for her to wear her native dress in the West – something that belonged to her, but was no longer really hers. These photos are undated, but must have been taken not long after she arrived with Heinrich in June of 1867. By the end of that year, she would have been showing signs of Antonie, who was born in March. Poised in a Hamburg studio, not in a Zanzibari palace, H.F. Plate[9] caught her on the cusp of transition, a liminal moment when it may have felt okay to feed into Western voyeurism – before her clothes became too associated with exoticism, before she was rendered more caricature than character. Even her husband seemed not to grasp the humiliation that came with her Oriental fashion displays:

Although I as yet had not the slightest sense for European music, the plan was for me to attend a major concert. For this purpose, I was advised to throw on my red shawl entwined with gold, which, you may recall, was a present from my dear brother M. from his East India trip, and let it hang like a burnoose. But oh, how I regretted that act, for we had hardly entered the great concert hall overflowing with people, when all eyes and opera glasses turned to my unfortunate person. I had no idea that this shawl would serve as a billboard, or I never in my life would have worn it across my shoulders. You can surely imagine how glad I was to finally leave. (Letters, p. 25)

Since there were so few exotic individuals to be seen in Germany at the time—relative to England and France—I suffered immensely during those first years. At parties, in theatres and concerts, I felt like I was under constant surveillance, which I found extremely vexing. My husband and I were taking a walk one day when some ladies drove by in a carriage. It was not enough for them to blatantly stare at us as they passed, but when I happened to turn around, I saw them both kneeling on the back seat to get a closer look. I later learned these ladies belonged to Hamburg’s “high-life.” Through experiences like this, I became so reluctant to be among people that I almost always rode in a closed carriage and turned down invitations whenever I could. (Letters, p. 20)

Sayyida Salme would have had no reason to publish her Memoirs if she had stayed in Zanzibar, and by the same token, we can also be quite sure there would have been no camera there to catch her in her prime. The princesses, as with the sarari in the harem, were strictly off-limits to the public, wearing masks at home and fully covered in the streets. As she recounts:

[An Arab woman] may be seen by only her father, son, uncle, nephew, and all her slaves. If she needs to appear before an unfamiliar man, or even speak with him, then the religion requires that she cover her head and body, especially part of her face, her chin and neck, and her ankles. (Memoirs, p.108)[10]

That was different for the Zanzibari Sultans. As with President Lincoln, they had a constituency to please and impress. Sultan Madjid appears to have been the first of the Al Bu Said dynasty to be photographed. There he looks timid, almost demure (Memoirs, p. 88). Does that reflect his personality or the newness of the medium? Perhaps it reveals a certain aniconistic reserve, not sure whether he is submitting to a form of idolatry or a mere mechanical process.[11] 

Madjid’s successor, Sultan Barghash, seems to have been a quicker study with experience abroad, a better friend of technology. His photographs present a more dignified face – and strikingly enough, like old Abe, he wears that dignity with the swath of a full beard. Indeed, as Sultan Barghash flexed his rule, photography was becoming a coin of the Zanzibari realm. But that is another story, perhaps for another blog post to come.

Let history surprise you; let her story inspire you – let her authentic voice speak to you.

Andrea Emily Stumpf, June 19, 2025

Photo credits:  Abraham Lincoln, from Wikipedia (Alexander Gardner 1863); Sayyid Barghash bin Said, from www.omanisilver.com (Maull & Co. London 1875).

[1] “The Qualities of a Statesman,” blog post on February 24, 2025.

[2] James Lundberg, “The Problem with Abe Lincoln’s Face,” from The Atlantic (April 10, 2025).

[3] Ibid.

[4] You can see most of the 130 or more photographs of “the most photographed American of the 19th century” at Wikipedia.

[5] Special attention was paid to the only son, Said, who later went by Rudolph. Although there was no real substance to the chatter about him as a successor to the Zanzibari Sultan, male privilege is nonetheless evident in the number of shots that the family had made of only him (Letters, p. 149).

[6] My Letters to the Homeland contains especially many family portraits.

[7] Compare, for example, the family with and without Heinrich in 1870 and 1871 (Letters, p. 122-23).

[8] Memoirs, p. ii. The original Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin was published in 1886. A framed photograph was later donated by her son to the Oriental Institute in Leiden. It now resides in the Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) at Leiden University.

[9] Heinrich Friedrich Plate (1824-95), whose studio in the 1860-70s was on the fashionable Jungfernstieg in Hamburg.

[10] She then adds: “Today I am quite willing to admit that these Oriental practices are excessive, but I am not yet ready to pronounce European customs superior. When a stately woman is seen here in her ball gown, one would be justified in deeming her paucity of clothing to be an even greater exaggeration.” (Memoirs, p. 109)

[11] There are no photographs of his father, the great Sayyid Said bin Sultan, whose untimely death in 1856 precluded the question.