Donatossian is the most prominent local photographer working in Baghdad at the beginning of the 20th century. He is likely to have settled in the city during the 1890s, where he practiced his metier until the end of World War I. It appears that, for several years at least, he served as an official photographer to the Ottoman, and – after 1917 – the British administrations in Iraq. The work that he made outside of ordinary studio portraiture, such as his documentary chronicles of public events and projects, are the results of such state commissions. Among these ‘reportage’ series we can find various groups of photographs that depict military, political and industrial events such as the construction and ceremonial opening of the Baghdad railroad. Donatossian also made portraits of nearly all representatives of the local Ottoman and British governments, along with Baghdad’s elite Armenian families. His coarsely direct images served very practical ends and are devoid of the aestheticized demeanour and pictorialist tendencies of earlier Ottoman studio photography, which gives Donatossian’s photographs their prototypically ‘modern’ appeal.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016