Precise biographical details regarding S. K. Harentz’ life and work have not been located. His surviving photographs suggest that Harentz ran one of the main photographic studios in Damascus, and counted among his clients members of the local Ottoman elites and European visitors and accordingly, the studio stamp was written in Ottoman, French and Armenian languages. The images that have reached us are primarily portraits made in an indoor pavilion and executed without individual flourishes, following the generally accepted standards of quotidian commercial photography of the day. One of his distinctive services offered by the studio to its foreign clients was the possibility of creating ethnographic ‘dress-up’ portraits. Fulfilling their orientalist fantasies, European tourists and diplomats could transform themselves with native costumes, becoming Bedouin girls or warriors. Harents’ studio appears to have closed sometime in the middle of the 1910s.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016