Guillaume Berggren

Born: Pehr Vihelm Berggren
Other: Guillaume Gustaf Adolf Berggren
Other: Guillaume Gustave Berggren
Other: Wilhelm Berggren

Born: 1835, 20 March
Died: 1920
Gender: Male
Active: Turkey
 
Swedish photographer who worked in Turkey from 1866 onwards. He recorded the construction of the Anatolian railway and the inauguration of the Orient Express.

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Swedish photographer who started work as an apprentice carpenter in 1850. He left Sweden in 1855, learned photography in Berlin, and settled in Constantinople in 1866, opening a studio in the Grande Rue de la Pera in the early 1870s. Berggren combined studio work - portraits of travelers and dignitaries, with the option of posing in Turkish attire - with the sale of prints offering a range of Ottoman motifs. He photographed the street scenes and architecture of Constantinople, including all its mosques, and the landscapes, ruins, and major religious sites of the Bosphorus region. He also recorded developments and events such as the construction of the Anatolian railway, and the inauguration of the Orient Express in 1883. In the 1890s he made a remarkable series of documentary portraits of Constantinople's working people: bakers, street sellers, harbour workers, and prostitutes.
 
[Courtesy of Wolfgang Klotz, October 2011]