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Featuring over 100 colour images, this book explores the photographic self-representations of the urban middle classes in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s. Examining the relationship between photography and gender, body, space as well as materiality and language, its six chapters explore how the production and circulation of vernacular photographs contributed to the making of the modern Turkish citizen in the formative years of the Turkish Republic, when nation-building, secularization and modernization reforms took centre stage.
Based on an extensive photographic archive, the book shows that individuals actively reproduced, circulated and negotiated the ideal citizen-image imposed by the Kemalist regime, reflecting not only state-imposed directives but also their class aspirations and other, wider social and cultural developments of the period, from Western fashion trends and movies to the increasing availability of modern consumer items. Calafato also reveals that the freedom from state control afforded by personal cameras allowed the desired image to be sometimes tweaked by incorporating elements from Ottoman and Turkic traditions, by pushing the boundaries of gender norms or by introducing playfulness. Making the Modern Turkish Citizen offers a valuable portrait of the ongoing political and social changes on the lives of the Turkish middle class, and of how they saw and wanted to present themselves, privately and publicly.
BOOK TALK BY ÖZGE CALAFATO Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era
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Özge Calafato is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie at the intersection of photography, archives, memory and cultural identity. Since 1999, she has worked as a journalist, editor and translator focusing on photography, literature, music and film. Between 2014 and 2020 she worked as the Assistant Director for the Akkasah: Center for Photography at the New York University Abu Dhabi. She completed her Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, and her Master’s Degree in Journalism at the University of Westminster in London. From 1999 to 2007, she worked as a writer and editor for the Geniş Açı Photography Magazine in Istanbul. From 2008 to 2013, she was Programming Manager at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
Zeynep Gürsel will serve as the discussant. Gürsel is a media anthropologist and Associate Professor in the department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Her scholarship involves both the analysis and production of documentary images. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (University of California Press, 2016), an ethnography of the international photojournalism industry. Specifically she is investigating photography during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909) to understand emerging forms of the state and the changing contours of Ottoman subjecthood.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by April 12, 2023. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.
