grey marble

October 19, 2004


Turkish thoughts and reactions

I've received a number of emails recently regarding my site 25 Days in Turkey. I've excerpted two below:

well,your photos are really fascinating.I am also a turkish girl.so there is a couple of things I want to say.I just saw that you showed the turkish women in a wrong way! all of your photos;you showed turkish women with 'turban's but there are many people who don't wear it!

and

why did you especially choose the pictures which are mostly mosque pictures and there are only women have scrafs in and also men who have beard? i do not think that these are the real aspects of Turkey. i recommend you to put other kind of pictures for example some good places that lots of people visit like istiklal street in istanbul or the truistic places and hotels in cities which are near the sea. i think this site is biased about Turkey. when i first look at the pictures i could not believe my eyes. i went that places so much but i have seen very few people you show in the pictures.

First of all, I'm glad these people took the time to write to me and express their concern. Their emails forced me seriously consider what happens when something is posted on the web, and how those works will be perceived. Sites on the web truly begin to have lives of their own, and it's easy for people to re-interpret or mis-interpret meaning once the work passes beyond the network of people you know and send it to.

Secondly, the site that I posted has to be biased, since the site was created and photographed by one person. I am seeing Turkey through primarily western eyes. Those things that draw my eye as a photographer and designer are probably those things that are different (or "exotic") from my personal experience. However, I am drawn to mosques and women wearing headscarves also because I find them incredibly beautiful, and I present the images as photographs of what I found beautiful and fascinating about Turkey; not to make political comments or judgements about Turkey on the whole.

Finally, I don't see how an individual can ever capably attempt to present the whole of something. Since this was a personal trip, I shot photographs of the tourist sites we happened to come across on our itinerary. I never intended the site to represent all of Turkey; it was a brief trip of 25 days and the site shows Turkey through my eyes in that alloted time. And while with the limited time I had in Istanbul I might not have managed to photograph everything about the city, I was able to visit and represent Kackar and parts of the East that are probably relatively little known compared to the more visited sites in Western Turkey. There are always tradeoffs on any trip, and we chose to see the east.

Initially, when assembling the site I was also editing to show Turkey to Western eyes (the primary audience being friends and acquaintances who wonder how my trip went). That the site reaches beyond is wonderful, but I had (perhaps mistakenly) not considered the larger reaction that the final selections would garner outside that circle.

If I have offended anyone by inclusion or lack of inclusion of images (or an unfair balance of images) relating to Turkey then I apologize. I was there for a short period of time, and attempted to document my visit as best as I could. While I shot images of Istiklal street (and very much enjoyed visiting that district), in the end the composition of those photographs might not have been as interesting as the other photographs I did take. Some choices were based just on the photographs themselves as much as the subject matter, though they were all photographs of Turkey as I saw it.

And I found Turkey to be very welcoming and incredibly beautiful. I hope to be fortunate enough to return again in the future. Posted by eku at October 19, 2004 7:49 PM
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