You could buy and develop film there as well as have your passport photos taken. Our neighborhood was fairly well-off, with plenty of camera owners, so there was a photo studio with a Kodak sign just three streets up from ours. This too could take quite some time: Once the current roll of film was used up, someone had to drop it off at the studio, and return a week later to collect the prints. I would beg and cajole them to look at the camera or look away, to stay still and stop fidgeting, to please shift a little to the right-but my directions were met only with taunts.Įven after all this hard work, we still had to get our photographs developed at a photo studio before we could actually see them. For a start, no one in my family took me seriously or heeded my instructions when I had them pose. But I quickly realized that I lacked my father’s stamina, patience, and determination to rearrange life inside a photo frame. When I finally got my own camera in 1962, I began to imitate all the rituals and conventions of photography as I had learned them from watching my brother and father. The camera was both a symptom of this problem and one of its triggers. Much like the rest of Turkish society, which was self-consciously striving to become more westernized, our family found that our every effort to appear modern and happy seemed to end in frustrating affectedness and hollow ritual. Sometimes, when we could no longer stand all the contrived solemnity, one of us would stick his fingers up behind his neighbor’s head to furnish him with horns, and soon, despite my father’s admonitions, we would all start prodding and poking one another. He wouldn’t stare at us directly, but only through a hole in the box, where a mirror reflected our image onto a screen showing the frame as it was about to be recorded.Įven with his face turned down toward the box, he would still try to maneuver us: “Smile, Orhan move to the right, Şevket now all of you, stop fidgeting!” and I’d begin to despair of the photograph’s ever being taken. The delicate lids and flaps around the lens would tinkle pleasantly as my father fiddled around with them. Like the camera my brother would receive ten years later, my father’s Rolleiflex was box-shaped and meant to be held at belly height. This impression was supported by my father’s efforts to make us look neat and tidy for every picture, the way a schoolteacher would prepare his class for the headmaster’s inspection. “The joy of taking photographs must always be at odds with our yearning for authenticity.” A photograph supposedly taken to record the truth was in fact no more than a device with which to deceive a pair of eyes in the future. It must have been then that I first began to reflect on the relationship between photography and reality, between representation and authenticity. If we didn’t feel like smiling, all we had to do was say “cheese” (which we pronounced çiyz and which, we learned, was the English equivalent of what we called peynir), and it would look close enough to genuine smiling.

On this trip, he’d also acquired a fervent belief in the importance of smiling for photographs. In 1949, my father returned from a trip to America with a camera. When we faced the camera, we were “posing” for the future. So really, we were having our photographs taken in anticipation of our own gaze back. As subjects, we faced the camera and posed for others-mostly our friends and families but also our future selves-who would be looking back at this image months and years later. We took photographs so as to have something to remember the moment by. Every photograph required a degree of thought and deliberation: “Does this look right?” It was around this time that I began to think about the significance of the photographs I took-and why I took them at all. We spoke of rolls and exposure counts as if we were soldiers in some ragtag army running out of ammunition we chose our shots carefully, and still wondered whether our photos were any good. It was important to know how many exposures would fit on a roll, and the camera kept a running tally of photographs taken. Taking a photograph was always a special occasion. When my brother was ready to transfer that murky image onto the film inside the box, he would push on the lever- click!-and as if by magic, a photograph would be taken. His was like a camera obscura, a black, metallic, perfectly square box, with a lens on one side and a glass screen on the other, on which you could see projected the image inside. My brother had been given one already, two years before. Translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap.

The eyes of ara photograph locations