http://uwhonorsinberlin2011.blogspot.com/2011/06/visual-assignment-plus-writing.html
Images:
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| Photo 1 - Armani ad in Ataturk airport. This is a case of how I see determining what I see: what I perceived as a dissonance between the model's headscarf and the international consumption and wealth Armani represents crystallized the model as the "other," and made this image seem strange and contradictory to me. Tourist alert when I whipped out my camera and took a few pictures of this - who else would take pictures of a regular ad? |
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| Photo 2 - We saw kids playing in these streets safely, "treating the urban as if it is rural," Orhan said. The space is built as and for a city, yet we saw the people who live there treating and moving within it as a rural space. |
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| Photo 3 - When I look at this I see a camera-produced image, not what the site actually looked like on the ground. This does not convey what I felt like on the ground, either. I don't know if any one image could express my relationship (or, frequently, lack thereof) with my religion--or with any religion, for that matter. |
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| Photo 4 - Kripoe's "yellow fist" street art undoes the west/non-west binary. (In other words, he really gets around.) http://allcitystreetart.com/2011/04/26/raised-fist-turkish-street-art-from-kripoe-invader-and-more/ http://www.tripleman.com/index.php?showimage=785 http://www.tripleman.com/index.php?showimage=786 |
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| Photo 5 - Food, gifts, consumption - all deeply personal themes. Photography is appropriate for a memory like this one, which I associate not primarily with smell, sound, or even taste, but with the moment in which I started my day by seeing these colors and textures. Now that we've left Istanbul, though, this photo is, in Ozyurek's words, "a mere replacement for something lost." |
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| Photo 6.1 - Istanbul is not the "old city," understood via architecture. |
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| Photo 6.2 - Istanbul is not the "old city," understood via bodies. |
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| Photo 7 - Evidence of political and social turmoil in Turkey's neighboring countries, found in unexpected places. |
Related blog posting, 7/2/11:
In the introduction to The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey, Esra Ozyurek remarks, “the foundation of a nation-state is commonly a traumatic experience because it brings a rupture with the past" (11, emphasis mine). We heard about the traumatic episodes characteristic of the rupture that was the founding of the Turkish Republic—massacre of Armenians, deportation of Orthodox Christians, the wealth tax, the ban on fezzes, overhauls of traditional alphabet and calendar systems—in Jen's lecture and tour. Later in the week, Orhan instructed the group to throw away the misconception that any part of Istanbul is the "old city." He articulated the effects of these experiences of rupture in terms of the built environment, and prepared us to see this rupture as we moved independently around the city. Walking around Istanbul, difference in the built environment—“ancient” mosques and monuments right next door to gentrified apartment complexes, like those in the view from the Istanbul Modern parking lot in Photo 6.1—is apparent at every turn. This image in particular brought to my mind what Ozyurek calls a "site of forgetting," which retains for the observer "a residual sense of rupture...to prove that the break actually took place" (6). In the aftermath of rupture, the gentrification that Orhan showed us hides violence, dictating what a citizen sees and ultimately remembers.
After Orhan's lecture, I started to see how the difference between "old" and "new" in the built environment translates onto people. Capitalism is at the center of my train of thought here: nostalgia for "old" times and practices in the face of gentrification "runs the country of which it is part...[and] is quite successful in turning commonly shared objects, concepts, and spaces into commodities" (Ozyurek 10). The glorifying of "Ottoman" foods, styles, and artifacts presents a flip-side to the traumatic experiences of the founding of the nation-state that Jen presented. Ottoman practices were previously abolished in the name of an imagined "Turkishness," but now the powerful longing of nostalgia (Tugal 161) has made those same practices opportunities not just for the construction of identity but also for capitalistic gain. With these ideas in mind, Photo 6.2, of Taksim Square during rush hour, is a meditation on the "engines of capitalism" (Ozyurek 10) in which the people of Istanbul and their nostalgia are simultaneously caught. The image of the woman in the foreground, with her back turned to the camera and her head covered, overlaps with other images and texts I encountered in Istanbul: first, the Armani ad in Photo 1, and second, Ozyurek's description of state-sponsored posters at the turn of the twentieth century that compared veiling practices with new, modern city states in an effort to "remind citizens of what they should leave behind and forget about desiring" while simultaneously "preventing the old ways from totally disappearing" (6). So, this image leaves me asking: to what extent is this woman “old” or “new”? Do her stylish black leggings and trendy belt “cancel out” her headscarf and skin-covering outfit? Or, is the contrast between the two styles—in people and in the built environment—indicative of a unique negotiation of modern Turkishness?
Finally, Photo 7 requires a short back-story. Janelle, Elizabeth, and I met two Turkish guys, Omer (pictured) and Can, on the main street north of Galata on Wednesday night. We didn’t speak any Turkish and they didn’t speak much English, but it seemed more fun to hang out around (but, note, not really “with) attractive Turkish guys than with other Americans. We managed to ask them where they were from, and Omer responded that he was from Bosnia. I didn’t think anything of it. The next day, however, when Didem lectured on the ongoing political and social turmoil in Turkey’s neighboring regions, the surprising significance of getting drinks with Omer clicked. I have no way of knowing if he and his family migrated in the 1990s to escape the wars, or if they came at another time for another reason. Regardless, meeting a self-identified Bosnian in Istanbul prompted personal revelations on the place of migrations from the Balkans in shaping my social circles. One of my good friends at home came to the U.S. from Serbia in the early 1990s with her family, and I have never really admitted to myself that she was part of a larger movement of people. As my close friend, she is, to me, so much more vibrant and tangible than numbers in textbooks or even in Didem's lecture. I see her as somehow immune to the conditions of migration, because I perceive her instead as part of my normal, everyday life. The coincidence of meeting a new person in Istanbul one day and confronting the (possible) reality of that person's introduction into my life the next has forced me to interrogate the ways in which I protect myself from the realities of the friends and acquaintances that make up my social world and, indirectly, my own identity.
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