Making the Modern Turkish Citizen by Özge Baykan Calafato

Author:Özge Baykan Calafato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Democratizing the Studio Space: Alaminüt Photography

From the mid-nineteenth century, itinerant photographers regularly brought cameras to various sites of leisure such as parks and the seaside (About 2015; Dominici 2018). They “set up tents at small fairs and markets, knocked on doors in working class neighborhoods, and visited far-flung villages” in different parts of the world, fostering “a global culture of frequent, anonymous, public photography” (Clark 2017: 227–9). The itinerant photographer typically followed the paths already established by travelling vendors and traders (About 2015). Even though the profession was specialized, it required only simple technical training, which included framing, focusing, and developing prints. It tended to attract artists in the early stages of their career or “in search of inspiration,” as well as young men who were unemployed, making it a male-dominated profession (Werner 1997 in About 2015: 5).30

As Holland (2015: 135) points out, in the West, photography was democratized by the revolutionary hand-held Kodak Box Brownie, launched in 1900 with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” Kodak brought “a revolution in ways of perceiving the immediate domestic world, and in redefining who had the right to record that world” (Holland 2015: 135). For Sarvas and Frohlich (2011: 20–1), the introduction of this Kodak camera as a “disruptive technology” moved domestic photography from the “portrait path,” largely characterized by studio photography, onto the “Kodak path,” marked by snapshot photography, until the emergence of digital image capture in the 1990s.

Because of its post-war impoverishment, it would take Turkey several decades to fully join the Kodak path. Snapshot photography spread more slowly than in Western countries throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and was primarily promoted for travel; summer holidays in the countryside/at the seaside (sayfiye); outings (tenezzüh) and gatherings/parties (eğlenti), as illustrated by Figures 5.3 and 5.4. It would be common to use the entire film roll on one such occasion.31 Ads like Figure 5.3 urged people to use a Kodak camera to record “the sweet and vivid memories of the happy moments you spent in your fleeting vacation,” claiming that “holidays without Kodak are fast forgotten.” Indeed, some of the common patterns in terms of location and composition we observe in snapshot photographs from the 1920s and 1930s suggest that such ads successfully generated an appeal for photography as a fun activity. However, due to the technical and financial implications of having prints developed and replenishing film, the use of snapshot cameras remained limited until the 1940s.

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