Living Amidst the Shadows

Roger Berkowitz
Suzy Hansen writes about the photographs and the journey of Turkish photographer Emin Özmen as he has documented Turkey’s descent from a democracy on the cusp of joining the European Union to an autocracy. Hansen collaborates with Özmen whose haunting photographs make palpable sense of powerlessness in Erdogan’s Turkey. Hansen writes:

On Sunday, May 14, Turkey’s first Alevi candidate for president, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, faced off against Turkey’s longtime autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a Sunni Muslim who rose to power in 2003, five years before Özmen became a working photojournalist. Over the course of Özmen’s career, he has watched and documented as Erdoğan has transformed Turkey from an aspiring democracy into a polarized autocracy with a failing economy.

Those Turks who have suffered from repression, violence, and hunger these past 20 years believed Kılıçdaroğlu might have a chance at winning this week, despite the vociferous opposition to him from Turkey’s right-wing populace, which disdains him because he is an Alevi liberal and because he is not Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But neither candidate gained the required 50 percent of the vote. The election will go to a runoff on May 28, and Erdoğan still has a chance—many Turks see it as a foregone conclusion—to prevail as president for another five years.
“A whole generation and I were only going to know this shadow,” Özmen writes in his beautiful new book, Olay. “To grow up despite this shadow, to try to build ourselves despite this shadow. This shadow is still there, twenty years later.”
Özmen sought to capture in his photographs the sense of constant terror his generation and his people have endured, particularly in the past 10 years. As he writes, many Turks have been silenced under Erdoğan, and his photos, even those of active violence, have an eerie quietness to them, as if the volume has been turned off on a TV. (His work recalls Gilles Peress’s influential Telex Iran.) Özmen uses this quality to evoke what he describes as a sense of “powerlessness in the face of so much injustice and violence.”