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 CRUISING MARYAM ŞAHİNYAN’S PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE:
INTERTWINING MEANINGS OF THE ARCHIVE BETWEEN THE
PERSONAL AND THE PUBLIC

Keywords: archive, vernacular photography, afterlives, transtemporality, queer
Originally produced to be used in personal and private settings, studio photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s (1911-1996) archive now pursue new lives as they circulate
publicly. In this thesis which is mainly motivated by the question of the significance
of Maryam Şahinyan’s studio photographic archive in its contemporary contexts,
I follow the photographs from this archive in their afterlives. In this respect, the
thesis takes Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as a point of departure, and rather than
employing a historicist lens to excavate the singular histories that the photographs
from the archive evoke, it focuses on the various new meanings they gain within
a transtemporal context. Suggesting that the conditions in which the archive had
come into being crucially inform the contemporary ways in which it is being received,
the thesis focuses first on the socio-historical setting of its formation before
investigating the cultural and political contexts within which it was revealed to the
public. Emphasising the irreducible gap between the original contexts of the studio
photographs in the archive and the belated contexts in which they circulate
recently, the thesis suggests that the significance of the archive in the present can
only be grasped if it is considered through a transtemporal and trans-spatial lens. It
also suggests that we consider such archives as dynamic (infra)structures on which
we depend in order to creatively engage with certain pasts, and localities, and to
imagine different futures.
iv


Anahtar Kelimeler: arşiv, vernaküler fotoğraf, ardıl yaşamlar, zamanlararasılık,
kuir
Maryam Şahinyan’ın (1911-1996) arşivinde karşımıza çıkan, aslen kişisel ve özel
bağlamlarda kullanılmak üzere üretilmiş olan stüdyo fotoğrafları, bugün kamusal
alanda dolaşım halinde yeni yaşamlar sürüyorlar. Maryam Şahinyan’ın stüdyo fotoğraf
arşivinin güncel bağlamları içindeki anlamlarının neler olabileceği sorusundan
yola çıkan bu tezde, arşivdeki fotoğrafların özellikle günümüzdeki yaratıcı kullanımları
üzerinden bu ardıl yaşamlarının izini sürüyorum. Bu bağlamda Maryam
Şahinyan’ın arşivini bir başlangıç noktası olarak ele alan tez, arşivdeki fotoğrafların
çağrıştırdığı tekil tarihleri ortaya çıkarmayı amaçlayan tarihselci bir bakış kullanmak
yerine, bu fotoğrafların zamanlararası bir bağlamda edindikleri yeni anlamların
peşinden gidiyor. Arşivin oluştuğu koşulların güncel alımlanış biçimlerini
önemli biçimlerde şekillendirdiğini savunan tez, bu nedenle arşivin kamuyla buluştuğu
kültürel ve politik bağlamları irdelemeden önce arşivin ortaya çıktığı toplumsal
ve tarihsel bağlama eğiliyor. Tez, arşivdeki stüdyo fotoğraflarının geldikleri birincil
bağlamlar ile bugün gecikmiş bir şekilde alımlandıkları yeni bağlamlar arasındaki
giderilemez boşluğu vurgulayarak, arşivin günümüzdeki anlamlarının ancak zaman
ve mekanlararası bir bakış yoluyla kavranabileceğini iddia ediyor. Bu bağlamda tez,
bu gibi arşivleri belirli geçmişlerle ve mekanlarla yaratıcı şekillerde ilişkilenirken
ve farklı gelecekler tahayyül ederken dayandığımız dinamik (alt)yapılar olarak ele
almayı öneriyor.
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Here comes the part I enjoy writing the most. Completing this thesis would not be
possible if it was not for all the beautiful people that I am surrounded with, and I
mean it.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Hülya Adak, whose shared
excitement with Maryam Şahinyan’s photography, and whose encouragement for
my project from the beginning had been key to my dare to execute this project
in the end. Her openness and encouragement for experimental methodologies and
approaches had also been crucial along the way, as the material I worked with
demanded such tools, which the conventional academic eye would deem suspect.
I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude along these lines to Ayşe Gül
Altınay, who both had been an amazing instructor, or co-thinker to put it more
bluntly, and an ardent guide whose crucial advice have shaped my trajectories in
this thesis in very important ways. I feel deeply gifted for having met her, and her
academic style will always guide me, and remind me of the possibility of an-other
academia, whenever I feel lost in this convoluted maze.
I am also deeply grateful that Tuğçe Kayaal kindly and excitedly accepted my invitation
to serve as an external reader in my thesis defence jury. Her comments
on this thesis have been beyond valuable, and her humbling encouragement for my
work has been beyond gratifying. I am thankful for getting to know her by this
occasion.
Writing this thesis has also provided me with an occasion to meet wonderful new
people outside the academic circles. I would especially like to thank Rehan Miskci,
who kindly accepted my invitation to talk about her artistic practice that draws
a lot of influence from Maryam Şahinyan, and that transforms her work in deeply
meaningful and amazing ways. I am also thankful to Tayfun Serttaş who shared
insights from his prolonged experience with digitalisation of Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive. Rober Koptaş and Yetvart Tomasyan from Aras Publishing have been so
kind to assist me in my work and to share their valuable perspective on the topic.
I am particularly grateful to Yetvart Tomasyan for the insights he shared on the
process of securing the archive and the long journey in reconstructing the story of
the studio and Maryam Şahinyan herself. I shall also acknowledge his efforts in
vi
securing the archive some 28 years ago, since if it was not for his intervention we
would not be able to talk about Maryam Şahinyan and her archive today.
Two years I spent “at” Sabancı University have coincided mostly with the global
pandemic of COVID-19, which in the end caused me and my cohort to complete
most of our course requirements remotely. Yet, as a small cohort, we have not only
survived these unprecedented and daring circumstances but also thrived through
them, despite all the odds. I am deeply grateful that this process has gifted me
with invaluable friends: Cansu, Beste, Eray, Berfin, Samet, and Ayşe. I would
also like to extend this list as to include Barış and Begüm, together with whom
we had wonderful discussions beyond academia at our evening sessions in Ayşe Gül
Hoca’s courses. We have also been wonderful partners in crime with Beste, Barış
and Begüm during our lovely karaoke sessions. I would not be able to stay sane in
the tiresome process of writing in procrastination if it was not for our enchanting
late night zoom calls with Cansu. Thanks deeply to SUGender that I met İlayda,
my fellow Ankaralı at Sabancı with whom I also share a common excitement about
going soon on a doctoral journey overseas. Let’s see what comes next!
I have also been so lucky to be surrounded with the caring love of my dearest friends
beyond Sabancı through the journey. Shout out to Naci who has been adding up to
the joy of my life for more than ten years now. Gülin has been the spatially most
remote yet effectively the closest as always along the way, and I still do not know
how I can make it up to her. Nebile, who is my home in Istanbul both literally and
symbolically has always kept an open door for me even for my sometimes unexpected
and last minute travels to Istanbul. I would also like to thank my dearest friends
whose mere presence in my life simply makes everything more beautiful: Ayşenur,
Elif, Marsel, Baran, Dicle, Aykut, Vera, and Brener. İyi ki varsınız.
I am deeply grateful to my dad, Ahmet Gökhan Demirer, who has always been there
with a keen curiosity about my work and an everlasting passion about discussing it
in more detail. His enduring support for me in all respects is beyond measurable
and humbling to say the least, and I am more than lucky to have him in my life as
family.
I would like to reserve my final acknowledgement for Mert, with whom our paths
have crossed during the initial months of my master’s studies and whose presence
in my life has since grown ever-more significant. His mere presence, and calm and
joyful handling of my ups and downs through this tiresome journey have been crucial
for me to arrive at this point. I would like to thank him, simply for everything.
vii
To my mother, Şennur Paşayiğit-Demirer, who left too soon, and to my fellow
queer community who incessantly illuminate the darkest of times through an
endless repertoire of world-making.
May our joy prevail
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
LIST OF ABBREVIATONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii
1. INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. How I Arrived at this Topic? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. Limitations and the Agenda of Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3. Outline of the Chapters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2. THE MAKING OF THE ARCHIVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.1. Who is Maryam Şahinyan? Fragmented Stories behind the Camera . . 9
2.1.1. Sebastia: Construction of Unthinkability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.1.2. Istanbul: The Site of Survival (and Regeneration?) . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
2.1.3. A “Modest” Photographer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.1.4. The First Professional Woman Studio Photographer? . . . . . . . . . 21
2.2. A Will to Archive? The Question of Agency in Maryam Şahinyan’s
Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
2.3. The Archive: Another Story of Survival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3. ENGAGING WITH AN ARCHIVE OF ORPHANED IMAGES. 30
3.1. Conceptualising Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.1.1. What are We Looking at? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
3.1.2. The Archival Turn and the Memory Boom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
3.1.3. Vernacular Photographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
3.2. What Do Maryam Şahinyan’s Photographs Do and What Do We Do
with Them? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.2.1. Feeling the Photographs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.2.2. Anachronism: A Troubled Terrain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
3.2.3. Cruising as a Queer Mode of Engagement with the Archive . . . 51
3.3. What’s the Use of Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
ix
4. CRUISING THE ARCHIVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.1. Void: Citing Absence through Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.2. September 1955 : The Photography Studio as a Place of Encounter . . . 64
4.3. Reimagining the Art Canon with Maryam Şahinyan, and Cruising
Istanbul with her Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
4.4. Affiliating Intimately with the Archive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
4.4.1. Personal Affiliations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.4.2. Communal Affiliations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
4.4.3. Diasporic Affiliations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5. CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
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LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2.1. An engraving depicting a part of Şahinyan Konağı, dating
from 1875. Taken from (Yarman 2008, 80). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Figure 2.2. Şahinyan Konağı as PTT headquarters. Taken from (Yarman
2008, 81). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Figure 2.3. Şahinyan Konağı in ca. 1930s. Note the replacement of the
PTT sign (visble in Figure 2.2) with Turkish Flags here. This photo
might be from the period in which the building was being used as a
public high school. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Figure 4.1. From Void . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Figure 4.2. From Void . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Figure 4.3. From Void . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Figure 4.4. September, from Void . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Figure 4.5. From Foto Yeraz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Figure 4.6. From September 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Figure 4.7. From September 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Figure 4.8. From September 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Figure 4.9. From September 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Figure 4.10. From September 1955 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Figure 4.11. From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice
by Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Figure 4.12. From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice
by Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Figure 4.13. From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice
by Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Figure 4.14. From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice
by Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
xi
LIST OF ABBREVIATONS
LGBTI+ lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, plus xii
PTT Posta, Telefon, Telgraf (National Postal Service) xii
xii
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 How I Arrived at this Topic?
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive first came to my attention in late 2019 while
I was reading about Cins Adımlar [Curious Steps], a queer-feminist memory walk
project organised by a curious group of students and faculty from the Gender and
Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SUGender) at Sabancı University, Istanbul.
The co-written piece I was reading (Abiral et al. 2019) sparked a deep interest in me
both for Maryam Şahinyan and her archive, and for the creative and experimental
methodologies that were being offered by this group of students and faculty, who
seemed to be going after different and more embodied ways of engaging with the
memories of the past and seeking otherwise means to attend to the traces of such
pasts. In this respect, this current thesis can be seen as an outgrowth of these initial
encounters, and can also be considered as a response to them.
Soon after this initial encounter, I realised that we had a copy of the book Foto
Galatasaray: Studio Practice by Maryam Şahinyan (Serttaş 2011), published by
Aras Publishing House at my family house, which, to date had escaped my attention.
Foto Galatasaray offers the first and the only extensive collection of photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, which was published in tandem with the
first ever exhibit on the work of Maryam Şahinyan, held at SALT Galata, Istanbul
between late 2011 and early 2012. I remember being struck and mesmerised by the
photographs in the book at first sight. At first, it was especially the multitude of
representations of non-normative gender and sexualities in the archive that struck
me, which generated a strange feeling of affinity. They felt like a window opening to
a whole new world, and at the time I did my first “cruise” among these pictures, I
was sure that I wanted to write about my encounter, in an effort to make sense of it
in the first place. As I looked deeper and longer into these pictures, I started questioning
the reasons why I was drawn into them. In this respect, my initial curiosity
1
in Maryam Şahinyan’s photography has not been shaped as an exclusive interest in
her story, but it has rather happened around the question of what her photographs
were doing to me.
As I started looking for other people’s reactions to these photographs, I realised that
I was not alone in my fascination with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. In fact, since the
story of Maryam Şahinyan and her archive was revealed to the public in 2011, various
creative engagements with Maryam Şahinyan and her photographs by different
actors have been taking place. The range of actors that have been engaging with
this archive and its producer include artists, independent researchers, archivists,
but also the curious members of a wider public, whose engagements take place in
more intangible forms such as disseminating and reacting to Maryam Şahinyan’s
photographs on online platforms. As I navigated through these contemporary engagements
with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, I started to realise that they might
constitute an important entry point for an academic discussion of the archive and
the stories that it carry.
My choice of this focus has also been informed by the impossibilities that an exclusive
emphasis on the archive itself suggested at an earlier phase in my formulation of the
research agenda. Like many other spectators of this archive, I also initially felt that
these photographs all had very important and curious stories to communicate, and I
had a trust in these images as photographs that would provide incontestable visual
traces from a certain past, and would reveal so many truths about the period they
belonged to in their own right. Soon, I realised that I was wrong in such assumptions
and in delegating so much responsibility over these photographs to communicate me
truths in a conventional sense. In light of this realisation Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
started presenting itself to me as an excess and as an impossibility, both at the same
time. It is composed of about 200,000 images with visual traces of approximately 1
million individuals whose path has crossed with Şahinyan’s Foto Galatasaray during
the years she operated it, and hence presents an invaluable visual resource. Yet, in
the absence of any accompanying evidence or stories, it is often impossible to know
more about these individuals beyond their pictures taken by Maryam Şahinyan. In
this respect, for the one who looks at these pictures, they hint not at a readily
available knowledge but rather at an immensity of unknowables.
My story of initial excitement and the subsequent trouble with the photographs in
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive carry a curious parallel to a story that Marianne Hirsch
and Leo Spitzer recount, in which they find a picture of Hirsch’s parents in their
family archive and digitally enlarge it, hoping to excavate historical data from it
about being a Jewish in 1942 in a town in Romania, but get subsequently frustrated
2
by the photograph as the bigger it gets it not only fails to provide them with what
they want but also grows more mystery around itself (Hirsch and Spitzer 2006).
Faced with the flaws of photography in providing accurate historical evidence, Hirsch
and Spitzer turn to consider the photograph not as a historical document in and of
itself, but rather as a tool that affectively bridges the past it claims to represent and
the desires of Hirsch and Spitzer in dealing with it. Following a similar trajectory,
what I do in this thesis is not a historical engagement with Maryam Şahinyan and
her archive, that aims to make sense of them exclusively within their own contexts.
Instead, what I suggest is that the significance of Maryam Şahinyan and her archive
relies in the trans-temporal and trans-spatial setting of their reception in which the
conditions and motivations of its production and the anxieties and desires of our
time gets connected through affiliative links, which connect the fragments of time
and space caused by the entangled processes of power in creative ways.
In this respect, both the context in which this archive had been produced and that
in which it is being received inform my discussion in crucial ways. In this thesis
which I imagine to be doing a work of feminist pearl diving into an endless ocean of
intertwined meanings and residues of fragmentation following the conceptualisation
of Linda Zerilli, I find it important to attend to each fragment that crosses my
way (Zerilli 2021). While Maryam Şahinyan received a good deal of attention and
continues to receive so among various audiences, there has not been significant
scholarly engagements with her work. I think it is not due to a lack of scholarly
interest in the significance of her work but rather due to the various limitations
for a scholarly work that her work entails. In fact, many people have articulated a
cautious curiosity when I told them I was working on Maryam Şahinyan, asking me
for quite understandable reasons how working on such a topic about which we have
so little and dispersed amount of sources would be possible. In this respect I hope,
my thesis will make a case for the possibility, importance, and the significance of
such scholarly engagements with fragments.
Looking back at the fragments of the past through the mediation of equally fragmented
photographs of Maryam Şahinyan, one finds itself in a position that alludes
to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history (Benjamin 2015). Her photographs hint at the
ever-growing piles of wreckage along the way of history’s procession, and in looking
at them one feels the helpless urge to recover from the catastrophe that this forceful
progress generates. These photographs are not only reminding us of what was the
cost of time’s progression, but also as the creative engagements with them that I
will be discussing imply, provide us some important tools through which we can
attend to these costs, and navigate our ways in this catastrophe. Like the angel of
history, we never directly face the future, but instead we have these photographs of
3
Maryam Şahinyan as profane illuminations from the past, which can help lighting
our imagination about what might be the other possibilities awaiting in the future.
Written under an aggravatingly hostile sociopolitical atmosphere which continues
constantly to add up to the piles of wreckage of the catastrophe of historical progression,
Maryam Şahniyan’s archive provided me a refuge along the way throughout
this thesis. Under the stark circumstances of racism, ever-increasing xenophobic
sentiments, and pervasive homophobia and transphobia, engaging with an array of
vernacular photographs which prick the configurations of violence by reminding us
of the possibilities of otherwise seems particularly significant and urgent. Infused
with “ordinary affects” to borrow the term from Kathleen Stewart, vernacular photographs
in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive directs our attention to the potentialities
that the discarded realms of the everyday and the inconsequential carry for engaging
with extraordinary issues that our present entails (Stewart 2007).
1.2 Limitations and the Agenda of Research
My research agenda has been shaped by the various limitations on the research on
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive, and this is why I discuss both limitations and the
agenda under one heading. First and foremost, the knowledge one can obtain about
Maryam Şahinyan’s life itself and the subjects she photographed at her studio is quite
limited as neither of these figures are alive anymore and it is virtually impossible to
trace them. An inconclusiveness is eminent to any effort aiming to narrate a story
of Maryam Şahinyan, and this well extends to the subjects she photographed. Even
though Şahinyan kept a very systematic and extensive archive of her work, which
formed the basis of what we have from her studio practice today, her photographic
archive is not accompanied by other means of resources such as record books that
she would have kept of her clients and alike, which makes it ultimately impossible to
know the names and other details about those we see depicted in her photographs.
In her introduction to Foto Galatasaray, Karin Karakaşlı also acknowledges that
the missing of the record books from the studio creates an immensity of elusiveness
(Karakaşlı 2011b, 18). Given those limitations, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive presents
itself to the researcher in form of both a curious representational excess, and as an
equally curious impossibility, which in the end became one of the main sources of
my excitement about it. Following Karakaşlı’s suggestion that the elusiveness of the
archive makes one to recover “lost possibilities of [other] ways of living” that the
photographs within the archive suggest rather gropingly (Ibid.), I suggest that we
4
think of this practice of groping recovery in terms of cruising and argue that the
pervasive unknowability related to the archive also occasions alternative creative
ways of engagement with it in the end.
Adding up to those limitations is the inaccessibility of the digitalised archive itself,
which, despite being digitalised with a rhetoric of making it available and openly
accessible for public use in 2011, is not accessible today. My attempts at accessing
the archive at an earlier phase of the research through contacting Tayfun Serttaş
and SALT has also not yielded any productive result. In this respect, while working
on Maryam Şahinyan’s photographic archive, I was not able to access the full
content of the archive, and was rather drastically limited to the publicly available
portions of it, which mainly consists of the selection of roughly 1000 images out of
the archive, that was published in Foto Galatasaray (Serttaş 2011). In the end, this
multiplicity of limitations on the given research has led me to focus on the public
uses of this archive, which for above reasons necessarily focus and depend mainly on
what is readily available from the archive. I name such public uses of the archive in
the present as the “afterlives” of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, and I find these new
lives that the archive inhabit through its uses in contemporary settings significant as
such engagements with the archive not only are interested in the historical contexts
of the archive itself, but also because they themselves give important clues about
the present in which they engage Maryam Şahinyan’s work. Once publicised, photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive started to live secondary lives in which
they were re-signified by various spectators that engage with them in their belated
contexts as found/recovered photographs. It is in this respect that coming from the
recent literature on vernacular photographs, I consider the contemporary context of
the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as “afterlives.” Therefore, I take
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive’s story as a starting point, rather than an end,
in this thesis.
Who are drawn to Maryam Şahinyan’s work and what do they make out of it?
What orients one to those photographs and what does these photographs do to their
spectators? What are the venues through which Maryam Şahinyan’s work continue
to circulate? What type of publics might these photographs be constituting, if they
can ever do so? In what ways the context in which the archive was produced informs
its contemporary reception? Driven precisely through the multiple limitations that
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive posits, these questions motivates the thesis at hand.
In this respect, mediation of the present is, and will be evident throughout my
thesis and I suggest we focus at this mediation itself with curiosity, instead of being
cautious not to confuse it with the “actuality” of the archive, as it will become clear
that a neat distinction between the “actuality” of an archive and its latter uses in
5
interchanging contexts, be them personal or public, is nowhere to be found, and the
uses and the value of an archive like Maryam Şahinyan’s might be situated exactly
at the interplay of these two.
1.3 Outline of the Chapters
As I situate the main problem motivating this thesis as the afterlives of Maryam
Şahinyan’s photographic archive and the ways in which its “former” lives inform
these afterlives, the structure of the thesis follows a chronological order as to navigate
the story of the archive in its transition from its conditions of making into its
condition of reception.
Following this introductory chapter, in Chapter 2, I focus on the story of Maryam
Şahinyan, of her studio Foto Galatasaray, and of the making of her archive. In
this chapter, I pay a particular attention to situate Maryam Şahinyan’s story in
the context of being an Armenian in the post-genocide Turkey. Here, I also pay
attention to the ways in which certain lives and stories that pertain to the stories
around Maryam Şahinyan get silenced and erased in the historical process of the
making of Turkey. In the chapter I also make a case for the often obscured agency
of Maryam Şahinyan in relation to her practice of archiving and studio photography.
In Chapter 3, I start focusing on the contemporary settings of the archive, and
conceptualise the archive within the context in which it was revealed. While I
conceptualise the archive in its contemporary setting, I also analyse the context of
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive’s reception through navigating the trajectories of
“the archival turn” and “the memory-boom” in Turkey. In the following, I situate
Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs, which compose the content of the archive in the
emergent literature on vernacular photographies. After discussing the potentialities
that these photographs elicit in our contemporary setting, I start discussing the
ways in which the contemporary audiences engage with these photographs, and
what those engagements entail for our understandings of the everyday, temporality,
and affect. It is also here that I discuss cruising both as a methodology and as a
lens that I employ in the study. I finish the chapter with the question “what’s the
use of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive?”
Finally in Chapter 4, I trace the various ways in which contemporary audiences
engage with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, and generate creative secondary stories
out of it. While some of the creative engagements I discuss in this chapter are in
6
form of formal artworks, others provide more dispersed and subtle modes of creative
engagements. Encounter, survival, and affiliation are some of the key concepts that
I work with in this chapter, while I construct an analytical map of the various
contemporary “uses” of the Şahinyan archive.
I conclude the thesis by underlining the political implications of engaging with
Maryam Şahinyan’s work, and situate my study along the lines of feminist pearl
diving that Linda Zerilli (2021) discusses. This is also where I will bring up a
brief discussion on the politics of archives, and underline the importance of Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive in our political present.
7
2. THE MAKING OF THE ARCHIVE
Even though I define my main purpose as engaging with the afterlives of Maryam
Şahinyan’s photographic archive in this thesis, I have important reasons to start the
thesis by focusing on Maryam Şahinyan’s own story before dwelling on her archive’s
contemporary trajectories. Regardless of how anonymous the photographs from
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive may seem in their contemporary context of circulation
among a public of strangers who do not relate directly to their originating settings,
these photographs always arrive to our attention as signified with their belonging
to the oeuvre of a single studio photographer. In this respect, Maryam Şahinyan’s
story is never an outsider to the way we receive these photographs, and as it will
be more clear as the thesis progresses, the context of their making informs both the
ways in which contemporary spectators creatively engage with them and the ways
in which the archive gains a political significance in our present.
In his essay titled “A Short History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin argues that
with the modern technology of photography which is capable of capturing images
that are way more proximate to the real than painting, the question of artistic quality
is exceeded (Benjamin 2006, 58). He argues that with this magical value of
photography, the contents of the images takes precedence over the authorship or the
artistic abilities of their respective photographers (Ibid.). While these observations
of Benjamin provide important insights on our mode of reception of singular photographs,
I think the stakes change when we are facing a photographs as coming
from an archive of a single photographer. In this case, Maryam Şahinyan captions
the photographs, and in fact, in most cases it is only her authorship that we know
about the individual photographs.
Moreover, paying attention exclusively to the afterlives of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs
could have run the risk of neglecting the active role Maryam Şahinyan
played in the arrival of these photograph to our contemporary context in the first
place and to neglecting the entanglements of agency that are at play in the production
and preservation of these photographic registers and their subsequent public
8
reception. Maryam Şahinyan’s story is fragmented, and her agency is obscured by
many factors in these fragments as my analysis makes clear in this chapter. Navigating
her story within the context of being an Armenian in republican Turkey is
important in this respect to account for the possible locations of her agency in the
making of her legacy. For these reasons, I start my project with a recourse to her,
as her story makes an appropriate point of departure.
2.1 Who is Maryam Şahinyan? Fragmented Stories behind the Camera
2.1.1 Sebastia: Construction of Unthinkability
"The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of
possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies
the terms under which the questions were phrased."
Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Trouillot 1995, 82)
Maryam Şahinyan was born as an Ottoman subject and died as a citizen of Turkey.
Between her birth and death, lies a history of enormous transformations, great losses
and milestones of unprecedented scale that irreversibly effected the geographies in
which she lived, and ultimately survived. She was born to a prosperous and prominent
Armenian family in Sebastia (today’s Sivas) in 1911, at a rather troublesome
conjuncture in time and space for an Armenian to be born. Şahniyans were not
only a member of the then substantial Armenian community in the city of Sebastia,
but also a significant family within this community, with some members of it
partaking in important positions within the Ottoman officialdom. Most prominent
of them was Agop Şahinyan (Pasha), who served as a member of the first Ottoman
parliament representing Sebastia, which was established in 1876, within the period
that is known in conventional historiographical accounts as the first constitutional
era in the Ottoman Empire (Yarman 2008).
Born as the granddaughter of Agop Şahinyan from the marriage of his son, Mihran
Şahinyan with Dikranuhi Abacıyan, Maryam Şahinyan was a rather privileged member
of her community, whose family connections have probably played a significant
role in the ultimate survival of her and her immediate family in this deeply troublesome
period (Serttaş 2011, 27-28). However, during the genocidal process in which
the dislocation of Armenian populations were accompanied by a process of material
9
dispossession of these communities, which ultimately guaranteed that those who
are forced to evacuate would never return back to their places of origin, Şahinyan
family was no exception. In this respect, Şahinyan family’s survival happened at
the cost of losing all their possessions in and connection to the city Sebastia, which
amounted to several villages in the region, various flour mills, and Şahinyan Konağı
[the Şahinyan Mansion] at the centre of the city, which was commissioned by Agop
Şahinyan in 1873, also known as Camlı Köşk [the Glass Mansion], and had been
home to Şahinyans until they left the city (Yarman 2008, 77) (Figure 2.1). It should
also be noted that not all the members of the family were able to survive the genocidal
process. Arsen Yarman provides photographs of some members of the extended
family like Aram Şahinyan, who was a cousin to Maryam Şahinyan’s father and who
was killed during the forced deportations (Yarman 2008, 336).
Figure 2.1 An engraving depicting a part of Şahinyan Konağı, dating from 1875.
Taken from (Yarman 2008, 80).
Besides the family’s renown through their involvement in Ottoman politics as the
case of Agop Şahinyan Paşa demonstrates, the family was also locally known to be
one of the main flour producers in the area of Sivas and to be an important trader of
cattles and horses (Yarman 2008, 78). In the period following 1915, two of the three
flour mills that Şahinyan’s were operating were sabotaged and burnet down (Ibid.),
which clearly attests to the increased precarity of the family’s existence in Sivas
after 1915. In a casual conversation I had with Yetvart Tomasyan on the issue, he
10
suggested that these arsons have most probably taken place in the period between
1922 and 1924 during which such offences targeting Armenian properties were quite
widespread across the country.
I would like to open a parenthesis here on the fate of Şahinyan Konağı, after
Şahinyans left Sebsteia, as I think this story clearly demonstrates how the process
of symbolic and material dispossession of Armenians were simultaneous and
complementary to one another, and also as it posits a foundational layer in the sediments
of dispossession and erasure that are embedded, as I will discuss, in the story
of Maryam Şahinyan. After Mihran Şahinyan and his brother Garabed Şahinyan
sold the building complex before leaving Sebastia with no return, Şahinyan Konağı
was used as the main postal office building (PTT) for some time, and as a Turkish
public high school, before its ultimate demolishing (Yarman 2008, 81) (Serttaş
2011, 28) (Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3). Today, at the site of the mansion lies Selçuk
Parkı [Saljuk Park], which is located at the heart of the city, adjacent to Hükümet
Konağı [the Government House]. Today, Sivas barely has spatial traces of its long
Armenian past, and as the latter uses of Şahinyan Konağı suggests, this erasure has
been facilitated not only by the dislocation of its former residents but also by the
continuous utilisation of their abandoned possessions for the purposes of ideological
reproduction of the new regime, which relied on not only the ethnic homogenisation
of the new nation but also on a homogenisation and reorganisation of space.
Figure 2.2 Şahinyan Konağı as PTT headquarters. Taken from (Yarman 2008, 81).
11
Figure 2.3 Şahinyan Konağı in ca. 1930s. Note the replacement of the PTT sign
(visble in Figure 2.2) with Turkish Flags here. This photo might be from the period
in which the building was being used as a public high school.
Conversion of properties belonging to former non-muslim residents into government
buildings was a common practice during the early years of the Turkish Republic.
This practice was facilitated by a series of legal regulations that have been put
into effect in the immediate aftermath of 1915 concerning the fate of the "abandoned"
properties that are forcibly left behind by the targeted Armenian communities
(Akçam and Kurt 2012). Such properties have been officially denominated
as vacant assets and properties, or as emval-i metruke in Turkish. According to
Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt, the continuation of the official discourse on emvali
metruke from the war period into the newly found republic is demonstrative of
a foundational ideological continuity between the generations that facilitated the
genocide and those that followed them into the republic (Akçam and Kurt 2012).
In fact, in the early 1920s, the new regime made different manoeuvres in order to
be able to confiscate such properties considered as vacant assets to put them in
use as government buildings (Akçam and Kurt 2012, 180). In the case of Şahinyan
Konağı which was converted into regional PTT headquarters after the family leaves
the city the story seems to had unfolded differently. Instead of a story of conversion
into emval-i metruke, Arsen Yarman writes that the building was sold by Şahinyan
brothers in 1924 out of necessity deriving from the narrations of Vruyr Şahinyan,
brother of Maryam Şahinyan (Yarman 2008, 77). Unfortunately, neither the nature
12
of the necessity nor the new owners are specified in this story.
As Taner Akçam and Ümit Kurt writes, the Lausanne Treaty which was signed in
1924 envisioned new regulations with regard to the issue of emval-i metruke (Akçam
and Kurt 2012, 179). The treaty maintained that the properties of Armenians who
have managed to stay in the country up until 1924 could not be considered as emvali
metruke. Moreover, the legal regulations by the Turkish government regarding
emval-i metruke at the time was focusing on the properties of those who left their
original places "for any reason" (Akçam and Kurt 2012, 219-220). It might also be
the result of these regulations that Şahinyan Konağı was not considered as emval-i
metruke.
In any case, the fate of the building followed more or less a similar trajectory with
those that were considered as abandoned, and its transfer to new owners marked
the end of Şahinyans physical and symbolic existence in Sebastia. Although the
date is not certain, the building should have been demolished altogether at a later
time as at its former location today lies a park. In fact, "a wave of cultural heritage
destruction" had taken place in the central Anatolian cities including Sivas especially
during 1950s, which left most of these cities "cleared" of the remnants and traces
of their heterogenous pasts (Keshishian, Löker, and Polatel 2018, 29). The most
symbolic in this respect was the destruction of the Surp Asdvadzadzin Cathedral in
Sivas in 1952 by way of planting explosives in it (Ibid.).
As in the case of countless other examples of “vacant assets and properties” of former
non-muslim communities, the Şahinyan Mansion became a site at which the new
regime consolidated its power not only through appropriating the physical building
but also by symbolically transforming it into a site of new regime’s ideological reproduction,
and eventually the fabrication of the historical unthinkability of its former
uses and residents in the imagination of following generations to come. To sum up,
it can be said that while some members of the Şahinyan family managed to survive
the genocide themselves, their story embedded to that of the city of Sebastia,
and their physical traces there were erased as the city was coming to be exclusively
referred to as Sivas, and this transformation aimed to render Sivas ultimately unthinkable
in terms of an Armenian past. Richard G. Hovannisian writes that the
area around Sebastia in the nineteenth century had come to be an important centre
for educational endeavours of Armenians which eventually contributed to various
cultural, intellectual and political movements, and that 1915 had brought an abrupt
end to all this history once and for all (Hovannisian 2004, 427-428). A region, that
has been home for a substantial Armenian population for centuries had only 3,000
Armenians left by 1925, which was to fall to around 1,200 in 1929 (Ibid.).
13
2.1.2 Istanbul: The Site of Survival (and Regeneration?)
Şahinyan family probably left the city sometime around 1924, after Mihran and
Garabed Şahinyan sold the mansion (Serttaş 2011, 28). The ultimate destination
for the family after leaving Sebastia was Istanbul, which was the only city left in
the country that seemed more or less welcoming for the minoritised populations
of the country and providing a shelter (Suciyan 2018, 74). In fact, starting from
1918, the Armenian population of Istanbul gradually increased as the survivors of
the genocide from other parts of the country sought refuge in the city (Ekmekçioğlu
2016, 16). Şahinyans’ move to Istanbul can also be situated within this context.
Studio photography entered the life of Şahinyan family as a means of sustenance
and survival after they moved to Istanbul from Sebastia. However, it should also be
noted that the choice of studio photography as a means of sustenance in this totally
new life for the family was not of mere coincidence, as Maryam Şahinyan’s father,
Mihran Şahinyan, was already interested in photography as a recreational activity
back in Sebastia, like many other midlle-class youths of the time (Serttaş 2011, 28).
As the Şahinyan family sought new means of sustenance, it was in early 1930s that
Mihran Şahinyan bought shares in a photography studio located at the top floor of
an arcade in Galatasaray neighbourhood of Beyoğlu district, known as Galatasaray
Pasajı, joining the two other immigrant brothers from Kosovo who had moved to
Istanbul during the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913, and who had been operating the
studio there probably since the early 1920s (Calafato 2022, 173; Serttaş 2011, 28).
Foto Koro was the former name of the photography studio that was operated by
these two brothers, Raif and Şerif Koro, before it was renamed as Foto Galatasaray
by the time Mihran Şahinyan joined the studio, and as the Kosovan brothers parted
ways (Calafato 2022, 173).
The year 1936 marked another important turning point in the new life of Maryam
Şahinyan and her family. After the untimely death of their mother Dikranuhi
Şahinyan, Maryam Şahinyan and her siblings needed to take new responsibilities
within the family (Serttaş 2011, 32). Following a gendered division of labor, the
ultimate decision was to reserve the limited amount of family finances for the further
education of the male members of the family, while women were expected to
help their father and take responsibility in keeping the household and in domestic
chores (Ibid.). Under these circumstances, Maryam cut her education short and
started working with her father at Foto Galatasaray. By then, Mihran Şahinyan
had already bought the remaining shares of the studio and was its sole operator, as
the former co-owner went on to open a separate studio of his (Ibid.). A year after,
in 1937, Maryam Şahinyan took over the whole responsibility of Foto Galatasaray,
14
and started to operate the studio on her own.
Maryam Şahinyan operated Foto Galatasaray on her own uninterruptedly from 1937
to 1986, when she finally decided to hand over the studio to new owners, at the age
of 75 (36). Under the ownership of Maryam Şahinyan, Foto Galatasaray has operated
in three different locations on İstiklal Street, and in this time span, Şahinyan
has witnessed Istanbul through her camera, producing more than 200,000 images
of an immensely wide range of people whose ways have crossed with her studio.
Foto Galatasaray, under Maryam Şahinyan’s operation, first served at its initial location
at Galatasaray Pasajı, until the demolishing of the arcade in the early 1940s
to give way to the reorganisation of the Galatasaray Square (30). Today, at this
initial site of the studio stands a sculpture by Sadi Çalık, which commemorates the
50th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic, commissioned in 1973
(Günal and Çelikkan 2019, 269). Demolishing of the Galatasaray Pasajı and the
replacement of it with a wider empty space, which today hosts a victorious monument
to the Republic can be considered as another layer of historical erasure that
is embedded in the story of Maryam Şahinyan, as the physical space today bears
no reference to the previous uses of the square. The history of handing over of the
arcades located on İstaklal Street or the demolishing of them altogether as in the
case of Galatasaray Pasajı bear witness to the processes of dispossession and appropriation
along the way of ethnic and spatial homogenisation of Turkey and the
nationalisation of its economy (257).
The second location of Foto Galatasaray, from early 1940s into late 1960s attest
to a similar story, which was again an arcade that is known as Çiçek Pasajı [the
Flower Arcade] today. Originally commissioned by a wealthy member of the Greek
community of Istanbul, Christakis Zografos Effendi in 1870, the arcade came to be
named as Hristaki Pasajı after its commissioner and as Cité de Pera (Pera was the
Greek originating name of today’s Beyoğlu district and the İstiklal Street was named
as Grand Rue de Pera accordingly) before it was purchased by the grand vizier of
Abdulhamid II in 1908, Küçük Said Pasha, who brought the Flower Production and
Marketing Cooperative to the building, which attributed its current name to the
arcade. After approximately two long decades at this location, Maryam Şahinyan
finally moved her business to its final address, a few blocks away from Çiçek Pasajı,
again on İstiklal Street.
This was the urban geography in which Maryam Şahinyan survived and lived. But
what kind of a survival spot was Istanbul for a member of a community which was
now considered a “minority”? Especially through the early decades of the republican
Turkey, Istanbul came to be understood in exact oppositional terms to the rest
15
of the country in the eyes of the new regime which intensified and continued the
systematic program of nationalising and homogenising the country. Ankara, which
was established as the new capital of republican Turkey in 1923, came to symbolise
everything that Istanbul was not in the imagination of the Kemalist republicans
(Bozdoğan 2001, 82). Ankara was being imagined as the locus from which a pure,
self-conscious nation of high morals would grow, as opposed to Istanbul, which was
considered as a locality that was deeply marked by the symbols of the dead regime,
impurity caused by its cosmopolitanism, and as a locus of immorality (Oncü 1992,
72). As a result, several policies of the new regime, be them implicit or explicit,
aimed to constitute Istanbul as an acceptable confinement for the minoritised populations
of the new country, which would contain the perceived “risks” that these
populations could pose for the aimed homogeneity of the new Turkish nation. In
fact, the population exchange that aimed to nationalise the respective populations
of Greece and Turkey via exchanging communities between territories based mainly
on their religious identity exempted Istanbul from this exchange and the strict prohibitions
on Armenian religious and cultural organising in other parts of the country
accompanied by systematic threats by extralegal organisations ensured that Armenians
had nowhere to live in safety as a community but in Istanbul (Suciyan 2018,
77-81). Similarly, a domestic travel ban that was imposed on the non-muslim communities
of Turkey in the mid-late 1920s made an exception for those who were
travelling to Istanbul, implicitly suggesting that Istanbul was the only officially acceptable
destination for these communities (Akçam and Kurt 2012).
However, this is not to say that Istanbul was totally exempted from the homogenising
tendencies of the new regime. In fact, as the spatial arrangements I exemplified
above suggest, Istanbul was also a location within which the new regime wanted to
solidify its power. Moreover, various atrocities throughout the 20th century such as
theWealth Tax of 1940s, the pogrom in September 1955, and the forced deportations
in 1964, all of which targeted non-muslim communities of the city, remind us that the
safety of the minoritised populations in Istanbul continued to remain quite fragile.
In fact, Maryam Şahinyan and her immediate family has also been effected by these
episodes to varying degrees. For example, in 1944 Maryam Şahinyan and her father
had been asked to pay 5,000 liras in total as wealth tax, which they had managed
to pay somehow in order not to be sent to the compulsory labor camp in Aşkale 1.
Yet still, as a result of the processes I delineated above, Istanbul became a locus
of containment for the "outcasts" and disenfranchised groups, communities that
posited a contrast to the ideals of the modern national citizen that the new regime
1Taken from the interview notes of Yetvart Tomasyan, which he conducted with Maryam Şahinyan’s brother,
Vruyr Şahinyan.
16
aimed to construct. As a place of gathering for populations that were expelled
from other parts of the surrounding geographies, the disenfranchised communities
of various sorts continued to live and survive until today in Istanbul, and I suggest
that we approach to the story of Maryam Şahniyan and the visual register she kept
in her archive through this lens. As Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (2016) rightfully suggests,
Armenians who remained in Turkey after the genocide have survived not only the
genocide itself but also the new Turkey (xii). I am contend that understanding
this new context for those who remained exclusively in terms of victimisation and
prolonged suffering would not do justice to the lived stories behind. The story
of Maryam Şahinyan and her work demands us to forgo such exclusive lenses of
victimisation to better understand them, and their afterlives.
2.1.3 A “Modest” Photographer?
Details that we know about the personal, everyday life of Maryam Şahinyan are
scarce and fragmented, and the ones we know come mainly from the narratives
of those who knew her during her life, collected in the posthumously published
book about her, Foto Galatasaray: Studio Practice by Maryam Şahinyan (Serttaş
2011). Most of this information about her and her family have been provided by
her brother Vruyr Şahinyan, supplemented by the accounts of İsa Barkev Avşar,
who took over the studio together with Fikri Kevork Çalış from Maryam Şahinyan
in 1986. Among the details they provide are the facts that she usually kept a lowprofile
in her everyday life in terms of having a small, close circle of friends, that she
spent most of her life in her “modest” studio, walking there back and forth everyday
from her house in Şişli, that she was never married nor did she have children, that
she always brought an apple to the studio as her lunch, that she was reticent and
not very fond of unnecessarily questioning people or being questioned herself, and
that she was quite careful in not arguing with her clients and meeting their demands
at her best (34-36). Even though these details we have about Şahinyan’s personal
life might seem fragmented and inconsequential at first, I think situating these bits
within a wider context of being an Armenian and a woman in republican Turkey can
provide us some valuable hints about her as the person behind the camera at Foto
Galatasaray, and for understanding her position vis-a-vis the archive she left with
us. Even though I do not want to want to limit my analyses to a lens of subjectivity
in this thesis for the reasons which I discuss more in detail in the coming chapters,
I still think that it is important to catch some glimpses about Maryam Şahinyan’s
positionality within her own context. This is not only for the purposes of shedding
even more light on the story of Maryam Şahinyan herself, but also for facilitating a
17
discussion, in the coming chapters, on the possibilities of imagining her within the
context of contemporary feminisms in and beyond Turkey.
In her groundbreaking work on being an Armenian in post-genocidal Turkey, Lerna
Ekmekçioğlu (2016) argues that the regeneration work that the Armenian community
had to undertake in the aftermath of the genocide was a deeply gendered
process. The genocide itself was a gendered and age-conscious event within which
massacres and deportations were accompanied by the giving out of the orphaned
Armenians (a category which often included women together with the children) to
Muslim families to be raised as Muslims, and this gave way to a gendered and ageconscious
legacy (11; 28). In the aftermath of the genocide, in compliance with
the gendered division of labor in many other national projects, among the surviving
Armenian community, women were perceived as the ones to safeguard the Armenianness
of the community by providing domestic care in their endogamous, Armenian
households and to ensure the futurity of the community by carrying and raising
children (22). In fact, Armenian publications at the time were demanding women
to devote themselves to the procreation of future generations of Armenians, and
defining this devotion as their sole duty along these lines (32).
Could the cloak of introvertedness attributed to Maryam Şahinyan in the narratives,
which suggests a certain extent of social isolation be caused by her "failure"
to join in this communal duty as an Armenian woman who never got married or
had children? While it is impossible to maintain anything conclusive in this respect,
I think it is also hard not to take this context into consideration while thinking
about the loneliness that is attributed to Maryam Şahinyan in the narratives about
her. On the other hand, though, I think it is also hard to situate Maryam Şahinyan
totally out of the post-genocidal Armenian communal imaginary and the position
it envisioned for women. As a studio photographer, her business occupied a liminal
space between the public and the private, and the liminality of the studio together
with Maryam Şahinyan’s identity as a woman also provided some advantages for
her work in terms of its unique clientele. Vruyr Şahinyan, who had also occasionally
helped Maryam Şahinyan in her business argues that Maryam Şahinyan’s identity as
a woman photographer have defined the kind of clientele that the studio appealed to
as women particularly chose her studio to be photographed at a time when confidentiality
[mahrem] was an issue of great importance regarding public lives of women.2
Words of Vruyr Şahinyan also attest to an understanding of the studio space as a
liminal one in which Maryam Şahinyan’s mediation as a woman photographer have
played a crucial role in the determination of the frames of the acceptable.
2From the interview notes of Yetvart Tomasyan
18
It was not only among the surviving Armenian community in republican Turkey,
but also in the imaginary of the new regime itself that women occupied a significant
position in the making of a new, modern society. Conceptualised as “state feminism”
by various scholars, the republican regime perceived women as primary carriers
of modernity and demanded them to join the public life along with men without
forgoing their duties as caregivers and mothers to the children of the new nation,
both defined in terms of a national duty of women (Arat 1998; Tekeli 1990). This
double call on women rendered certain professions in the early decades of the republic
especially reputable for women. Being a teacher, for example, was as one of these
professions in the early decades of the republic, which was imbued with the ideals
of raising the new generations of the nation, who were then to further the civilising
mission of the country. Idealised in such terms, teaching became one of the best
fitting professions to the image of the new, modern woman, whose public duty was
never imagined distinctively from the private ones. However, being a women and a
member of a designated “minority” group in such context, complicates this picture
even further.
How might Maryam Şahinyan be fitting into this picture as an Armenian woman
studio photographer? Underlining the liminality of studio photography between
public and private is important in this respect, but not enough. Therefore, in order
to better answer this question, I would like to turn briefly to the role of studio photography
in family (and community) making. In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch
argues that photography plays a crucial role in the constructions of self-narratives
about the family, and underlines photography’s “inscription in family life and its perpetuation
of familial ideology” (Hirsch 1997, 6). Found in photo albums, hung on
walls at homes, put on furniture in frames, or exchanged as gifts, such photographs
indeed work as markers and reinforcers of belonging to various communities, including
that of the family. Even though it is hard to classify Maryam Şahinyan as
a community photographer per se (SaltOnline 2011), it is evident that in the vast
repertoire of images she produced throughout her career, photos belonging to the
members of the minoritised communities of Istanbul, and especially that of the Armenians
constitute a significant amount (Serttaş 2011, 46). In Istanbul, Şahinyans
maintained a close relationship with fellow Armenians who also migrated to Istanbul
from Sebastia, and this community has also become one of the frequenters of the
studio (SaltOnline 2011). Maryam Şahinyan also had close personal relations with
the members of the clergy, staff of Armenian orphanages, and the staff of consulates
around Beyoğlu, who consequently constituted the clientele of Foto Galatasaray.3
Therefore, in the photographs taken by Maryam Şahinyan, we see numerous mem-
3From the interview notes of Yetvart Tomasyan, conducted with Vruyr Şahinyan
19
bers of clergy in their religious outfits as well as numerous people in everyday attires
with symbols of their religious belonging such as a cross necklace, children, students,
and families.
As the photographer of these images which probably once had their place in respective
private albums, walls and houses, Maryam Şahinyan can be considered as having
played a part, however unconventional or invisible, conscious or not, in the regeneration
of the communities around her, through producing photographs of them, which
would serve as important components in their respective narratives of belonging.
In fact, in the case of the Armenian community in Republican Turkey, the process
of post-genocidal regeneration was a communal one, with individual families within
the community perceived as fundamental units in the process (Ekmekçioğlu 2016,
22). Genocide fragmented the community through tearing families up, hence the
aftermath was imagined as a process of brining back those fragmented bits together
(22-23). Photography should have played a significant role in this task of brining
back together the pieces. The perpetuity of the representations of religious belonging
in Maryam Şahniyan’s photographs can also be read along these lines. In the
following decades after the genocide, religious institutions that belonged to Armenians,
and especially those in Istanbul, became important vessels for the regeneration
and survival of Armenians as a community, as these institutions managed to remain
more or less intact, hence provided a suitable infrastructure for the communities
to rely on (122). Whereas the liminality of the studio between public and private
should have provided a suitable and rather comfortable environment for the community
and families to perform their imagined identities, belongings, and selves, as the
official dictum in republican Turkey demanded its citizens to behave as a monolithic
mass in the public sphere, which ultimately lead to a privatisation of identity based
differences (14).
In the notes among the various different boxes in which Maryam Şahinyan kept
her archive, she was referred to with different names. Variations of her name in
these notes include Maryam Şahinyan, Meryem Şahinyan, Maryam Şahinoğlu, and
Meryem Şahinoğlu (Serttaş 2011, 76). These variations of her name in different notes
within her archive, that contain different clientele groups’ photographs demonstrate
quite strikingly the liminality of the studio photography setting, and the particular
position of an Armenian woman in it, within the specific context of republican
Turkey. Lerna Ekmekçioğlu (2016) names a spherical imagination in order to explain
the ways in which Armenians conduct their everyday lives and position themselves
and their community vis-a-vis the dominant group. According to this spherical
imagination, the “in-side” of the community stands for the families and kinship
networks, the “mid-side” stands for the communal spaces and institutions that are
20
used by Armenians but also surveilled by the state such as the schools, churches and
hospitals, and finally the “out-side” stands for the realm of non-Armenians, then
public sphere, and the state (13). The varied naming strategy that was employed
by Maryam Şahniyan herself suggests that she was quite conscious of the fact that
in her studio she was engaging with the “in-side,” “mid-side,” and “out-side” of
her community interchangeably, and that these varying engagements required her
to adjust expressions of her identity accordingly.
2.1.4 The First Professional Woman Studio Photographer?
Women constituted a significant portion within the clientele of Foto Galatasaray, and
Maryam Şahinyan’s identity as a woman have played a crucial role in the constitution
of her clients’ profile as I have just discussed. It is estimated that roughly 90 percent
of the people she photographed were women (Serttaş 2011, 46). It is also suggested
that the “modest” outlook of Maryam Şahinyan and Foto Galatasaray, which has
always operated at locations that were central to the public life in Istanbul, yet were
at the same time secluded from the public by being located at the rather isolated
corners of the buildings in which it operated made the studio a popular destination
for those whose joining to the public life was expected take place in a liminal space
(34; 46). Maryam Şahinyan is frequently referred to as the first woman professional
studio photographer of Turkey. While her unique and significant position within the
history of studio photography in Turkey is undeniable, I would like to problematise
this notion of the “first” for three main reasons.
Firstly, I think the notion of “the first” posits a historiographical problem for considering
the role of women in the history of studio photography, as it risks neglecting
the various crucial roles that women played in the development of this realm in
photography. Within the context of modernity, where the regime of visibility produced
a gendered division along the lines of seeing and being seen, the role that
women played in the development of a field that was absolutely implicated with
these emergent power dynamics needs to be evaluated carefully. We know that
since the opening of the first photography studios in the Ottoman Empire, women
played crucial roles in them behind the cameras. It was thanks to them that women
also visited these studios and get themselves photographed. A good example to this
is the photographer Laurent (Loran) Astras, who operated at Balık Pazarı [the Fish
Market] district of Beyoğlu in the mid-19th century, together with his wife (Bölük
2014, 18). Madam Astras was in charge of taking the pictures of their muslim women
clients at the time, and if demanded, she was also travelling to the houses of families
21
to get them photographed (Oztuncay 2015, 73). At a time when the visibility of
muslim women was an issue of deep concern among the Ottoman elite (Eldem 2015),
Madam Astras made it possible for muslim women to get themselves photographed.
How possible is it to make a clear-cut categorisation through the level of professionalisation
among women photographers, and more importantly, would not such
categorisation risk neglecting the role that women had already been playing in the
development of studio photography in this geography?
Secondly, another problem with the notion of “the first” is the fact that it often relies
on a selective categorisation based on the places of origin of those who are included.
Michéle Hanoosh argues that our understanding of the development of photography
in the geographies of the Eastern Mediterranean can be better understood within
the connectivity that the Mediterranean context itself suggests, and in this respect
she demands that we abandon the lenses of the nation-state and isolated regions in
our categorisations of the photographic practices in these locations (Hanoosh 2016).
Hanoosh talks about a French woman photographer, Anna Guichard, who operated
a studio on her own from 1860s onward in the Pera (Beyoğlu) district of Istanbul
as an example (9). Case of the Astras family, that I discussed above can also be
considered in this vein, as they were also “outsiders” to the Ottoman context as
French photographers. Are we to exclude them from our discussions of the history
of women in studio photography in this geography as they were “outsiders” to it?
Lastly, the denomination of Maryam Şahinyan as the first professional woman studio
photographer of Turkey relies also on the fact that unlike her precedents, she entered
the business after the foundation of the Republic, hence can be considered as the
first in the republican history. This categorisation also posits a historiographical
problem as it suggests, hence reproduces a narrative of rupture between the histories
of the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. In fact, there were a couple
of known woman photographers of the transitionary period from Ottoman Empire
to the Republican Turkey such as Naciye Hanım (Suman), who operated a studio
named Türk Hanımlar Fotoğrafhanesi [Turkish Women’s Photography Studio] from
1919 until 1930; Muzaffer Hanım, who worked as a mobile photographer; and Advise
Hanım, who worked probably at the same period as Naciye Hanım (Calafato 2022,
361-362; Bölük 2014, 50-51).
These examples do not discredit the unique importance and significance of Maryam
Şahinyan in this history, as the details I recounted about her life above already
suggest intertwined singularities of her position within this history, but rather they
enrich the story of women in studio photography in this region. Her story can
be situated as peculiar within the history of Armenian photographers of Turkey,
22
who have been the forerunners in the development of the profession from its earlier
times in the Ottoman Empire. In fact, as Armen Tsolag Marsoobian demonstrates,
prominent Armenian photographers have been key to the permeation of this new
medium in the provinces of the Empire (Marsoobian 2015). As an Armenian and
woman in this profession, who had operated a studio incessantly through a rather
troubled period for non-muslims her story deserves a significantly peculiar position
within the known history of photography in Turkey. Moreover, Maryam Şahinyan
can still be singled out among the other women photographers that I recounted not
for chronological reasons but for the fact that her archive survived until today unlike
in the case of others’, and that it serves as an unprecedented treasure in our present.
In this respect, it is the photographic archive of Maryam Şahinyan and the multiple
meanings it gains through different engagement with it over the time that I will be
dealing with in the coming chapters of this thesis. Before doing that, I would like
to present a brief analysis of the ways in which her archive have made its way into
today.
2.2 A Will to Archive? The Question of Agency in Maryam Şahinyan’s
Story
In İstanbul Ansiklopedisi [the Istanbul Encyclopedia], popular historian Reşat Ekrem
Koçu complains about the fact that the photography studios in Istanbul does not
keep regular archives, or such archives usually get lost over time (Koçu 1971, 5825).
He defines the loss of archives as painful. Maryam Şahinyan was active in her
business while Koçu was complaining about the fate of the archives at photography
studios in Istanbul. In a felicitous contrast to what Koçu believed was to be the
case at the studios, Maryam Şahinyan indeed kept an archive rather assiduously.
We know that many studios that operated around the same time had either kept
more limited archives that was less systematic in formation, or did not pay much
attention to the work of archiving altogether (SaltOnline 2011). Moreover, much of
these archives were not able to survive the passing of the time, and got usually lost
in processes of moving to different locations or the closure of the studios.
Hundreds of photographs in the Foto Galatasaray archive were produced for commercial
purposes and brought together by Maryam Şahinyan herself in the first
place, as the photographer of the studio. While in the first instance this collection
by Maryam Şahinyan can be thought to be driven primarily by a professional motivation,
which was to ensure the reproducibility of these photographs in case they
23
were demanded by their respective client-owners, Maryam Şahinyan’s careful protection
of all the negatives that she produced throughout her career that expands
to half a century also suggests that the keeping of the archive goes beyond a mere
motivation that was driven exclusively by commercial purposes. In fact, the glass
negatives from the earlier periods of her career, which were probably the hardest to
preserve due to their fragility, and whose owners might have well be gone towards
the end of Şahinyan’s studio photography career, were also kept by her up until the
time she decided to stop working. Even though it is impossible to establish anything
conclusive in this respect, it is possible to regard Maryam Şahinyan’s practice as one
of an archivist, that goes well beyond what would conventionally be expected from
a studio photographer. Besides, if we consider the multitude of representations that
composed the archive that Maryam Şahinyan kept, which included several representations
that were deemed inappropriate within the public sphere of the country
when they were produced for the reasons I briefly discussed earlier, keeping of such
an archive can also be considered as a risky endeavour. In this respect, I find it extremely
important to highlight the significance of the agency of Maryam Şahinyan in
making of the archive, as it is this obscure yet curious drive to preserve of hers which
occasioned the various new engagements with her work possible in our present.
When Maryam Şahinyan’s journey in studio photography is being considered, I think
that her agency is often prone to be neglected. In an overall outlook, she seems to
have ended up being a studio photographer as a result of consecutive events which
had taken place outside her will. Considering her life and practice only in terms of
various episodes of compulsory actions would not only not do justice to her story,
but it would also debilitate our understanding of the trans-temporal entanglements
of agencies, desires and motivations that the contemporary engagements with her
work I will be discussing entail. If we exclusively stress the fact that she entered
the business of studio photography out of necessity and urgency, it would become
trivial to go after important details regarding her practice such as her practice of
archiving.
Plurality of the subjects that we see in Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs can be a
good point of investigation in this respect. Was it Maryam Şahinyan who draw these
people from totally different walks of life to her studio to freely express themselves
in front of her camera, or was it her avoidant character of any type of conflict
with her customers that occasioned the possibility of all types of expressions at her
studio? Or should we think of this story beyond such categories with oppositional
tendencies? Tayfun Serttaş argues that it would be anachronistic and distorting to
consider Maryam Şahinyan’s story through a feminist lens that would highlight the
significance of her as a woman studio photographer and the significance of the fact
24
that her clients have been predominantly consisted of women (Serttaş 2011, 45-46).
He urges the reader to consider the story rather in relation to the gendered social
structures of the time which envisioned a gendered segregation of the public sphere
that in the end over-determined the gendered identity of Foto Galatasaray as well
(Ibid.). I think that such reading does not only fall short of allowing enough space
for situating Maryam Şahinyan’s agency as a studio photographer in the story, but
it also cannot really account for the desires, anxieties, aspirations and various sorts
of motivations that draw her clients to Foto Galatasaray.
In this respect, I find Karin Karakaşlı’s introduction to Foto Galatasaray (2011)
quite expansive as in this essay Karakaşlı creaitvely imagines Maryam Şahinyan’s
studio setting beyond the mandates of social structures. Her essay also presents a
very appropriate example of the contemporary engagements with Maryam Şahinyan
and her photography that I will be exploring more in detail in the coming chapters of
the thesis. Instead of the historicist approach of Serttaş that urges the reader not to
conflate a contemporary feminist lens with the readings of Maryam Şahinyan’s story,
Karin Karakaşlı approaches the task of fabulating Maryam Şahinyan’s story as an
imagintive and creative one in which she focuses particularly on the role of Maryam
Şahinyan as the actor who brought together all the different people seen in her
photographs (Karakaşlı 2011b). Karakaşlı’s fascination with Maryam Şahinyan’s
photography has been occasioned mainly by her reading of a radical openness in
Maryam Şahinyan that made it possible for countless people to express themselves
freely in front of her camera (Karakaşlı 2011b, 17). In Karakaşlı’s engagement with
Maryam Şahinyan’s story, narrative is central to the sense-making process. Instead
of making a recourse to the structures that are assumed to be governing the story,
Karakaşlı makes an imaginative investment in the story that aims to highlight the
entanglements of agency that made the archive at hand possible. In her reading,
the studio archive attests to a foreclosed possibility of a pluralistic society that had
once been occasioned by the radical openness of Maryam Şahinyan.
Yetvart Tomasyan, who have been key in the preservation of the archive after
Maryam Şahinyan terminated her career, and who has become the publisher of Foto
Galatasaray (2011) at Aras Publishing, also provides important insights regarding
the personality of Maryam Şahinyan. I will elaborate more on the story of the
archive after Maryam Şahinyan ended her career, with a focus on Tomasyan’s role
in this process later in this chapter. While talking about Maryam Şahinyan’s relations
to her clients in which she was known to be avoidant of any conflict, Tomasyan
suggests that it was due to Maryam Şahinyan’s perception of her Armenianness in
the post-genocidal context of Turkey (SaltOnline 2012). Deriving both from his own
life experiences and from his interviews with Vruyr Şahinyan, Tomasyan argues that
25
within the context of contemporary Turkey where being an Armenian corresponds
to an everlasting feeling of being subjugated citizens, Armenians have always felt
obliged to play the role of “the good angel” toward their clients, and they have always
tried their best to meet their demands without confronting, and that we can also
understand Maryam Şahinyan within these terms. According to Tomasyan, "playing
the good angel" and remaining unnoticeable as much as possible is a subverted
strategy of survival for an Armenian living in Turkey. Tomasyan have conducted
lengthy interviews with Maryam Şahinyan’s younger brother Vruyr Şahinyan within
the process of the Foto Galatasaray book’s production. He says that during those
interviews Vruyr Şahinyan was also quite reluctant in sharing much detail about the
story of his family and Maryam Şahinyan in particular, and he argues that this was
most probably due to a similar perception of vulnerability. In fact, there are some
evidence that Maryam Şahinyan had indeed wanted to remain invisible as much as
possible herself, as curiously this woman who have photographed countless people
in the period she worked has never been fond of being photographed herself.4
I would like to consider Karakaşlı’s and Tomasyan’s respective approaches to the
story of Maryam Şahinyan with the mediation of Lerna Ekmekçioğlu’s elaborations
on the limits and possibilities of (political) agency for Armenians in "postgenocide,
post-minoriticization Turkey" (Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 163). While answering
the provocative question of whether an Armenian can also be a feminist in republican
Turkey, Ekmekçioğlu argues that "the broader political framework did not leave
them much choice but ’only paradoxes to offer’ for (politcal) agents (Ibid.). It is
along similar lines that I would like to suggest that Maryam Şahinyan’s role can
be best understood within the context of such paradoxes. There might have been
several felt obligations for Maryam Şahinyan throughout her career, yet the archive
that is with us today also urges us to consider what went on in that studio "beyond"
the structural mandates.
In light of these arguments, I think it would be more fruitful if we approach the
practice of Maryam Şahinyan at Foto Galatasaray not through the lens of an impossible
(and problematic) question of “what she wanted” but through “what she left
with us,” which would facilitate a more attentive and reparative mode of evaluating
the fragments of her story, and enable us to acknowledge the obscured ways in
which agency manifests itself within these fragments. In the end, as scholars like Judith
Halberstam and Dina Georgis argue, it is not only through explicit expressions
of agentive capacities or intelligible resistiveness that we can attend to subjugated
subjectivities (Halberstam 2011, 124)(Georgis 2013, 19). Dina Georgis argues that
4From the interview notes of Yetvart Tomasyan
26
the proper subject of trauma in postcolonial literature have always been imagined
along the lines of a melancholic attachment to the losses that these subjects have
endured, which in turn lead to a political scepticism about the work of mourning,
which is usually considered along the lines of assimilation to a normalcy (3-4). Such
an approach, which relegates resistance exclusively to the realm of melancholic attachment
neglects the complexities that are implicated in the processes of mourning,
hence falls short in accounting for the unintelligible and more obscure ways in which
subjects survive. I suggest that we consider Maryam Şahinyan, her archive, and the
contemporary engagements with her archive along the lines of such unintelligibility,
instead of looking for explicit expressions of agency and resistance.
2.3 The Archive: Another Story of Survival
What does this archive owes its survival to beyond Maryam Şahinyan? There are a
couple of aspects to this story. First of all, I think that the archive owes its survival
to the “modesty” of its studio. The time frame through which Foto Galatasaray
kept operating coincide with various troublesome turning points and events in the
republican history, some of which took place in the immediate vicinity of the studio,
around Istiklal Street. The September 1955 pogrom that I mentioned earlier
can be singled out in this respect. In this pogrom which targeted the non-muslim
communities, and especially that of the Greek-Orthodox of Istanbul, Istiklal Street
and its surroundings were the epicentre. On the Istiklal Street, it was especially the
businesses that were known to be operated by non-muslims which were targeted.
Foto Galatasaray was located at Hristaki/Sait Paşa Arcade (today’s Çiçek Pasajı)
at the time. Vruyr Şahinyan recounts that the arcade was secured by its steel doors
during the plunder which also helped the studio to stay safe during the events, yet
the windows of the studio that faced İstiklal Street were broken by the attackers
during the incident. 5 Moreover, Tayfun Serttaş suggests that Maryam Şahinyan’s
womanness might have extenuated her image even among her peers and thus her
business were not attracted much attention during the atrocity (Estukyan 2018). In
this respect, it can be argued that the survival process of the studio and its archive
was a gendered one.
After Maryam Şahinyan decided to stop operating Foto Galatasaray in 1986, she
transferred the studio with its archive to İsa Barkev Avşar and Fikri Kevork Çalış,
who were also members of the Armenian community in Istanbul (Serttaş 2011, 38).
5From the interview notes of Yetvart Tomasyan
27
After Avşar and Çalış also decided to stop operating the studio, the archive faced a
risk of perishing as the business got ultimately discontinued. Alarmed by this risk
that the archive faced, Sarkis Çerkezyan, who had been considered as a person of
wisdom and mastery among the Armenian community of Istanbul, and hence denominated
as varbet (an all-encompassing term for “master” in Armenian), referred
to Yetvart Tomasyan in 1994 to save the archive in boxes (SaltOnline 2012). After
seeing the persisting insistence of Sarkis Varbet, Yetvart Tomasyan decided to carry
the archive to his inventory at Hıdivyal Palas on İstiklal Street, where he had been
operating a publishing business, namely Aras Publishing. Tomasyan is not certain
about the reasons why Sarkis Varbet might have chosen him to save the archive
among his relatively big network in the Armenian community of Istanbul (Ibid.).
Could his role as a publisher at Aras Publishing, which he defines as a “window
opening to the Armenian culture and literature in Turkey” played a role in Sarkis
Varbet’s decision? While it may not be possible to provide a conclusive answer to
this question, it is also obvious that the ending up of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive in
the hands of a publisher who focuses on publishing Armenian literature and culture
made it possible for the archive to be publicised in the following years.
When I met Yetvart Tomasyan to listen to his story with Maryam Şahinyan, he first
defined himself as an ardent collector and archivist. He told that he continues this
practice since 1960s, and that he does not discriminate the materials he comes across
with while collecting. In the office located at Hıdivyal Palas on İstiklal Street where
we had a lengthy conversation, there was also an intensive work going on regarding
the sorting and organising of the various ephemera that Tomasyan has collected over
the decades. While he said that there was no particular logic he followed in collecting
these ephemera, he was also quite excited about the various unpredictable ends that
his archive may serve in the future. Tomasyan thinks that it was also due to this
archivist aspect of his that Sarkis Çerkezyan chose him to look after the archive.
While insisting that Tomasyan took care of the archive, Çerkezyan also said that
there were group photographs of graduates of Armenian community schools and the
archive was worth saving at least for this reason if for nothing else. It seems that
an urge to preserve these vulnerable remnant, together with an anticipation of a
renewed future purpose of them were at play in this joint effort in careful keeping of
the archive. Tomasyan also acknowledges that the story of his preservation of the
archive upon the insistence of Sarkis Çerkezyan has come to a meaningful coclusion
by the publicisation of the archive in 2011.
Archives have constituted an important issue of concern for the surviving populations
of Armenians in post-genocidal Turkey. For example, alarmed by the fire
that burned down a substantial amount of the city of Smyrna/Izmir down in 1922,
28
the Armenian patriarch in Istanbul at the time, Archbishop Zaven Der Yeghiayan,
thought of moving the archive of the patriarchate out of Istanbul as the first thing, as
a precaution to the possibility of a similar fire happening in Istanbul (Ekmekçioğlu
2016, 14). Lerna Ekmekçioğlu argues that this move of the patriarch, which sought
to save the future of the community, suggests that the surviving populations of Armenians
thought it could be better to keep some aspects of their future deliberately
in dark, for them to ultimately survive (15, emphasis is mine). Such an attitude
toward the archives, Ekmekçioğlu goes on to suggest, have been a method for the
generations of the surviving Armenian community in Turkey to exercise control over
their history and their present (Ibid.). Can we read the survival story of the Foto
Galatasaray archive, and the involvement of these different figures in this story along
these lines?
After the archive stayed untouched for more than 15 years in the inventory at Hıdivyal
Palas, Yetvart Tomasyan finally invited Istanbul based artist-researcher Tayfun
Serttaş to have a look at it. In the process that followed, Tayfun Serttaş processed
the negatives found in the raw archive and turned it into a digital archive of roughly
200,000 images. In 2011, the digitalised archive was exhibited for the first time as
part of the inaugural exhibition of SALT Galata, which soon became one of the
most prominent art institutions in Istanbul. The main and only written source on
the life and work of Maryam Şahinyan, the book Foto Galatasaray: Studio Practice
by Maryam Şahinyan was published in tandem with this exhibition in 2011, and
together they marked the first instance in which Maryam Şahniyan and her archive
was revealed to the wider public.
29
3. ENGAGING WITH AN ARCHIVE OF ORPHANED IMAGES
As I delineated in the previous chapter, the constitution of Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive took place within a context of persistent political and historical dispossession,
erasure, and survival. In this respect, it would not be wrong to suggest that a
sedimentation of various layers of catastrophe has occasioned the emergence of this
archive that we are looking at today, and this catastrophic setting of it informs, to
varying degrees, the various ways in which contemporary actors engages with this
archive in their works. Starting with this chapter onwards, I will be dealing with
these contemporary engagements with the archive, which I suggest to be characterising
the afterlives of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. For this matter, in this chapter
I will first conceptualise the Foto Galatasaray archive in the form that it entered
our present, through navigating the recent debates in the literatures on archives and
photography briefly. Following this conceptualisation, I will delineate the sociocultural
and political context within which the archive revealed to the interest of the
public. I find this contextualisation important as it informs in important ways the
ways in which different actors have engaged with Maryam Şahinyan’s photographic
work after it was revealed. In the remainder of the chapter, I will conceptualise
the lens through which I will be dealing with the particular engagements with the
archive, which will set the tone for the following chapter, and introduce the notion
of “cruising” as a queer, creative mode of engagement with the archive. Finally,
I will wrap this chapter up by answering the question “what’s the use of Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive?”
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3.1 Conceptualising Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive
3.1.1 What are We Looking at?
Photographs that we are looking at in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive today differ from
the ones that have been kept originally by Maryam Şahinyan while she operated
her business, and I find it important to stress on this difference, as it occasions
and implicates the contemporary receptions of these photographs. The primary
purpose of Maryam Şahinyan’s own collection was not to look at the photographs
in form of images, as they were kept in form of glass or safety negatives, in piles of
boxes. To Maryam Şahinyan, as the operator of the studio, they probably mattered
more as negatives and as materials, than as photographs or for their content. To
their respective client-owners, on the other hand, they probably had various personal
meanings which were immediate to their lived experiences, and in this respect copies
of these negatives have most probably had their individual first lives at the hands
of their owners. In this respect, the form in which we look at these photographs
today, implies a process of double alienation.
Firstly, presented to us as a collection of the works of a studio photographer, these
photographs no longer serve their primary purposes that they once served while they
were in possession of their owners. While the individual primary purposes of these
photographs may vary, it is certain that they were not produced to be presented to
us decades after their production.
Secondly, in the process of conversion from negatives to digital and print images,
these photographs ceased to be the ones that Maryam Şahinyan archived, and they
take on an unanticipated new life in the hands of countless foreigners, who are often
strangers to their primal contexts. In this respect, I suppose that a studio archive
that ends up circulating in the hands of countless “outsiders” as a result of its
publicisation differ significantly from the photographic archives of other kinds such
as family albums, or those kept by various institutions like prisons, the police, schools
and hospitals, due to this double alienation process they undergo within the process.
It is a multitude of subjects that blink at us from Maryam Şahinyan’s photographic
archive. Among these photographs we see unnamed families, children, babies, groups
of friends, members of the clergy, performance artists, scientists, members of various
religious communities, youths, families of immigrated communities who came to
Istanbul from different parts of Turkey with a prospect of a better life especially
after 1960s, and various expressions of non-normative sexual desires and gender
identities.
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How can we conceptualise Maryam Şahinyan’s archive along the lines of this multitude
of representation that it provides? I would like to approach this question with
Allan Sekula’s conceptualisation of “the shadow archive,” as it can both provide a
valuable lens in dealing with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, and be troubled by it.
In his essay “The Body and the Archive,” Allan Sekula elaborates on the various
complex roles that photography plays in modern societies and conceptualises the
shadow archive as an encompassing term for what the various different practices of
photography constitute (Sekula 1986). In Sekula’s discussion, where photography
implies both the introduction of the panoptic principle to the everyday life through
the means of its use by various apparatuses of power, and a process of democratisation
though its introduction of honorific bourgeois portraiture in the service of
greater masses, coexisting uses of photography contributed to the emergence of an
inclusive, general archive of images (10). Naming this general archive also as the
shadow archive, which encompasses the social terrain in its entirety, Sekula suggests
that “[t]he general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of
the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the
poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other
embodiments of the unworthy” (Ibid.).
I find the suggestion of multitude in this conceptualisation as a coexistence of the
worthy and unworthy significant as it underlines the dynamics of power implicated
in the coexistence of differences, which often ranks these differences according to the
various hierarchies of value. However, I also think that the binary apportionment
of the categories of worthy and unworthy as solid categories in and of themselves
does not hold well if we consider Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs, as this binary
cannot easily account for the intersections of identity that Maryam Şahniyan’s photographs
offer. For example, if we juxtapose the various representations of families
and conjugal couples we see in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive to those with expressions
of various non-normative gender and sexualities, we can draw a picture along the
lines of worthiness and unworthiness. But would that opposition still hold if we also
consider the fact that most of these families and heterosexual couples that we see
in Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs come mostly from disenfranchised communities
in Turkey? In response to Sekula’s conceptualisation of the honorific in the shadow
archive, Tina M. Campt asks: “what happens when, for example, the family portrait
captures a configuration of family that does not enjoy the privileges of middle-class,
heterosexual, white sovereignty?” (Campt 2020, 113). I think a possible solution to
this challenge could be to reconsider the suggestions of worthy/unworthy or honorific/
repressive in Sekula’s definition not as fixed categorisations but rather as continuums
among which status of photographs can shift, depending on their context,
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and in relation to what other photographs they are being considered.
Along the lines of the reconsideration, the lens of the shadow archive urges us
not to consider photographic archives including Maryam Şahinyan’s as exclusively
subversive or normative, but it rather suggests that we approach them as a realm
in which these two tendencies are interchangeable and entangled.
Photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive can be defined as vernacular, covering
the multiple ways in which the term has been defined by various scholars working on
photography. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett defines vernacularisation as a process
and argues that “no photograph is born vernacular,” but they become one as they
are “severed from their first live (or lives)” and “enter their second life (or lives)”
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2020, 304). In light of this conceptualisation, it can be
said that we are facing vernacular photographs while we look at the images in
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. Recent debates around the various conceptualisations
of vernacular photography such as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s provide a fruitful lens
through which Maryam Şahinyan’s archive can be conceptualised, and in the coming
sections I will navigate these discussions more elaborately.
Beyond the vernacular, photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive also present
themselves as what Tina M. Campt defines as orphan photos and fugitive images
(Campt 2012, 87). The figure of the orphan in Campt’s conceptualisation pertains
to those “survivors who forge new configurations of family and attachment that
both affirm and unsettle those we take for granted as the norm,” and the fugitives
are those who “cannot or do not remain in their proper place, or the places
to which they have been confined or assigned” (Ibid.). Conceptualising Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive along the lines of orphanage and fugitiveness as Campt suggests
can in this respect guide our attention to the afterlives of the photographs we see
in it. As photographs that have been severed from their original families and networks
of belonging, that no longer have a proper place in space/time, they now
assume new, “potentially disruptive capacities” as unruly, orphaned photographs,
circulating among their unanticipated, new audiences (90). It is in this manner that
I follow these photographs within their new contexts, investigate the ways in which
their emergent disruptive capacities are manifested, and analyse the cultural and
political significance of the disruptive work that they entail.
The public reveal of Maryam Şahinyan and her archive in early 2010s can be best
understood within the context of growing interest in the archives and vernacular
photography among widening audiences over the last decades. Similarly, the sociocultural
conditions in which it was received by its new audiences needs to be analysed
in order to make better sense of the range of engagements with Maryam Şahinyan’s
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photography. In this respect, in what follows, I will first situate the public reveal of
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive in the settings of memory boom and the archival turn,
and then will turn to the recent debates around vernacular photography to delineate
the ways in which Maryam Şahinyan’s archive matter within this historical context.
3.1.2 The Archival Turn and the Memory Boom
Vernacular photography, or defined in plural as vernacular photographies by Geoffrey
Batchen have come to the attention of scholars and artists working with the
medium of photography starting from 1990s (Batchen 2000). It is no coincidence
that this emergent interest in vernacular photographies has coincided with another
phenomenon in scholarly and artistic engagements at the time, namely the archival
turn. From a scholarly perspective, the turn to the archives among various disciplines
in this period hinted at the demise of the monopoly of historians over the
archives in academic enquiry (Altınay and Jokic 2020, 1261). In this respect, the
archival turn embodied a challenge that demanded us to reimagine the ways in
which we apprehend history, and to transform the mode of its writing as to pay
attention to those subjects who had been discarded in the dominant and official
modes of historiographical endeavour (Ibid.). In the artistic realm, the archival turn
resembled a renewed interest in the archives by various artists, which had its roots
that can be traceable to the prewar period (Foster 2004, 3-4). In conjunction with
the emergent and pervasive scholarly interest in the archives, artists have sought to
make the historically lost or displaced information physically present through their
engagements with the archives in this period (Ibid.).
Cheryl Simon argues that the archival turn of 1990s can be understood within the
social and cultural context of late twentieth century which was imbued with a sense
of nostalgia, increased cultural anxieties fostered by the postmodern condition, and
“the expansion of visual culture” (Simon 2002, 102). I think, the memory boom
of the 1990s can also be added to this list of informing conditions in which the
archival turn took shape. Andreas Huyssen argues that the project of progressive
national modernity, which sought to give a particular meaning to the present and to
envision a future along these lines in political, cultural and social terms have failed
in its mission towards the end of the twentieth century, and this gave way to the
emergence of various discourses around memory (Huyssen 2003, 2). Huyssen goes
on to suggest that at this moment in time, it was not only that the narratives of
universal History was waning, but the destructions and multiple layers of forgetting
they entailed in the process of their construction were resurfaced (Ibid.). Within
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this process of resurfacing, memory emerged as a cultural, artistic and scholarly
discourse in response to those multiple pasts that have been erased and discarded
by the projects of modernity. In this respect, the historical conjuncture within which
the archival turn took place can be said to be corresponding to a moment of renewed
characterisation of the modern historical process as a catastrophic one.
Marianne Hirsch situates what she defines as the work of postmemory, which captures
the different ways in which generations that follow a historical catastrophe
engage with the memories of this catastrophe, within the context of the archival
turn (Hirsch 2012, 228). She argues that despite what the earlier conceptualisations
suggested for the artistic works that were being done motivated by an archival
impulse, the works of postmemory that have been engaging the archive were not forgoing
historical specificity of the contexts of their archives in a postmodern fashion,
but to the contrary, they were utilising them as correctives and additives to their respective
histories (Ibid.). This tension between reclaiming the historical specificity
or forgoing it altogether in the projects that engage with the archives within the
context of the archival turn that Hirsch’s point suggests translates very well into the
trajectories that the memory boom and the consequent archival turn have embodied
in Turkey. In this respect, now I would like to turn to the particular story of these
developments in Turkey, as it also sheds light on the various possible ways in which
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive is being received in contemporary Turkey, before
navigating this tension in the recent discussions on vernacular photography.
The situation in Turkey has simultaneously followed the global tendencies in terms
of the turn to archives and to the various discourses of memory that I outlined
above. Although such developments in Turkey carry significant parallels to those
that happened elsewhere, the context in which they took place in Turkey also have a
specific character. The period in which the memory boom and the subsequent turn
to the archives happened in Turkey corresponds to the aftermath of the military
coup of 1980, which had significant consequences for the political, social, economic,
and cultural spheres in the country in the following decades. In an essay where she
contemplates on the new cultural climate of Turkey in the aftermath of the 1980
coup d’etat, Nurdan Gürbilek argues that one of the greatest ironies in the cultural
sphere of Turkey at that period was the fact that the legacy of a significantly repressive
logic of the military rule had coexisted with a simultaneous “boom of speech,”
which generated a promise of unprecedented liberation as to occlude the violence of
the coup that had happened just recently (Gürbilek 1992, 21). Accompanied by a
simultaneous program of economic liberalisation, Gürbilek argues that this “boom
of speech” cannot be thought separately from the logic of the cultural markets that
had started to permeate the country en masse during this period. The “boom of
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speech” that Gürbilek describes entailed a process of naming in which different
groups within the country who have been discarded by the dominant groups and
narratives have started to name and speak for themselves. I think, this context of
the 1980s as defined by Nurdan Gürbilek, in which the repression of voices accompanied
the multiplication of speech, which was taking place within new frames of
the sayable that were set not only by the political limits on speech but also by the
global tendencies within which they were taking shape also informed the subsequent
memory boom that happened in Turkey in 1990s and 2000s in crucial ways.
Memory boom, particularly with respect to the remembrance of the past of the various
“minority” groups in Turkey, have manifested itself first in form of the rhetoric
of multiculturalism in 1990s (Bilal 2006, 74). It is no coincidence that the memorydriven
relationship to the past in the country have manifested itself first in cultural
terms as the denomination multiculturalism suggests, when we think of the “culturalisation”
of the everyday life that started in 1980s (Gürbilek 1992, 15). In its
exclusively cultural version, the mode of multicultural remembrance in Turkey have
contributed to a liberal conceptualisation of an “Anatolian mosaic,” within which
the various communities of non-muslims were regarded as the “vanishing colours of
the mosaic” (Bilal 2006, 74). Towards late 1990s, this conceptualisation of multiculturalism
found its manifestation in the archiving work of some music companies
in Turkey, which started releasing albums composed of songs by the former nonmuslim
communities of provincial Turkey, in a gesture to underline the essential
“geographical brotherhood” of the communities of Anatolia (Iğsız 2001, 156-157).
Even though these initial works have remained more or less within the boundaries
of this exclusively cultural definition of multiculturalisms in terms of the forms of
remembering they entailed, they have nevertheless facilitated a public discussion
around the discarded pasts of the country. In fact, the cultural formulation of multiculturalism,
which was not attentive to the histories of violence, displacement and
erasure that underlaid the actual vanishing of the “colours of Anatolia” they were
articulating was soon to be accompanied by public debates around coming to terms
with the difficult pasts that the modern history of the country entailed. In this
respect, the reduction of remembrance of the past to an exclusively cultural terrain
which would work to contain the political potentials of the remembering work did
not hold. This is not to suggest that the discourses of social memory in today’s
Turkey are exclusively political but it is rather to raise the point that the different
modes of remembering coexist in the contemporary sociocultural and political terrain,
one occupying the mainstream and the other remaining more disruptive as to
seek justice in the present.
I think that the registers that keep the record of the ordinary instances from the
36
everyday life, for which Maryam Şahinyan’s archival record is also an example, are
specially prone for being regarded through this depoliticised lens of multiculturalism.
It is especially in this respect that I include a detailed analysis of the trajectories of
the contemporary culture of remembering in Turkey as the realm of the everyday
can both be subsumed in a nostalgic yearning for a multicultural past and as the
examples I will be discussing in the next chapter show can be reclaimed in a more
overtly politicised way as to call attention to the politics that permeate in the
configurations of it.
1990s, following the preceding decade that carried the legacy of a violent military
coup also correspond to a period in Turkey during which new episodes have been
added to the already substantial records of state violence in the country. The ongoing
armed conflict between the Turkish Army and the Kurdish insurgents in the
southeast of the country lead to new waves of internal displacement, this time of
Kurdish populations of the country, and have rendered many others disappeared. In
the immediacy of this new episode of state violence, the modes of remembering the
past had no chance but to gain a more explicit political outlook. The emergent civil
society in the country has also been crucial in this process of politicisation of the
mode of remembering, by the means of introducing the global discussions around
coming to terms with difficult pasts to Turkey (Günal 2013, 7).
2000s also witnessed a proliferation of public debates around the Armenian Genocide
in Turkey, facilitated especially by the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the
genocide in 2005 (Altınay and Türkyılmaz 2011, 30). Up until 2000s, there have not
been much critical voices raised on this issue in Turkey and the official stance regarding
the issue had been shaped around a dictum of obligatory forgetting, altogether
denial and trivialisation (27-28). While much of the debates in mid-2000s proceeded
in form of a “war of theses” in which the two sides of “the war” were defined as the
Turkish thesis and the Armenian thesis, there were also a separate thread that was
emerging, which urged to shift the focus of the discussions from a war of theses to
the lived realities of the 1915 and its aftermaths (30-31). Proliferation of memoirs
written by the next generations of the Islamised Armenians have accompanied and
further facilitated these debates around the human costs of the genocidal process
and its aftermaths, while they also brought to the table the gendered experience
of this violence and its legacies (32-33). The mode of remembering that these new
forms of memory work entailed, which were attentive not only to the atrocities and
victimhood but more importantly to the lived realities, trivialised gendered experiences,
and the stories of survival are significant for my purposes in this study, as an
archive of vernacular photographs like Maryam Şahinyan’s also facilitate a work of
remembering and engaging with the difficult pasts along such lines as I will make
37
more clear.
In fact, the use of photographs in the work of gendered remembering of atrocities was
no stranger to the context of Turkey starting form the second half of 1990s onwards. I
would like to single out the example of Cumartesi Anneleri [the Saturday Mothers]
in this respect. The Saturday Mothers is formed by a group of mothers of the
disappeared, whose children was lost under prolonged custodies during the height
of the armed struggle that took place mainly in the Kurdish cities of the Southeast
Turkey, and their struggle is still ongoing. They have originally been gathering in
the Galatasaray Square until they were prohibited by the district governorship of
Beyoğlu in 2018, where the first Foto Galatasaray was also located at as I recounted
in the previous chapter, on every Saturday since 1995, reformulating the significance
of instruments of state power in a fashion to turn them against the state itself
to demand accountability for their losses. The meanings of the motherhood and
those of the identity photographs, which are originally instrumental for surveillance
practices of the state itself are being subverted in their struggle. Meltem Ahıska
argues that the nationalist idealisation of motherhood which defines motherhood
through the figure of “the child” marginalises the complex experiences of women
with regard to the world and to their children (Ahıska 2019, 144). By way of taking
to the street and making a case by relying on their status as mothers whose children
have been disappeared by the state apparatuses, The Saturday Mothers politicise
the meaning of motherhood in a subversive way, underlining the political quality of
the private role that has been attributed to them (145).
“Holding up the photograph” belonging to the forcibly disappeared relatives of these
women has been integral to the repertories of struggle of the Saturday Mothers
since the beginning of their political action (Bozkurt and Özlem Kaya 2014). If the
practice of forced disappearance targets the very existence of its victims as Avery
Gordon suggests, then the practice of holding up the photographs of the disappeared
(which are in most cases identity photographs) resists this strategy of disappearance
via relying on the evidentiary power of the (identity) photograph (Gordon 2008, 79).
This strategy serves multiple purposes at once. It not only turns a technology of state
power, namely the identity photograph, subversively to the state itself, but also helps
render the experiences that the relatives of the disappeared endure in this process
visible, as it is now only through photographs that they can relate to their losses.
In this respect, the use of photography in the struggle of the Saturday Mothers
suggest the significance of vernacular photography as a medium that encapsulates
multiple temporalities, one that does not only relate to the time of their “original”
context but also to their multiple new contexts, in which their meaning are remade
in a relational fashion. Therefore, the trans-temporal significance that photography
38
entails in the practices of the Saturday Mothers speaks intricately to the ways in
which I approach to the Maryam Şahinyan’s archive and its afterlives.
The contemporary context of Turkey I discussed here in which remembering the
past gained a particularly political significance where certain episodes of violence
in the past are named, dealt with, and understood in alternative narratives of a
continuum occasions the various examples of creative engagements with Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive that I discuss in the next chapter. These creative engagements
not only further the process of naming and dealing with the episodes of violent pasts
in Turkey, but they also foster spaces of mourning and encounter by relying on the
works of Maryam Şahinyan. In fact, in my opinion, the reveal of Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive within this contemporary cultural and political terrain of Turkey derives its
true significance for serving not as a repository of evidential information but as an
affective register.
The archive has long been a topic of political contestation in Turkey as elsewhere
for the attributed potentials to it, which would serve as corrective (or as supportive,
depending on one’s position) to the existing historical narratives. What is at stake
in most of these discussions is the role attributed to the archive as a repository of
factual evidence, which would serve to establish and alter historical narratives of
truth. One can think of the ever-lasting debates around opening up the archives
that pertain to the history of the Armenian Genocide in this respect. While I will
not get into the details of these debates, but I would like to touch upon a few
points about this attribution of factuality to the archives in them. Referring to
these debates, historian Selim Deringil criticises the treatment of the archives as
“magical” tools that would serve to conclusively end the highly polarised disputes
around historical issues and deems this treatment to be illusionary (Deringil 2011,
14). While acknowledging the significant place that the archive has in the work of
historians, he argues that the archive cannot be imagined as a repository of pure
truths as the archival document can only serve as a tool for historian’s interpretation.
When thought in light of these arguments, I think that Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
is also important as it reminds us that an archive can be more than a register of
factual evidence, especially when the factuality of the dominant historical archive
itself is in vein. Moreover, it reminds us that the use of an archive is not limited
to the work of history writing, as the examples I will be discussing in the next
chapter facilitate Maryam Şahinyan’s archive in creative ways to find possibilities of
mourning and encounter with the troubled past in the present.
Out of the impossibilities that I mentioned earlier about establishing narratives
of truth around the fugitive images in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, emerges new
39
creative possibilities. It is in this respect, I suggest that we treat photographs in
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as affective registers instead of an evidentiary one, which
provides various unexpected and queer affects to their onlookers to engage with
creatively. The “better stories,” to borrow the term from Dina Georgis (2013) that
are being narrated in each of these contemporary engagements through attending to
the queer affects within Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, do a work of relating with the
losses that the past entails, instead of attempting to correct its grand-narratives.
In this respect, I argue that the photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive can be
better understood if we think of them as traces instead of evidentiary documents.
These photographs offer affects more than they offer readily available knowledges,
and it is in this affective register that they act upon us and that we act upon them in
return. If the work of remembering entails not only that of naming and registering
the violence of the past but also engaging with the trauma that various communities
suffer through this experience of violence, then an archive like Maryam Şahinyan’s
can be thought to be facilitating a work of engagement with the experience of loss
that the past entails. As Ann Cvetkovich argues, the experience of “[t]rauma puts
pressure on conventional forms of documentation,” hence it requires unusual archives
of its own to be acted upon (Cvetkovich 2003, 7). If it is an “unspeakability,” and an
impossibility to inscribe into conventional regimes of representation such as language
that the traumatic experience implies, then an archive such as Maryam Şahinyan’s
with photographs that primarily make us feel rather than know can be considered
an appropriate means to approach the repertories of such experience. It is in this
respect that I now would like to dwell more on vernacular photographies to make
sense of the reasons why this medium can be best understood in affective terms that
works as a mediator between a troubled past and its legacies in the present.
3.1.3 Vernacular Photographies
Since the initial conceptualisation of vernacular photographies by Geoffrey Batchen
in 2000, the medium has gained an even greater significance in the works of artists
and scholars who deal with the discarded and obscured realms of everyday experiences
and the workings of memory in different settings. The expansion of the range
of engagement with vernacular photographies also lead to various disputes around
naming the vast repertoires of photography under the term vernacular, and I think
these disputes cannot be thought separately from the tensions that surround the
engagements with the archives. Recalling the point made by Marianne Hirsch that
I discussed earlier, tensions in the debates on vernacular photography often arise
from the problems that the questions such as what we do with the historical and
40
institutional contexts within which various photographic practices that we denominate
as vernacular take place, and how we relate to these contexts, or if we relate
to them at all in our engagements posit.
Batchen conceptualised vernacular photographies as those that involved the ordinary
photographs which had been produced and bought by the everyday people, that had
undeniable significance in the lives and living spaces of the ordinary folk but were
totally absent from the spaces of art institutions or the analyses of scholars (Batchen
2000, 262). It was the absence of these abject photographs in the institutional
narratives and in the history of photography that formed the basis of Batchen’s
urge, and he suggested that an emphasis on vernacular photographies would not
make an addition to the already existing histories of photography but it would rather
change the entire conception of photography and the value systems that its cannons
assumed (268). Moreover, Batchen maintained that the scholarly engagements with
vernacular photographies would entail a necessary reassessment of the ways in which
we approach history in terms of the methodologies we employ and the questions
we ask. Stressing the pervasive impossibility of restoring the original contexts in
working with vernacular photographies, he argues that these photographs demand
us to reimagine the proper role of history not as one that searches for authentic
identities or actual meanings of objects through returning to an origin but as one
that treats identity of objects in terms of becoming rather than being, and that aims
“to articulate the intelligibility of these objects for our own time” (268-269). While
this initial conceptualisation of vernacular photographies and their significance for
both the rethinking of the history of photography and the ways in which we approach
history beyond photography opens up a whole new range of possible assessments
and sets the tone of future discussions around the use of these mediums, Batchen’s
exclusive treatment of vernacular photographs as objects leaves aside the question
of the histories and settings within which these objects come into being.
It is precisely this omission that Batchen’s conceptualisation entails which sets the
agenda of discussions on vernacular photographies in a recent edited volume named
Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Campt et al.
2020a). While in accordance with Batchen in acknowledging the promises of vernacular
photographs for future methodological reconsiderations of the ways in which
we relate to the past, the essays in this volume also engage with what I can describe
as a care work towards these photographs, by way of attending to the fragility of
the contexts in which they are produced and to the multiple vulnerabilities of the
subjects who are documented in them in form of traces (Campt et al. 2020b, 11-
13). Via expanding the notion of vernacular in photography by focusing on the
different genres under the denomination such as those produced within colonial set-
41
tings (Azoulay 2020; Hayes 2020), within carceral regimes (Fleetwood 2020), within
regimes of state surveillance (Cho 2020), within studios in peripheral geographies
(Behdad 2020), within the settings of the psychiatric ward (Wexler 2020), and on
those produced by members of disenfranchised and/or marginalised communities
(Hackett 2020; Raiford 2020), these engagements also question the extent to which
the definition of the vernacular through the notion of the everyday and the ordinary
hold.
Bringing in the questions of subjectivity and performativity, scholars further scrutinise
the notion of ordinariness in vernacular photographies. For example, in Gil
Hochberg’s elaboration on the “personal photographs” of people, which were not
taken originally by the intention of being rendered public, the ability of photography
“to go beyond documentation and mere application of reality” becomes crystallised
as they evoke the performative act of posing that constitutes them, which is an
act that is entangled with processes of self-making and self expression (Hochberg
2020, 195). In this respect, vernacular photographies in general, and personal photographs,
and the portraiture which forms the basis of photographs also in Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive in particular often render the institutional biases on photography
which consider them as transparent representations of an actual reality in
vain (Simon 2002, 105). I think Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s (2020) characterisation
of vernacular photography with the term extraordinary ordinary captures the role
performativity play in these photographs very intricately. As images coming from
contexts that are often deemed trivial, they also carry an extraordinary quality that
exceeds their moment of making.
Where do we situate performativity with regard to vernacular photographs? Is it
only inscribed in the act of posing that the subjects of the photographs engaged in?
Or can we consider these photographs as performative themselves, acting on their
spectators in different ways? If this is the case, when do we consider photographs as
such? Hochberg’s (2020) discussion suggests that performativity is implicated both
in the contents of personal photographs and their actions in their respective social
worlds, and that our consideration of photographs as performative often rely on the
settings in which we come across with them and the stories that accompany them.
In this respect, the settings in which we find vernacular photographs and the accompanying
stories attached to those pictures all occasion our modes of engagement
with them. Presented to us as an archive, which went through a secondary process
of systematic archiving, and as subjected to the mediation of institutional involvement
of a publishing house and an art gallery, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive arrives
to our present already as framed in certain ways inescapably. Framing of Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive by the actors involved in its public reveal as one that offers new
42
lenses to engage with a particular period in the past of Turkey thus occasions the
terms of these photographs’ “doing” to an extent.
In acknowledgement of the irreducible temporal and spatial gap between the original
contexts of the various repertoires of vernacular photographs and our collective
context within which we receive these images, recent scholarship on vernacular photography
urges us to engage with this material through a practice of what Stuart
Hall names as “a politics of reading” (Wallis 2020, 19). While stressing the importance
of including photographic evidence in the construction of an archive that
could facilitate the writing of a discarded history such as Black settlement in the
post-war Britain, Stuart Hall also acknowledges that it is nearly impossible to capture
earlier meanings of such photographs to be included (Hall 2021, 79). He argues
that it is also illusory as an effort to look for an essential meaning of a photograph
as photography is always already multiaccentual as a medium (Ibid.). In face of
this impossibility and the conceptual irrelevance of returning to a lost origin, Hall
suggests instead that we rather approach to these photographs with a considerable
caution and historical judgement, which forms the basis of his new “politics
of reading” (Ibid.). It is along the lines that Hall envisioned that I pay substantial
importance to the work of contextualisation together with conceptualisation in
this thesis when considering the subject of Maryam Şahinyan and her photographic
archive. If vernacular photography entails a “reinvention and reactivation of photographs
that have fallen out of use” as Clément Chéroux suggests, then this work
of contextualisation is also vital to make sense of the trajectories these photographs
follow in their reinvented and reanimated settings (Chéroux 2020, 26).
3.2 What Do Maryam Şahinyan’s Photographs Do and What Do We
Do with Them?
"What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity to name is a
good symptom of disturbance."
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes (Barthes 1981, 51)
I have so far argued that the vernacular photographs such as Maryam Şahinyan’s
gain new range of unanticipated meanings and performative capacities once they
meet with a new range of audiences in their delayed and relocated cartographies of
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afterlives. In this section, I would like to emphasise that these photographs gain a
quintessential queer character in their afterlives and in this respect I suggest that
we need to employ a queer lens to investigate the ways in which they operate on
their contemporary recipients, and the ways in which these contemporary recipients
engage with them in return within these contemporary cartographies.
In the previous section, I suggested that the photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive gain a fugitive character once they emerge out of their primary contexts,
deriving from Tina M. Campt’s (2012) conceptualisation of orphan photos. As I
discussed, the fugitives in Camps conceptualisation figure “those who leave, run
away, are forced out, or seek refuge elsewhere. Those who by compulsion or choice
cannot conform; cannot or will not submit to the law; cannot or do not remain
in their proper place, or the places to which they have been confined or assigned.
Those who venture into sites unknown or unwelcoming are interlopers and strangers
who unsettle our sense of the norm” (87). I think, the unruliness which underlies
the figure of the fugitive in this conceptualisation intricately recalls the notion of
“growing sideways” that Katherine Bond Stockton suggests for the figure of the
queer child (Stockton 2009). It is also the connotations that the term orphan figures
in Campt’s conceptualisation, not only as one that recalls the necessity of care
towards such photographs but also as one that suggests them as disjointed from
the progressive configurations of time and development that brings them closer to
Stockton’s figure of the queer child. Similar to the temporal delay (together with a
spatial relocation) that implicates the emergence of orphan photos as fugitive figures
in Campt’s discussion, Stockton emphasises the delays in the assumed progression of
the child’s “growing up” as the underlying reason for the progression of unexpected
and unruly growing sideways (4, emphases are mine). When the assumed trajectory
of timely growth which envisions an upward progression “toward full stature, marriage,
work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” fails, the delayed progression
leads to a growth that does not follow a straight upward line but pursues movements
to the sideways and even backward (Ibid).
The delayed reveal of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs on a totally new terrain
envision a similar trajectory of growth for these photographs. These photographs
have captured us at a time when it was no longer possible to connect with what they
were about in their earlier lives due to the eternal missing of their producer and their
subjects, and in this respect they grow on us sideways, telling us more about our
desires in our present than about their time of conception. Yet, in our engagements
with them, informed by the context of their making, we also perceive them as tools
to engage with their time, mostly in creative ways. Their delayed reappearance also
provides us with tools to delay, or at least to prick the ever rampant progression of
44
hegemonic time, for they communicate the collective losses we endured within this
forced, straight movement of progress. In the next chapter, I will focus on the works
of various actors that engage with Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs, and investigate
the ways in which their engagements prick the progress of a straight time that the
nationalist, exclusionary and heteronormative project of modernity relies on.
The unique and queer relation of photography to temporality also formulates a
crucial aspect of Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography in Camera Lucida
(1981), which has been, and remains as an important early work on the social
and cultural theories of photography. When breaking down photography into its
components, Barthes defines three different parts. First one of them is what he calls
“the operator” which refers to the photographer. Second is “the spectator,” the one
that looks at the photograph, and which is where Barthes also positions himself.
And the third is what he defines as “the spectrum,” which is where he locates the
person or thing that is photographed (9). As his underlining of his position among
the category of the spectator also suggests, Barthes’ theorisation on photography is
very much shaped around the question of what photographs do to their spectators,
and how their spectators engage with them. In his words, photographs animate him
and he animates them in return (20). Framing this reciprocal relationship between
the photographic object and its spectator as one of adventure, Barthes argue that
one cannot seek of photography if there is no adventure (19). This suggestion implies
that the significance of a photograph relies not exclusively in its own being or its
conditions of production but in its becoming, in the relational setting in which it
enters a reciprocal relationship with its spectator.
Time figures a crucial aspect of the performance of the photograph on its onlooker in
Barthes’s theorisation. While elaborating on a childhood photograph of his mother
that he found in their family archive, Barthes realises that what excites him the
most about this photograph was the History that separated him from it. Elements
suggesting this temporal gap between his and his mother’s childhood were visually
manifest in the photograph in forms of the costume she wore, fabrics and alike but
what was striking for Barthes was that he was only able to recognise his mother in
the photograph through her difference, instead of in her essence (66). This point
suggests that even when in its primary context of meaning (as in the case of the
child looking at the photograph of his mother), a photograph inherently alienates
its onlooker due to an irreducible temporal gap that forms between its moment of
capture and the delayed gaze of the onlooker, yet it also enables recognition through
this alienation. The irrelevance of the search for a pure meaning in a primal state
that I discussed in relation to the vernacular photographies gain a new significance
with this insight, as it supposes that even in its supposedly primal contexts such
45
photographs do not communicate pure and simple meanings.
Another fascinating aspect of photography in its relation to time for Barthes is
the fact that photographs always communicate an undeniable past. In looking at
a picture we can never deny that “the thing has been there” (76). I suggest that
this superimposition of a past state of being and reality, however performative and
staged, occasions one of the main reasons why Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs
fascinate their contemporary onlookers. Looking at them and seeing figures that
many other accounts of “reality” deny or neglect comes as a relief to the present
onlooker as it feels like the “reality” finally speaks for itself and occasions a generous
come-back for its dead and deep buried. However, this encounter does not necessarily
lead to a fantasy of recovering what has been buried deep. In fact, as Barthes
also argues, the effect of these photographs on their onlookers is not an urge “to
restore what has been abolished” by time and by distance, but an invitation to
attest that what is seen in these photographs have indeed existed (82). In this
respect, we can argue that the calling of these photographs for us is not a work
of restoration but that of the repair. Of restoration and repair Fred Moten writes:
“[w]hat if we could detach repair not only from restoration but also from the very
idea of the original—not so that repair comes first but that it comes before. Then,
making and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, suspended between and
beside themselves” (Moten 2017, 168). This reformulation of repair that detaches
it from an act of returning to the original and that rather imagines it as a point of
departure in a process of endless and unanticipated becoming captures both what
the term fugitive implies for Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs and the imaginaries of
various contemporary creative engagements with these photographs. In this respect,
Maryam Şahinyan and her archive can best be understood as a point of departure
in their endeavours instead of one of arrival.
3.2.1 Feeling the Photographs
Shawn Michelle Smith underlines that Roland Barthes feels photography (Smith
2014, 29). In Barthes’ (1981) discussion the mode of engagement that photography
offers to its spectators is primarily an affective one (21). When we look at
photographs we are touched and pricked by them, and this is what that actually
draws us to them. Barthes defines two distinct themes in the pursuit of engagement
with photographs. The first one of them entails an engagement with the formal
characteristics of a photograph that any appropriately trained eye can undertake,
which focuses on “the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, [and] the actions”
46
(26). Barthes names this kind of formal engagement with the photograph as the
studium, and declares that it is of interest to a lesser degree in his assessment of
photography (Ibid.). The second level however, refers to the more unexpected and
haptic effect of photographs on their spectators, which Barthes names as the punctum
of photography (26-27). It is through its punctum that a photograph manifests
itself as a queer medium, that which pierces, touches, and wounds its onlooker in
unanticipated ways. For Barthes, punctum of the photograph may be situated at
two different realms. It can arise from a fleeting, trivial, and an often unintentional
detail in the photograph that somehow pricks its onlooker for a variety of reasons,
personal or not (43-45). But the punctum can also emerge as the effect of the experience
of intensity of time when one looks at a photograph (96). When we look at
a photograph, the irreducible temporal gap that we encounter in our act of looking
also pricks us. As this unique experience of time in the act of looking at a photograph
encompasses any engagement with photography, Barthes argues that it is
ultimately impossible to distinguish a field of cultural interest in photographs (which
would be primarily concerned with the studium) from the realm of the punctum, as
the punctum is inescapably implicated in any type engagement with photography
(95-96).
While the feelings about photographs that are implicated in the punctum of photograph
can definitely have personal resignations as the case of Barthes with the
photograph of his mother entail, in the context where photographs go public and
assume new lives in the hands of “strangers” to their original contexts, the feelings
that are associated with them can also gain a public significance. In fact, as Ann
Cvetkovich argues in An Archive of Feelings (2003), feelings have the capacity to
form certain public cultures around themselves. While, for example, the shared feelings
of longing and the experience of loss facilitates the emergence of a public for the
contemporary Armenian spectators who engage with the photographs in Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive, the experience of affinity and a range of feelings that spur from
this experience forms another public for the LGBTI+ spectators of the archive, for
whom the selection of photographs with representations of non-normative gender expressions
and sexual desire have different connotations. In this respect, the context
and the mode of engagement with the photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
and the unruliness of the feelings that it provides occasions an important instance
in which the meaning of the archive as personal and public gets intertwined.
In their introduction to the edited volume, Feeling Photography, Elspeth H. Brown
and Thy Phu (Brown and Phu 2014) argue that the approaches on photography
through a lens of thinking contribute to a “straight” criticism of photography which
marginalises the entanglements of feeling that the photographic medium entails, and
47
they argue that this approach in turn marginalises the shadow subjects of photography
such as women, racialised communities, and queer sexualities (3). Deriving
from a queer reading of Barthes’ Camera Lucida, and especially from the role of the
punctum in his theorisation, Brown and Phu make a strong case for emphasising
the practices of viewing photography and for engaging with the politics of viewing,
which an affective lens to the subject enables (7). They argue that it is only
through a recourse to the feeling that photography entails that we can attend to
the counterpublics that photography facilitates and to the affiliative possibilities it
provides for marginalised communities (5-8). They ask for the photographic archive:
“[r]ather than functioning as a repository for the production of knowledge, one of
the important questions [that we can ask] is, what desires animate these archives?”
(13)
3.2.2 Anachronism: A Troubled Terrain
"anachronism (noun): a thing belonging or appropriate to a period other
than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously oldfashioned"
Oxford Dictionary of English
When I was applying to various master’s programs with this project on Maryam
Şahinyan’s photography in a preliminary form in mind, a program in History was
also among my options. At the time, my interest in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
was more or less limited to the photographs with representations of non-normative
gender and sexualities in the archive and what compelled me the most was the
subjective queer affinity I was feeling towards them. When I brought my particular
interest in Maryam Şahinyan’s photography to the interview with the program’s
faculty, the most striking question I received lingered around the risk of anachronism
that my project might had been entailing. One of members of the interviewing
committee was insistent on the question of whether my subjective reception of the
photographs in the archive were congruent with the actuality of the archive. I was
equally insistent, without being aware of the various reasons why, to be fair, on
the possibility of defining Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as a queer archive, and the
criticism I remained to receive was around the question whether we could really
think of Maryam Şahinyan as a consciously queer photographer.
While these criticisms hold to an extent if we think of them as coming from a
48
historian’s perspective, whose task is to draw narratives around a subject that is
attentive to the time of the subject itself as much as possible, they are also equally
telling of the shortcomings of an exclusively historical lens when it comes to account
for the transtemporal dynamics of reception. This tension between my approach
to Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs and the historian’s perspective on a proper
approach to photography for a historiographical study alludes to the tension between
feeling and thinking photography. While my interest in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
grew bigger since then as to include not only my but also other’s engagements with
it, the main question that drives my curiosity still remains around the question of
transtemporality and trans-spatiality of its reception. This story on my project’s
failed appeal to the historian’s perspective brings me necessarily to the troubled
notion of anachronism and to the question whether anachronism is possible to be
avoided in a study on (vernacular) photographs, and if yes, the cost at which this
happens. My short answer to this question is that in terms of Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive, anachronism can be avoided only when the question of its contemporary
reception is forgone altogether. As my discussion of the archive so far suggests,
however, such an omission would delimit our capacity to attend to the archive in an
affective register.
In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman makes a case for queer theory to account for
the various disjunctures, asynchronies, and de/reterritorialisations that the notion
of temporality is inscribed with (Freeman 2010). She argues that the notions such
as afterlives entail nonsequential forms of time, and that they “fold subjects into
structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye” (xi).
She writes that touches, and we can think of the pricking touch of the photograph
here, “break open the past, slicing it into asynchronous, discontinuous pieces of
time” (xii). In this respect, while working on a medium like photography, it can be
maintained that is not possible to hold on to a linear notion of time. I suggest that
this issue is also present even in historicist accounts on photography. To make this
case clearer, I would like to refer to a recent study on vernacular photography that
focuses on early republican Turkey.
In a very recent volume on the uses and significance of vernacular photography
in early republican Turkey, Özge Baykan Calafato (2022) investigates the copies
of studio photographs that she had collected from auctions, antique markets and
second-hand sellers in relationship to the social and cultural setting of the country
at the time of these photographs’ production. She questions the ways in which
the ordinary subjects of these photographs have made their cases performatively to
be the citizens of the new, modernising and immensely transforming country. In
this framework of scrutiny, the photographs she archived figure not for what they
49
mean to their researcher in their belated contemporary setting but for what they
could have possibly meant for their actual owners in their own time. However, an
unspoken tenet in the book is that the position of the researcher, for understandable
and obligatory reasons if you like, is of one that who reads them retrospectively in
light of a secondary literature on the social and political context of the period so
that they can be situated and be considered accordingly. Yet, in the instances when
the secondary literature does not allow for the work of such contextualisation, the
questions that can be directed to these photographs within this historical framework
appear to be in vain.
For example, while Calafato makes a compelling case about the ways in which we
can trace the making of the modern gendered subjectivities in the photographs of
women, men, professional mixed-gendered settings, soldiers, married couples, conjugal
families, and alike in the book, it is in the instance where she discusses a
photograph of a person with a non-normative expression of gender identity, that
the question of the contemporary gaze and the risk of anachronism makes a curious
and striking comeback (178). While the seeming conformity of the subjects of the
photographs in former categories render them intelligible without requiring much
scrutiny within the modalities of normative subjectivities of the early republican
Turkey, the performance of the subject in the latter photograph leads Calafato’s discussion
into a troubled terrain with respect to the framework she utilises. Troubled
with whether it is possible to make sure that a perceived queerness in an anonymous
photograph corresponds to an actual one, Calafato maintains that “[i]n anonymous
vernacular photographs it is difficult to know whether looking queerly is justified,
because of the complexity of deciding what certain elements are evidence of” (184-
185). The conclusion that Calafato makes out of this case is a call for extra caution
and vigilance against the possible risks of committing anachronisms in dealing with
unverifiable evidences that vernacular photographs present (187-188). While the
queerness of the photograph in this discussion in is vein from the historicist perspective
of Calafato, I think that it is precisely this capacity of the photograph to
trouble the historicist effort which renders it queer. While I am in agreement with
Calafato that the perception of gender queerness in a photograph cannot be argued
to be corresponding to the gender queerness of its subject, I also suggest that queerness
of a photograph would not reside either in its perception or its actuality, but
it rather resides precisely in the irreducibility of the question of perception to the
question of actuality. In this respect, looking queerly to a vernacular photograph in
Calafato’s words can be justified only when we employ a transtemporal lens, which
would consider anachronism not as a risk but as the condition of possibility for the
anonymous photograph to pursue new lives. In fact, as the dictionary definition
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of anachronism also suggests, vernacular photographs are themselves anachronistic
mediums, who circulate within a temporal setting which is asynchronous with that
in which they were conceived.
3.2.3 Cruising as a Queer Mode of Engagement with the Archive
The notion of cruising intricately captures the practice of wandering around in a
vast archive of anonymous fugitive photographs. Queer resonation of the term make
it especially appealing for my purposes in this study. In its dictionary definition,
cruising accounts for a practice of wandering around in an area without a precise
destination. In this respect, it can be understood as an act of curious engagement
with the space where it takes place, without an anticipated arrival point. Insofar
we consider Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as a point of departure instead of that of
an arrival, cruising as a practice that is curious about its location of action but
is equally indeterminate about its directions captures quite accurately the types of
engagements that I am interested in. Moreover, I think that the indeterminacy of
a precise destination in the practice of cruising implies a radical openness to be
affected, which again fits well within my framing of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as
one that does things to us as we do things with it. If we consider the particular use
of cruising in the lexicon of queer slang on the other hand (as in çark yapmak/çarka
çıkmak in Turkish queer slang), we realise that cruising is also a practice that is often
driven by various queer desires. As a desirous practice of wandering around, it also
captures the adventure, excitement, and the pleasure of looking at the photograph
that Barthes argues for.
It can be said that cruising constitutes both a methodology and a lens in this study
as for my purposes, cruising figures both for what I as the researcher am engaging
with in picking up the fragments around Maryam Şahinyan and her archive to
constitute an analytical story out of them, and the contemporary practices of other
actors pertaining to the archive that I am looking at. In fact, cruising can be said
to be constituting a loose methodological lens in the projects of scholars of queer
theory, a peculiar and overt example of which can be considered as Cruising Utopia
of José Esteban Muñoz (Muñoz 2019). In this groundbreaking work, Muñoz engages
with a practice of cruising in the dispersed aesthetic archives of queer radicalism in
order to excavate utopian visions for imagining a radical queer futurity. He describes
his methodology as one that entails “ a backward glance that enacts a future vision”
(4). Muñoz’s approach to the dispersed aesthetic archives of the past as a repository
for tools that can enable the imagination of a radically different future in the
51
present resonates with my approach to Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. However, the
transtemporal context of Turkey which informs my emphasis on Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive differ in important ways from the implications of past, present, and future
in Muñoz’s analysis. Whereas the present in Muñoz’s formulation, which is marked
by the infiltration of neoliberal logic to the realm of queer politics, figures for a
prison house that obstacles any imagination of a radically different political futurity,
in my discussion of the present context in which Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
circulates publicly, the present moment, together with its ongoing destructiveness,
is also infused with possibilities of an engagement with the past in political terms.
Muñoz’s take on cruising exemplifies the ways in which it has been imagined as
a methodological practice. What Gayatri Gopinath defines as the queer aesthetic
practices that engage with a work of excavating the past, on the other hand, can
provide us hints for the use of cruising as a lens to look at the creative engagements
that work with the archive (Gopinath 2018). Moreover, the examples that
Gopinath grapples with while conceptualising such queer practices resonate intricately
with the subject of this thesis. Among her examples is the work of Lebanese
archival artist Akram Zaatari, a great deal of whose creative works engage with the
studio photographic archives from Lebanon. In one of them, Zaatari engages with
the photographic archive of a studio photographer, Hashem el Madani, who was
based in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon (149). According to Gopinath, the
artistic intervention of Zaatari in el Madani’s archive lies in his particular selection,
and arrangement of photographs from it as to communicate new stories of affinity,
belonging and longing, which reanimates the oeuvre of el Madani in unexpectedly
queer ways (149-150). In this respect, Zaatari’s artistic practice with the archive of
Hashem el Madani can be though to be one of cruising. Before investigating the
examples in which Maryam Şahinyan’s archive becomes a cruising spot for creative
engagements, I would like to make a final recourse to the question of the significance
of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive for here and now of the present.
3.3 What’s the Use of Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive?
Wrapping this chapter up by returning back to the problem of the contemporary uses
of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive would be meaningful for setting the tone of the next
chapter in which I focus these creative engagements. The rhetorical question asking
“what’s the use?” is often coined to underline the pointlessness of something as Sara
Ahmed argues (2019) captures elaborately the significance of the “ordinary affects”
52
(?) that Maryam Şahinyan’s archive is infused with, which are often prone to trivialisation
and neglect in the efforts of engaging with the past that our contemporary
present entails. Sara Ahmed writes: “It is not surprising that when the world is not
used to you, when you appear as unusual, use becomes what you question” (Ahmed
2019, 3). In a cultural setting where the archive derives its use value primarily
through its significance as an evidentiary repository for yielding formal knowledge,
an archive like Maryam Şahinyan’s might seem odd when you suggest that its significance
does not derive from an evidentiary capacity. Insofar the immensity of the
unknowable that inflicts most of the photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive is
revealed, the archive can easily be discarded as a reliable source of knowledge.
However, as I made clear through various points throughout this chapter, Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive in its contemporary setting can be said to be facilitating new possibilities
of engagement with the past where the uses of it as a conventional archive
are in vain. When its use in an evidentiary register is in vain, the archive gains a new
significance on an affective register. It is this capacity of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
to operate in an affective register where it derives its queerness. In its contemporary
sociocultural setting, the archive operates as a membrane for mediating between
the past it formally represents and the present in which it circulates. Photographs
in this archive do not let us know, but let us feel what has been lost, neglected or
occluded in the often violent process of the making of our present.
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4. CRUISING THE ARCHIVE
Reveal of Maryam Şahinyan and her archive to the public attention has been received
as an opening up of the pandora’s box by many. In fact, a hidden archive
of photographic negatives that had been kept within piles of cardboard boxes was
being revealed in a new format, and the excitement about the content of these boxes
was immense for those who had no idea about neither their photographer nor their
content before. For example, in her article published on Milliyet newspaper’s online
blog, Zuhal Floria treats the opening up of the boxes of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
as a reveal of a city treasure that had been kept hidden from the public eye for so
long (Floria 2018). The excitement that the reveal of the archive incites for Floria
pertains to the promise of the archive to lay bare the transformations that the country
had endured through the years in which those photographs were captured. The
fascination with the transformation that the photographs in Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive were demonstrating for their belated onlookers were in fact was one of the
main driving motivations behind the felt importance for revealing this archive to
the public. Reading of an expression of transformation in these photographs by
their contemporary spectators already hints at their recognition in difference in this
transtemporal setting for transformation can only be named in a context of postness.
Karin Karakaşlı’s words in appreciating the photographic universe of Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive are capturing this process of recognition in difference for the
position of the contemporary spectator. She writes that they present her a “black
and white, strange yet familiar world” as she looks at these photographs (Karakaşlı
2011a).
In fact it is this double bind of these photographs’ enactment on their contemporary
spectators that underlay the ways in which these spectators enact back at them in
the examples I will be discussing through this chapter. They facilitate a renewed
affiliation with the past that is felt in them, a feeling of pastness that is recognised
by the mediation of the difference of the present. Transtemporality of this process
of recognition enables the spectators to attend not only to the past itself that makes
54
itself apparent in these photographs, but to the difference of this past. In this respect
these photographs enable a reparative mode of engagement with the transformation
they make their contemporary spectators feel through them. Despite the fact that
the feeling of post-ness that these photographs facilitate for their contemporary
onlookers differ from the post-ness of the memories of the following generations of
direct survivors of a catastrophic experience in Marianne Hirsch’s (2012) discussion
of the postmemory, for in the case of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs the public that
their contemporary audiences formulate is not composed of members of a particular
public but a multitude of different publics, Hirsch’s elaborations on post-ness still
carry important insights for my discussion.
The generational emphasis in Marianne Hirsch’s conceptualisation of the postmemory
suggests that the formation of the belated mode of remembering entails a public
character. Individual memories that the following generations of survivors are troubled
to carry may be specific, but the troubled position of these generations vis-a-vis
the memories that they do not themselves carry but inherit from their predecessors
imply a public sentiment as Hirsch demonstrates. This is why she treats postmemory
as a cultural phenomenon instead of an exclusively personal one. Connection
to the past for the following generations of survivors in Hirsch’s discussion is always
a connection established through the temporal difference of the “generations
after.” In this respect, Hirsch writes: “Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus
actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation”
(2012, 5). The creative investment that Hirsch underlines as the mediator
for a belated connection with the past captures intricately the creative investment
in the works I will discuss in this chapter. Works that are engaging with Maryam
Şahinyan’s photographs I will be discussing all carry a creative and imaginative investment
in these photographs. I should also mention here that I take creativity
here as a broad repertoire of investment. While some of the works I discuss are formal
artworks that have been motivated by Maryam Şahinyan’s photography, some
others are creative in the sense that they employ a selective eye towards her archive
and curate their own stories out of the vast repertoire of images in the archive.
When discussing the work of the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari with the studio photography
of Hashem el Madani, Gayatri Gopinath (2018) stresses the significance
of curating as a creative mode of engagement in Zaatari’s work. She argues that
el Madani’s photographs “perform new histories” in the hands of Akram Zaatari,
thanks to his selective gaze that curates particular arrangement from within the
oeuvre of the studio photographer (3). Referring to the scholars and curators Erica
Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton, Gopinath recalls the meaning of curating not only
as a practice of mere selection but also as rooted in “caring for” (4). Citing Lehrer
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and Milton, she suggests that we think curation “‘not only as selection, design, and
interpretation, but as care-taking—as a kind of intimate, intersubjective, interrelation
obligation,’ an obligation to ‘deal with the past’ in particular” (Lehrer and
Milton 2011, 4), cited in (Gopinath 2018, 4). This conceptualisation of the practice
of curating suggests that we see it both as a care work towards the fragments of the
past and as a process of witnessing to ones own process witnessing, as the work of
curating crystallises our mode of engagement with the past on an affective register.
It is in this respect the work of curating figures for the particular lenses and selective
modes of engagement that various spectators of the archive of Maryam Şahinyan
employ in their engagement with it in my discussion. The examples I draw here can
themselves be considered as a curation from the vast repertoire of contemporary
engagements with the archive. I made this curation/selection especially on the basis
of the legibility of transtemporality and trans-spatiality in these engagements.
Creative engagements with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive unmake and remake the
archive and its meanings in different ways. Together, they constitute what I would
like to call repertoires of engagement with the archival content. If an archive is
a repository of objects that are brought together through a selective, systematic
logic for formal analysis as Diana Taylor argues, then Maryam Şahinyan’s archive is
constantly being undone through more ephemeral repertories of intervention (Taylor
2003, 19). Taylor argues that repertoires of embodied practices are important
systems of knowing, and a lens of performance is key for attending such systems
of knowing (26). It is in this respect I consider the contemporary repertories of
engagement with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as performative acts, which generate
embodied knowledges by relying on the archive and by continuously transforming
it through their engagements. In fact, an archive as unconventional as Maryam
Şahinyan’s, one that communicates predominantly in an affective register, demands
embodied engagements.
In the following I will navigate the contemporary trajectories of creative engagements
with Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. The order I will be following starts from
more formal artistic engagements with the archive towards more dispersed and loose
repertories of engagement, ones that curate stories out of the material of the archive,
starting with my own personal encounters.
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4.1 Void: Citing Absence through Maryam Şahinyan’s Archive
Void is a series of photographic installations conducted by Rehan Miskci, who is an
Armenian artist from Turkey, currently living and working in New York. In Void,
Miskci remakes a selection of photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive by way
of removing the subjects out of them as to leave the photographs as images of the
empty interiors of the studio (see Figure 4.1). Simultaneously, she transports the
subjects that she removes from the original photographs and projects them onto
interior spaces that are expressive of her interpretation of studio settings. Projected
onto the irregular surfaces of these new interiors, the subjects that are removed from
their original photographs get fragmented in their new settings (see Figure 4.2 and
4.3). Miskci’s interest in Maryam Şahinyan’s story and photographs has been driven
primarily, if not exclusively, by personal reasons. These reasons pertain to Maryam
Şahinyan’s identity as an Armenian and woman with a family history originating in
Sebastia (Sivas), traits all of which are shared by Miskci herself. In Miskci’s words,
Void aims “to visualise the idea of loss and disruption, which defines the Armenian
experience in Turkey” (Miskci 2015).
Figure 4.1 From Void
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Figure 4.2 From Void
Figure 4.3 From Void
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Void engages with a fruitful intervention into Maryam Şahinyan’s photography,
which can be read through many different registers. By removing the subjects
from their original photographs and creating a visible void in Maryam Şahinyan’s
photographs, Miskci performs in Void, something that pertains to what Nicole Gervasio
names as “siting absence” (Gervasio 2019). For Gervasio, photographs that
“site” absence are those that situate “the embodied presence of ineffable loss while
rendering that loss so familiar to strangers” (260). By erasing the actual subject
from Maryam Şahinyan’s studio photographs, Miskci removes the last bit of visual
traces from the images, which ultimately withholds the viewers from gratification
of seeing. Increasing the immensity of the unknowable in these already anonymous
images, Miskci makes the experience of loss and disruption legible for her audience,
not as something that can be readily known but as something that is itself enigmatic.
The enigma of absence that she creates in the photographs operate as new
windows for the audiences to have a sense of what such an experience of loss might
entail. Moreover, by drawing attention to the experience of loss itself, Miskci cites
another absence, which is the invisibility of the experiences of Armenians living in
Turkey.
By way of generalising the sense of loss in the experience of looking at Maryam
Şahinyan’s studio photographs via making these photographs into registers of absence,
Miskci’s intervention can also be understood as inviting a larger audience
beyond Armenians of Turkey to attend to this loss in collective terms. Judith Butler
argues that the experience of loss occasions the possibility of constituting a “we”
(Butler 2006, 20). Armenians constitute a “structuring absence” to borrow the term
from Gervasio (2019, 261), in the story of modern Turkey. It is not only a material
absence but also an absence from the official frames of thought that formulates this
“structuring absence.” Butler (2006) suggests that the subject becomes inscrutable
to herself when she loses someone else as the subject is always already constituted
relationally at the interplay of “I” and “you” (22). In this respect, Void can be
read as an invitation that demands its audiences to attend to what they might have
themselves lost in this process. In this intersubjective imaginary, the figures from
the Maryam Şahinyan’s archive cease to exist as external others that constitute a
self-evident “cultural mosaic,” as the erasure of subjects from the images prohibits
their legibility as autonomous beings yet allows for an experience of them as an
embodied, internalised loss.
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Figure 4.4 September, from Void
Second part of Void, where Miskci projects the subjects she transports from the
original images onto the imaginary studio interiors that she creates, on the other
hand, communicates an experience of fragmentation. In these images, the interiors
we see allude to the liminality of the studio space between private and public. The
irregularities of surfaces however, causes the projected figures to decompose over
these multidimensional surfaces, effectively suggesting another impossibility, that
of coherence. September, which is a photograph from this group of series in Void
is especially telling of the liminality of the studio space (Figure 4.4). The name
September recalls the events of September 6-7 in 1955, that I mentioned earlier. In
the photograph, the geometrical arrangement of the imaginary studio setting with
textiles that suggest a domesticity is juxtaposed with the image of a window with
flames of fire coming out of it, an image that was integral to the experience of the
events of September 6-7 during which several shops of non-muslims were set on fire.
September accounts for the vulnerability of Maryam Şahinyan’s studio occupying a
liminal space between a violent exterior and a regulated interior.
“Terk” is the Turkish title that Miskci uses for Void. Connoting a movement as
in “abandonment,” Terk resonates differently than Void, which connotes a state
rather than a process. Miskci argues that the choice of these different titles are
due to the varying level of familiarity in different audiences regarding the story she
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connotes in her work pertaining to the experience of Armenian identity in Turkey.
While offering two distinctive modes of intelligibility for her work, I think these
titles also operate to interpellate the respective audiences of the work in different
registers. For the Turkish speaking audiences Terk double-emphasises the nature of
absence in these manipulated photographs and works to interpellate its audiences
“more deeply into a void of recognition” (Gervasio 2019, 270). Yet, the name “void”
suggests that we can also read the work in different registers. I think, if at one level
Void/Terk communicates the interstices of the experience of being an Armenian in
Turkey and facilities an intersubjective terrain on which the viewers are invited into
this experience as I have discussed, at another level it can be seen as an allegory
to the belated experience of the spectators with orphan photographs from Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive. The intervention of Miskci in form of taking the subjects from
their original photographic contexts and transposing them to a contemporary setting
where they are not supposed to be alludes to the trajectory that the photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive themselves followed, having been severed from their
initial contexts and revealed only to be received on a totally new terrain decades
later. In Miskci’s transposing of the subjects to new, contemporary settings, they
can only be seen in fragments. This fragmentation both underlines the impossibility
of establishing coherence in the face of irreducible temporal and contextual gap in
our reception of the subjects go the photographs. However, it can also be argued
that these anonymous subjects, transposed to a new context create new spaces, and
facilitate a mode of recognition especially through fragmentation.
Miksci’s emptied studio portrait photographs of Maryam Şahinyan are also significant
as interventions that affectively communicate the performative character of
studio photography. As Miskci erases the subjects from the photographs, what remains
is not a mere emptiness but rather the setting of the studio taking the centre
place. For Miskci, the studio setup of Maryam Şahinyan in which she used geometrical
objects operate as unique signatures of the photographer, and in this respect
drawing attention to the setup by removing the subjects can be seen as a gesture
that emphasises the authorial role of the studio photographer. However, I think
that this intervention goes beyond this authorial appreciation as to also underline
the performative character of the studio photographic setting. What remains in
these remade photographs are a fabricated stage, which suggests that the people we
should normally see in them are performers in their own right. In this respect, it
can also be argued that Miskci’s intervention works as a gesture in acknowledging
the active role that the anonymous subjects played in the making of the originals of
these photographs, together with their photographer.
I would like to elaborate more on the performative character of studio photography
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that the stage supposes in Miskci’s remakes. Vacant stages of photographic studios
occupy a significant place in Miskci’s artistic practice. After her remakes of Maryam
Şahinyan’s photographs, she conducted another series of installations named Foto
Yeraz (Photo Dream in Armenian), in which she built up imaginary vacant photography
studio settings. Deriving from actual studio setting including that of Maryam
Şahinyan, the stage settings that Miskci creates in Foto Yeraz underlines the imaginary
and performative aspect of studio photography. Underlining this performative
character can be considered as the realm in which, her interventions gesture toward
not only a work of remembering but also toward imagination and futurity. Studio
setting that is devoid of subjects is vulnerable to decontextualisation and misrecognition,
which in turn can allow viewers of it to project themselves into the depopulated
frames (Gervasio 2019, 258). As Gervasio argues, “this representational ambivalence
produces both ethical risk an political agency” (258-259). Miskci’s setups in Foto
Yeraz and remade photographs in Void are all “empty” enough for their viewers to
project themselves in them, yet they are all infused with the historical and cultural
references at the same time, which works to preempt viewers from engaging with
them regardless of their context as situated in the Armenian identity, in a specific
relationship to loss and remembrance.
The empty (yet contextualised) stages of Miskci in Void and Foto Yeraz reminds me
of the works of visual artist Kevin McCarty, as discussed by José Esteban Muñoz.
For the series titles as The Chameleon Club in which Kevin McCarty photographs
empty stages of underground queer performance venues, Muñoz argues that they
index a utopian performativity (Muñoz 2019, 98). Looking at the vacant stages
in McCarty’s photographs, Muñoz writes: “[t]he glow that McCarty’s photos generate
is that anticipatory illumination, that moment of possibility right before an
amazing band or performance manifests itself on stage and transforms the world.
[. . . ] The best performances do not disappear but instead linger in our memory,
haunt our present, and illuminate our future” (104). In Miskci’s remake of Maryam
Şahinyan’s photographs, the vacant stage both reminds us of the processes of erasure
and displacement that caused the stage to be emptied and indexes the potentiality
that it was infused with. The empty stage of Foto Galatasaray provides as a
dreamscape and poses a question: what if the multitude of Maryam Şahinyan’s
subjects could make it to the stage again, and perform themselves today? The
empty stage in Miskci’s version of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs thus make a
performative gesture to bring the event of Maryam Şahinyan’s photography to our
present, demanding us to fill the empty stage with our imagination. Muñoz argues
that the incompleteness of performance enables its persistence and its ability to
bring together a “community of interlocutors” (106). Miskci’s intervention invites
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us to imagine the performative act of the photoshoot at Maryam Şahinyan’s Foto
Galatasaray as an incomplete performance, and draws us together to the emptied
stage of Foto Galatasaray not to just recognise an absence in the present but also
to imagine the present and the future in different terms. This intervention imagines
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive not only as one that registers what-has-been-lost,
but also as a repository from the past that can fuel utopian performativity in the
present. While celebrating the multitude of photographic performances that once
took place at Maryam Şahinyan’s studio, the erasure of the subject from what is
supposed to be an end product in the context of a photography studio, namely the
photographic negative, urges us to imagine the photographic performance as an unfinished
one, and calls the contemporary viewer into this ongoing performance. This
ultimately underlines the status of Maryam Şahinyan’s photograph in our present
as in constant process of becoming, instead of a fixed and finished one.
Figure 4.5 From Foto Yeraz
Discussing Miskci’s work with Maryam Şahinyan’s photography, I would like to make
a final point about the implications of her work in terms of transtemporality. One
installation from Foto Yeraz is quite captivating (Figure 4.5). In this installation,
the cropped picture we see in the background is taken from Maryam Şahinyan’s
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archive and it depicts Miskci’s father with his former fiancee. In fact, Miskci recounts
her coming across with this photograph while cruising the archive as a very
coincidental and surprising one, as she did not know that such a photograph of her
father existed before (Soysal 2019). While a photograph with a former fiancee could
not make its way into the family album, it was present in the studio archive. This
instance is quite telling of the queer character of the studio archive vis-a-vis the
more normalising tendencies of a family album. While the family album follows a
“chrononormative” order, to borrow the term from Elizebeth Freeman (2010), in
constructing its narrative as a linear progression of the family, leaving out “failures”
of bonding or older spouses, the studio archive does not follow a similar normative
order for selecting its components. Moreover, Miskci’s belated encounter with this
photograph in the archive and her recognition of her father in misrecognition of
the photograph demonstrates that the transtemporality of our encounters with the
archive always entail an entanglement of estrangement and familiarity, even if we
encounter photos of relatives in the archive.
Miskci cuts this photograph into two halves by cropping the faces totally out of the
frame as to make the subjects unrecognisable and places her dreamscape of a studio
setting in between the halves of the original photograph. This intervention can be
seen as a gesture that juxtaposes the ephemerality of the pose (and of the relationship
that it signifies) and the rather prolonged durability of the studio setting which can
stage countless other performances. Juxtaposition of the black-and-white fragments
of Maryam Şahinyan’s photograph to the image of a studio setting with a rug with
vivid colours demands the viewer to imagine the studio stage on a transtemporal
plane. The continuum between the rug in the original photograph and the vivid one
in the middle piece however urges us not to override the particular context that this
work demands us to engage with.
4.2 September 1955: The Photography Studio as a Place of Encounter
In the multimedia installation September 1955, Deniz Tortum, Çağrı Hakan Zaman
and Nil Tuzcu construct an imaginary photography studio setting with the help of
virtual reality (VR) technology (Figure 4.6) (Tortum, Zaman, and Tuzcu 2016). The
studio is modelled after Foto Galatasaray of Maryam Şahinyan and the photography
studio of Osep Minasoğlu, who was also a prominent Armenian studio photographer
from Istanbul (Serttaş 2009) (Figure 4.7). September 1955 invites its participants
to this imaginary photography studio and to the date September 6th, 1955, the
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date of the pogrom targeting non-muslim communities of Istanbul that I recounted
in previous chapters. Defined as an 8-minute VR experience, the participants of
September 1955 are invited to experience the initial minutes of the pogrom from
within the photography studio, as the photographer operating the business. Deniz
Tortum defines their work in September 1955 as creating a space for contemplating
and remembering that is informed by archival sources, including that of Maryam
Şahinyan’s (Bir Sanal Gerçelik Deneyimi: Eylül 1955 | Deniz Tortum 2019). In this
respect, it can be said that September 1955 reimagines Maryam Şahinyan’s studio
setting and her photographic archive as a spatial means of encountering the past by
recalling it into our present and by turning it into an embodied experience, enabled
by the VR technology. In September 1955, the stage of the studio this time figures
a virtual space on which a lively encounter with the events of September 6th and
7th can be encountered performatively (Figure 4.8).
Figure 4.6 From September 1955
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Figure 4.7 From September 1955
Figure 4.8 From September 1955
In acknowledgement of the irreducible temporal and experiential gap between the
violent instance of 1955 pogrom and the contemporary context, yet also in an understanding
of the legacies of this past violence as structuring the present condition,
September 1955 implies that the possibilities of a “true” encounter with the past
lies in the reconstruction of this past in the present by relying on its sources while
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creating a fictive setting of it that is infused with an imaginary investment that
makes this foreign territory familiar to the belated gaze of the contemporary spectators.
In this respect, September 1955 offers an experience of the studio that no
longer exclusively belongs either to its own time or to our present. While the setting
that they create for the VR experience is constructed by relying on references to
this time in history, the actors they imagine in this setting are composed of people
from the present. Wearing the VR equipment, you are expected to be operating a
photography studio, taking photographs that Maryam Şahinyan once took, yet the
voices of your clients that you hear throughout the experience belong to the present,
hence you hear discussions that are relevant to your immediate spatial and temporal
context. Moreover, in the reconstructed settings of group photographs for example,
the subjects you are expected to be photographing do not appear as actual people
but rather as textureless three dimensional objects (Figure 4.9). Juxtaposition of the
familiar voices of the clients with their visual oddity in this VR experience index the
uncanniness of recognition of familiarity in alienation that the orphan photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive imply.
Figure 4.9 From September 1955
September 1955 ’s simultaneous allowing of recognition through familiarity and withholding
of over-identification demands from its audiences a deeper response for the
past it references. It creates an effect that does not work to expose the otherness of
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the Other, but that exposes the otherness of the audience to the referred context. It
creates a space of what Nicole Gervasio calls as “intimate distance” for its audiences
that facilitates an identification through difference (2019, 270). In this respect, the
experience that September 1955 offers is not an experience of what-has-been, but
an experience of our intimate distance from the event itself. It does not promise a
knowledge of the event, but an affective experience of our relation to it.
By imagining the photography studio setting as an appropriate venue for such encounter
with the past, I think September 1955 also plays with the notion of modesty
that is attributed to the studio photographic profession in the case of Maryam
Şahinyan. Instead of focusing on the institutional and diplomatic politics that occasioned
the pogrom of September 1955, the intervention of September 1955 urges us
to think the politics of that event in terms of its effects on the ordinary life, legacies
of which has also occasioned the present we live in. By inviting its audiences to a
photography studio that had been overwhelmingly frequented by the members of
non-muslim communities of Istanbul to experience the event, it demands us to ask
how the ordinary life (then and now) has been effected as a result of the pogrom.
The transtemporal setting that September 1955 constructs aims to move us beyond
the evaluation of the pogrom through the immediate damage that it caused then
and there. While it does not neglect the material and immediate violence of the
event as the shards of broken glass included in the VR installation that allude to
the damage that Maryam Şahinyan’s studio suffered implies (Figure 4.10), it urges
us to evaluate the event in terms of its symbolic and historical consequences, in
terms of its shattering of the ordinary experiences and its costs for the everyday life
across time.
Figure 4.10 From September 1955
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Moreover, by underlining the significance of the ordinary suffering that is occasioned
by this violence, September 1955 turns Maryam Şahinyan’s studio setting
into a contemporary space where a vast array of audiences composed of the following
generations of insiders, outsiders and by-standers of the event to encounter it as
a story that contributed to the making of their collective present, again underlining
the relationality of loss that Butler’s remarks underline which I recounted earlier.
4.3 Reimagining the Art Canon with Maryam Şahinyan, and Cruising
Istanbul with her Memory
As I have discussed in the introduction, my initial curiosity toward Maryam
Şahinyan’s story and her photography has been triggered by my encounter with an
article on Curious Steps, which is an ongoing project that organises feminist walks
in Istanbul at chosen locations with the institutional support of Sabancı University
Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender) since 2014. Since
its inception, Maryam Şahinyan and Foto Galatasaray has been a prominent stop
in the Beyoğlu route of Curious Steps, which has been the first route to be created
within the project (Abiral et al. 2019, 85). Curious Steps project has been defined
as “a collective effort to mobilise memories through walking and storytelling” by a
group of its organisers in the above-mentioned article (84), and it fosters a curious
and creative relationship to the city which is mainly derived from its methodology
of feminist intervention to the space by narrating obscured stories related to these
spaces which pertain mainly to the lives of disenfranchised groups. If one outcome
of walking the city with a feminist lens that is attentive to the obscured stories of it
is remobilising such memories in the present as to imagine a different future and to
expand the feminist imagination through revitalising different horizons that each of
such stories provide, another equally important outcome of it is that this practice
works as connective, making the participants of Curious Steps to (re)connect with
the stories that are being told on the one hand and to make the spatial connections
between different histories of dispossession and violence that obscured these stories
in the first hand legible (Ibid.).
For example, when Maryam Şahinyan’s story is told at the Galatasaray Square stop
of the Curious Steps, the story that is being told gets to be imagined in relation to
the various layers of erasure, silencing and political violence that marks the space
of the square, recalled by the weekly vigils of the Saturday Mothers that took place
in the square until 2018, the demolishing of the Galatasaray Pasajı and the con-
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struction of the monument to the 50th anniversary of the Republic in its place. In
this respect, through inscribing memory into the space and reimagining memory in
spatial terms, feminist walks of Curious Steps transform both the spaces where they
intervene and the memories that they mobilise. It is through their creative and connective
intervention to the space for example that Maryam Şahinyan’s story can be
reimagined in relation to the nationalist historiography that the “50th Anniversary”
monument recalls, or the vulnerable resistance of the Saturday Mothers that once
took place at the same location (97). I think that the case of Curious Steps which
entails both a temporal and spatial curiosity in its feminist imaginary fits very nicely
to the way in which I define cruising in this thesis. Enchanted by various obscured
stories and “intimate archives” including that of Maryam Şahinyan and her archive,
participants and organisers of Curious Steps re-enchant the space by “re-incrib[ing]
gender-curious memories into the fabric of the city” through an “ephemeral and
unfixed” practice of walking (98). By reimagining Maryam Şahinyan’s story within
a creative repertoire of action in form of a feminist walk, Curious Steps provides a
brilliant example of an embodied and affective practice of knowledge making, whose
main motive is not to correct but to nourish critical scepticism towards the stories
that surround us in the spaces of our living (Ibid.). Since 2014, there have been
various different storytellers who took up Maryam Şahinyan’s story from different
angles from vantage points that resonated with them the most, and in each of these
endeavours the story of her and her archive have been transformed and remade.
In the spring of 2022, I also had the chance to join the team as a storyteller and I
told the story of Maryam Şahinyan and Foto Galatasaray held physical in Beyoğlu,
and the other one virtually on Zoom. The occasion in which I joined the team was
a special one also for the Curious Steps itself as this time the walk was organised in
tandem with an art exhibition named “I-You-They: A Century of Artist Women”
which was held at MEŞHER, an art venue located on Istiklal Avenue. While the
original Beyoğlu route of Curious Steps have been readopted to the artists that
have been featured in the exhibition, Maryam Şahinyan stop at Galatasaray Square
kept its place in the route as she was also featured in the exhibit. The walk on
this occasion was named as “Curious Steps: Beyoğlu in the Footsteps of Artist
Women.” The MEŞHER exhibition “I-You-They,” curated by Deniz Artun which
has been held between October 9th, 2021 and May 29th, 2022, brought together
more than 100 women artists who lived and worked roughly between 1850s and
1950s through their works. As the organisers of the exhibit put, “[t]he exhibition
not only recognizes each woman, most of whom could not realize themselves and
therefore were overlooked and neglected by art history, but also searches for the
grounds for making a collective ‘we’” (I-You-They: A Century of Artist Women
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2021). In this respect, it can be said that the exhibit both aims to intervene into
the existing exclusionary artistic canon which neglects women in its constitution
and to reimagine these women artists as a collective that can provide new horizons
in the present and new possibilities for rewriting the art history. Instead of merely
“adding” women to the already existing history of art, by subtitling itself as “A
Century of Artist Women,” the exhibit calls for an altogether reconsideration of the
ways in which the extant histories of art are being written. Featuring a photograph
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive, the exhibit brings Maryam Şahinyan’s story to
a new terrain this time, situating her as a significant (yet obscured) figure in the
history of art in Turkey.
In the second chapter, I have touched upon the issue of Maryam Şahinyan’s agency
in recounting her story in relation to her photography and practice of archiving
as a troubled terrain in which a discourse of necessity and structural limits often
obscure her active role in the constitution of what we the contemporary spectators
of her work publicly have of her. When thought in relation to this problem, what
Curious Steps’ and “I-You-They” exhibit’s intervention into her reconsiderations do
can be regarded as a re-inscription Maryam Şahinyan’s story in the contemporary
feminist imaginary through focusing on the significance of her as a historical figure
and of her work as imbued with the capacity of mobilising distinct memories that
surround them. These two instances recall Maryam Şahinyan and her photography
to the contemporary feminist imaginary especially through their understanding of
feminism as a lens and a methodology instead of conceptualising it as a fixed subjectposition.
In a thought-provoking article where she pursues the question whether the
Armenian writer Zabel Yeseyan was a feminist, Nora Tataryan makes a compelling
case for expanding our imagination of feminism by thinking of it first and foremost
as a lens and methodology instead of an essential marker of identity (Tataryan
2020). Despite the fact that Yeseyan openly rejected being a feminist in her time,
Tataryan argues that her writings and imagination cannot be though separately from
the desire-centred feminisms of today and suggests that we expand our notions of
feminism as to imagine figures like Yeseyan within it. Tataryan’s reading of Yeseyan
is willingly asynchronous and transtemporal. In fact, her reading suggests that we
let go of the linearly progressive and essentially fixed notions of feminism in order to
expand our understanding of it. She writes: “when we stop considering feminism as
an essence, and rather discuss the question of ‘what should a feminist imagination
look like,’ we would have opened a space for imagination and the world ceases to
be divided along the lines of ‘feminists’ and ‘non-feminists’” (Ibid., translation is
mine).
In accordance with what Tataryan suggests, the feminist interventions of Curious
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Steps and “I-You-They” inscribe Maryam Şahinyan into a contemporary feminist
imaginary while not reducing feminism to an identity category nor necessitating
marking Maryam Şahinyan as a feminist for doing so. In this respect, these interventions
also enrich and expand the emergent endeavours in feminist and queer
historiography of the last decades in Turkey. Such historiography dealing especially
with the periods of Late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey has extensively
focused on the activities of women especially around writing, publishing, and producing
public discourses about the role of women in public sphere over the last
decades. While the initial examples in this scholarship focused mainly on the cultural
and political organisations and consequent publications of Turkish/Muslim
women, they were soon followed by interventions from the margins that expanded
the field of feminist historiography as to include significant and crucial feminisms of
women from Greek, Armenian, Kurdish and Circassian communities (Altınay 2014,
310). While these historiographical endeavours expanded the feminist imagination
in crucial and undeniable ways, they have mostly remained focusing on the more
legible forms of feminist agency such as formations of political and cultural organisations,
publishing and contributing to the various public discourses around the
definitions of womanhood. I think that the case of Curious Steps and “I-You-They”
add up to these existing interventions by reconsidering the notions of feminism on a
more transtemporal scale, by inviting various obscured gendered stories to the contemporary
feminist imagination and playfully mobilising them within the present.
It is the very transtemporality of their endeavours in excavating the “hidden” or
neglected stories from the past and their re-inscription of them in the contemporary
spaces that makes it possible for a figure like Maryam Şahinyan to find herself a
place in the contemporary feminist imaginary, as a woman photographer who kept
an ardent visual archive of countless women and people from other disenfranchised
groups in ordinary and trivialised settings.
4.4 Affiliating Intimately with the Archive
In this subsection of the chapter, I will look at the engagements with the archive that
are creative in a loose sense, that do not necessarily take a formally artistic form,
yet rely on curations that are made from the content of the archive, starting from
my own, personal encounters. As Gayatri Gopinath makes clear in Unruly Visions
(2018), affiliation is a very approbate lens in emphasising the transtemporality of
reception, as it underlines the significance of the perceptions and subjective positions
of the contemporary audiences in relating to artefacts of the past. I think, the lens
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of affiliation enables us to attend to the entanglements of desires and agendas of
contemporary spectators in their engagements with such traces that archives like
Maryam Şahinyan’s provide. In this respect, I would especially like to focus on
the affective circulation of the photographs that imply non-normative expressions of
gender and sexuality from the archive in this section, as I think their contemporary
trajectories characterise what I understand to be an affiliative mode of engagement
with orphan photographs. Their circulation also attests to the capacity of orphan
photographs to enable formation of communities on the basis of affiliation.
4.4.1 Personal Affiliations
The whole story of my interest in Maryam Şahinyan, which ultimately occasioned
the writing of this thesis, has started with my encounter with a selection of photographs
from her archive, which resonated with me on an affiliative register.
These photographs which are brought together under the heading “Gender” in Foto
Galatasaray (2011) are rich with expressions of non-normative forms of gender and
sexuality, and I could feel their haptic effect on me in terms of my increased heart
beat in the first sight. The embodied experience they occasioned for me can be best
understood in terms of the affiliation I felt towards them, for when I was leafing
through these pages I felt like I came across with an album of strange familiars. In
his introduction to an edited volume composed of short stories from literature in
Turkish (covering the period of 1872-1928) that are infused with themes and characters
representing non-normative gender and sexualities, Serdar Soydan writes that
in bringing these different literary examples together it feels as if the characters
of these different stories “come together years after, like members of a shattered
family, gathering around a festive table” (Soydan 2020, 7) (translation is mine).
Photographs culminated under the “Gender” section of Foto Galatasaray (2011)
communicate a similar feeling to me. At this point it is also worth noting that it
was thanks to the selective gaze of Tayfun Serttaş, who compiled the photographs
to be presented in the book that these photographs with subversive expressions of
gender and sexuality are further underlined while they were being publicised.
Yet, these photographs from the archive are equally troubling as the rest of the images
in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as it is impossible to identify their subjects, and
their motivations in getting themselves photographed. In this respect, they hide as
much as they show and hence relegate the contemporary spectator to a problematic
position. As it would be wrong to assume who we see in them actually are, I rather
want to focus on the effect of affiliation they provide in their contemporary context.
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Gayatri Gopinath (2018) argues that it is a similar queer affiliation that Akram
Zaatari felt, which motivated his selection and assemblages relying on the studio
photographs of southern Lebanese studio photographer Hashem el Madani in his
project, titled as Hashem el Madani: Studio Practices (Zaatari 2004). However, it
should also be noted that Akram Zaatari had the chance to cruise these photographs
with the assistance of Hashem el Madani, as el Madani was present while Akram
Zaatari compiled his selection and gave important insights on the contents and contexts
of the photographs within the process. For example, for the photographs
depicting homoerotic intimacy, el Madani informs Zaatari and his readers that they
are usually enacted before the camera as a conscious act of gender play, in which
the subjects of the same “sex” assume feminine and masculine tropes to perform
a heterosexual imaginary of intimacy, and they do so due to the conservative conventions
of the society which does not allow open expressions of intimacy between
men and women (14). In the case of Maryam Şahinyan, however, such photographs
have not been supported by insights of any kind, as the photographs have been
recovered posthumously, more than a decade after Maryam Şahinyan’s passing. In
this respect, it is not possible to maintain anything conclusive about the nature of
their production. We can never know whether they are products of pure enactment
and play with categories, or expressions of the self. Yet still, they affect us as they
are. Therefore, I would like to situate queerness not in these pictures but rather
around them, as an effect of their troubling charm when they meet us belatedly.
Even though the sense of affiliation that I feel towards these photographs are well
informed by my own sexual identity, it is not only the identity itself that generates
this affiliation but also the historical experience of it, that is in form of seclusion,
erasure and denial. I perceive these images as coming out of the closet of a dominant
history that neglected and dismissed such expressions to take part in its conventional
constructions. In fact, while the homogenising tendencies of the official
narratives worked to obscure differences along the lines of religion and ethnicity, they
also operated as normalising and straightening mechanisms that only allowed room
for expressions of cis-heterosexuality to find a room in them. It is this perceived
commonness of the experience of being rendered outcast that occasions my queer
affiliation with these photographs, that is outside the logic of blood and kinship.
Moreover, I am captivated by the photographs in “Gender” section not only for a
sense of affinity but also for what I perceive in them to be expressive of the historical
process in which homoeroticism was cast outside the realm of the normative. In this
respect, I would like to draw attention to a group of photographs in this section,
which are telling both of the trouble that dominant constructions of masculinities
create and of the performative setting of the photography studio that challenges
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such constructions.
In a group of photographs from the archive we see pairs of men posing in front of
the camera loosely holding hands, examples of which can be seen in Figure 4.11
and Figure 4.12. The punctum of these photographs for me reside in the ways in
which their subjects hold hands. I think that the rather discomfortable gesture of
holding hands in these photographs suggest a tension between male homosociality
and homoeroticism, a rather slippery terrain that has been subjected to a strict
regulation over the course of modernity as to consolidate a normative heterosexual
masculine identity. Such studio photographs of men holding hands are not unique
to Maryam Şahinyan’s archive. In fact, Gülderen Bölük argues that this practice
was a widespread one especially in earlier phases of studio photography in Turkey
(2014: 329). She also maintains that these photographs, which are expressive of
the visualisation of a friendly bond are often misinterpreted as suggestive of a bond
that exceeds the frames of friendship (Ibid.). Even if the likewise photographs from
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive are expressive “only” of a friendly bond, what can we
make out of the troubled gesture of holding hands in them? In Between Men, Eve
Kosofky Sedgwick argues that in the course of modernity, the homosocial bonds
between men which have been crucial for the operation of patriarchal gender regime
have been subjected to a strict regulation as to sustain their distance from any
slippage into homoeroticism (Sedgwick 2016). In this respect, the patriarchal gender
regime, which is structurally a homophobic one, relied heavily on the sustenance of
homosocial bonds between men and on the disruption of the continuum between
homosociality and homoeroticism (36-39). If we are to read photographs of men
holding hands in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive as expressive of “exclusively friendly”
bonds between men, then what strikes me the most in them is their exposing of this
troubled terrain on which patriarchy realises itself. Patriarchy’s double demand,
asking men to hold hands yet not to slide into a desirous bonding while doing so
is expressed in the form of fainthearted act of holding hands in these photographs.
These images are also powerful as they communicate the fragility of the tenets on
which patriarchy relies.
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Figure 4.11 From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice by
Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing
76
Figure 4.12 From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice by
Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing
Even though the historical transformations in the gender regime in Turkey (and
Ottoman Empire) have been increasingly scrutinised over the last decades in the
scholarship on Turkey (and Ottoman Empire), much of this scholarly investigations
have focused especially on the period of modernisation, expanding to early modernity
up until the initial years of the republic. While these investigations have been
crucial in shedding light on the ways in which the modern gender regime has been
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established in the contexts of late Ottoman and early Republican periods, the time
frame they cover leaves the republican period mostly untouched. Even though I am
also wary of considering the process of modernity and westernisation as the main
and only culprit for the institutionalisation of heteronormativity and subsequently
of homophobia in the contexts of Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey, thanks
to this emergent literature we now know that the cultures around gender and sexuality
have undergone an immense transformation within this process, and that the
social meanings attached to expressions of gender and sexuality that deemed nonnormative
have consequently changed. However, insofar the scholarly interest on
the subject of non-normative gender and sexualities is driven by a motivation to
establish this realm as an important venue in which the process of modernisation
makes itself legible, the period that follows the one that is considered to be the most
significant one in terms of this reconfiguration remains out of scholarly interest. I
think, it is also due to this exclusive focus that we have not yet seen works focusing
on the ways in which non-normative gender and sexualities have survived the republic
itself. Much has been said on how certain gender expressions and sexualities has
been cast outside the hegemonic constructions, yet the ways in which the outcasts
of these constructions have survived them remains pretty much a dark territory.
It was also due to this gap that encountering expressions of non-normative gender
and sexualities in Maryam Şahinyan’s archive was a very exciting experience for me.
These photographs from the archive, however silent they are, make a strong demand
for recognition in the present.
While considering the affiliative attachments that are formed between the photographs
from the archive and their contemporary spectators, it is also important to
underline the equally active role that these photographs play in this process. Otherwise,
paying too much attention exclusively to the contemporary spectator might
run the risk of neglecting the agentive capacities of the photographs and more importantly
of the subjects that we see in them. In this respect, I would like to draw
attention to two particularly captivating photographs from the archive (Figure 4.13
and Figure 4.14). These photographs captivate me not only for their evoking of a
sense of affinity in me due to the gender subversion I read in them, but also for what
I think to be their playful incorporation of juxtaposition into their game. What
puzzles and draws me to these photographs is the juxtaposition of performances of
femininity to those of militarised masculinity that I read in them, which is informed
by my knowledge of the secondary literature in militarised modernity in Turkey.
In this respect, the punctum of these photographs for me today cannot be thought
separately from their belated return in a public context.
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Figure 4.13 From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice by
Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing
79
Figure 4.14 From Serttaş, Tayfun (2011) Foto Galatasary: Studio Practice by
Maryam Şahinyan, Istanbul: Aras Publishing
In The Myth of the Military-Nation, Ayşe Gül Altınay argues that military has constituted
an integral part in the formation of a gendered Turkish national identity
(Altınay 2004). According to Altınay, while the military has been culturalised within
this ideological formation, the gendered discourses of citizenship have demanded and
contributed to the militarisation of the proper masculine identity (32). Vernacular
photography has played an integral role in this process. Calafato (2022) argues that
the photographs of soldiers have played, and continues to play to this date, an integral
role in the constitution of an idealised military masculinity, and its perpetuation
as a cultural myth across the nation (64-72). Photographic portraits of soldiering
men have often been disseminated by these men themselves among their private
circles of families and friends as souvenirs that attest to their becoming of proper
citizens to the nation (Ibid.). When thought in light of these arguments, what can
we make out of the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive in which we see
juxtaposition of militarised masculinities with expressions that fall outside of the
cis-heteronormative matrix? They surely have a powerful, disorienting capacity for
the contemporary spectator. Even if we cannot know the nature of relationship
between the subjects in these photographs, the enactment of a setting of marriage
in the latter image suggests that there is a consciously performative play going on
in them. If they are enacting an ideal of heterosexual family in these photographs,
then can we read their inclusion of men in military attire also as a conscious effort
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in further underlining of an ideal? Moreover, can we not argue that the gender
play that they engage with in these photographs also expose the fact that the militarised
masculinity is itself a performance that is constructed? While processes of
normalisation renders subjects that fall out of their frames as visibly marked, they
provide anonymity and invisibility to those who can conform. While a solo portrait
of a soldier can easily be dismissed as “just another one” in an endless repertoire of
reiterations of a normalised, hence internalised performance, when an expression of
militarised masculine subjectivity meets subversive acts of gender-play in a single
composition, then its invisibility derived from its normalcy gets in vein too. By way
of imitating an “original” scene of marriage, Figure 4.13 communicates an act of
subversion, that exposes the performative character of gender (Butler 1990, 187).
While it is the conscious enactment that is engaged by the subjects in the photograph
that occasions my reading of gender performativity in it, the subversive effect
of the image becomes legible only in a belated setting. In this respect, the affiliative
relationship that such a photograph enables for the contemporary spectator can only
be understood through the entanglements of agency on a transtemporal setting.
4.4.2 Communal Affiliations
Wider circulation of the photographs implying non-normative gender and sexualities
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive suggests that I am far from being alone in
engaging with her photographs through a sense of affinity. In this section, I would
like to investigate the meanings they gain in their contemporary contexts of dissemination.
For doing so, I would first like to focus on an article written by Aslı
Alpar, which was published online on Kaos GL, which is a prominent online and
print cultural platform for the LGBTI+ communities in Turkey (Alpar 2017). This
short article, which also provides a brief biography of Maryam Şahinyan, introduces
a selection from her photographs that are culminated under the “Gender” section in
Foto Galatasaray (2011) to its readers. The article is curiously titled as “Maryam
Şahinyan’ın objektifinden; gacılar, seviciler, geyler,” which can be roughly translated
as “Trannies, dykes, and gays from Maryam Şahinyan’s lens.” This article, which
does nothing much more than just providing a particular assemblage of photographs
from the archive is quite telling of the public meanings that such of her photographs
are gaining in the contemporary setting of Turkey.
Within the contemporary political atmosphere in Turkey which is becoming aggravatingly
hostile towards LGBTI+ communities as also to deny them a position in
history, the sense of that-has-been that the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s
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archive communicate gain a new significance for the LGBTI+ communities to make
a claim in history. While I think that the legitimacy of LGBTI+ existences and
their demands in this contemporary setting cannot be subsumed to a claim of history,
these photographs nevertheless provide an affiliative register through which
contemporary subjects can establish a sense of belonging across time. In fact, in Alpar’s
article the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive are presented not as
evidences but as affiliative traces that can foster a sense of belonging and continuity
with the “1940s, 50s, and 60s” of the country (Ibid.).
Alpar’s choice of title for the article is particularly telling in this respect. While the
attribution of certain identities to the subjects in these anonymous photographs can
be considered problematic from a narrow lens of political correctness and historical
accuracy, I think that such reading of Alpar’s engagement with the photographs
cannot account for the stakes involved in this engagement. Therefore, I suggest
that we read the identity categories that Alpar refers to in her readings of these
photographs as attesting more to the sense of affinity she feels towards them instead
of what she deems the subjects of these photographs to be. Discarding such a reading
for its anachronism and identity assignment would make it impossible to account
for the transtemporality of affiliative engagement.
Moreover, I think that Alpar’s use of identity categories with their denominations
in the “Turkish” queer slang in her references to the photographs is not coincidental.
Instead of “trans,” Alpar prefers “gacı,” and likewise, instead of “lezbiyen,”
she utters “sevici.” Usage of a particularly local terminology when referring to these
photographs suggest that they matter for Alpar not only as strange familiars from
the past, but also (and probably more importantly) as those from a familiar spatial
context. In this respect, the article implies that the sense of belonging these
photographs foster for their contemporary queer spectators is both temporal and
spatial. In these contemporary readings, the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive “perform new histories,” (Feldman and Zaatari 2014, 62), cited in (Gopinath
2018, 3) and they contribute to a “queer regional imaginary” through an affective
register of affinity. Gopinath (2018) defines queer regional imaginary as one “that
stands in contradistinction to a dominant national imaginary that effaces nonconforming
bodies, desires, and affiliations” (5). As a visual repository of a multitude
of ordinary utterances, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive can be considered as facilitating
queer regional imaginaries in its contemporary setting.
Photographs from Maryam Şahinnyan’s archive like the ones Alpar cites in her
article are indeed circulated widely particularly on social media, and especially on
the occasions of pride month that is celebrated in June each year. A sense of surprise
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and fascination due to the date and location of these photographs is eminent in most
of these instances. In fact, wide circulation of photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive, together with exhibitions composed of her photographs, have contributed
to a wider recognition of her work, beyond Turkey. This has contributed to the
engagements of especially queer and Armenian communities with her work abroad.
In the coming section I will be looking at these new trans-spatial contexts of the
archive’s reception.
4.4.3 Diasporic Affiliations
The new senses of queer temporal and spatial belonging that photographs from
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive have fostered is not limited to the immediate context
of its reveal. In fact, as the example of the entry about Maryam Şahinyan on The
Queer Armenian Library, which is an online library that brings together the cultural
works of queer-identified Armenians suggest, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive gain new
meanings when photographs from it start circulating beyond the immediate context
of contemporary Turkey. United States based The Queer Armenian Library is inaugurated
in 2020 by John Parker-der Boghossian, who is a queer-identified Armenian
from the US, with an aim of bringing together literature, film, art and music that
pertain to queer themes from Armenia and its diasporas (The Queer Armenian Library
2020). The online library has grown big in a short amount of time and in
February 2021, it added Maryam Şahinyan’s photography to its catalogue with an
entry titled “The Queer Photography of Maryam Şahinyan” (The Queer Photography
of Maryam Şahinyan 2021). In a private correspondence that I established with
them, der Boghossian said that they have first encountered Maryam Şahinyan and
her photography on social media, after joining a group that was run by queer Armenians.
They describe the moment in which they first saw the photos as a random yet
very special and unbelievable one, and they also expressed a frustration for the fact
that there were not many photographs from the archive available online. Soon after
this first encounter, der Boghossian incorporated Maryam Şahinyan to the online
catalogue of the Library with a brief introduction that defined her work as focusing
“on portraits, which included queer subjects and folx from disenfranchised religious
and ethnic groups” (Ibid.).
The interest among queer-identified Armenians living in the diaspora for what
they deem as the queer photography of Maryam Şahinyan suggests that the photographs
from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive that circulate trans-spatially may generate
a sense of double-affinity among these subjects due to the Armennianness of
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Maryam Şahinyan as the photographer and the queerness that they read into her
photographs. While this image of Maryam Şahinyan’s may well be mediating an
identification of queer Armenian subjects in the diaspora with a home that was long
left behind through a perception of an intersection of Armenian and queer identities
in her archive, the same perception of an intersection may also be mediating
a negotiation of Armenian and queer identities in the context of diaspora itself.
Arlene Voski Avakian argues that the patriarchal conservatism that permeates the
Armenian diasporic communities in the United States, which is fuelled mainly by
a nationalist attitude toward identity preservation in the context of diaspora often
alienates feminists and queers from these communities (Avakian 2010). The picture
that Avakian delineates of the Armenian diaspora in the US suggests that there is
a perceived incongruity between the Armenian identity and the queer identity that
needs to be negotiated for subjects that are at the intersection of both. The community
of The Queer Armenian Library is no stranger to the work of Avakian as it was
her memoir Lion Woman’s Legacy (Avakian 1992) that constituted the first entry
in the Library’s catalogue. Perceived as an Armenian woman photographer with a
generosity towards queer subjects in her work, Maryam Şahinyan might also be constituting
a window that opens to the historical intersections of these two identities
for the members of Armenian diasporic communities.
One last aspect of Maryam Şahinyan’s archive that can be considered within this
setting of trans-spatial engagements is the post-regeneration work that it is imagined
to be contributing. When the archive was first exhibited publicly at SALT
Galata in 2011, a simultaneous event was hold in tandem with the exhibition, which
aimed to identify the subjects in the photographs by making a public call to those
who might had relatives that had got their photographs taken at Foto Galatasaray.
The call, and the consequent exhibitions of the archive in other countries have attracted
many members especially of Armenian communities that are now dispersed
across the globe, who identified themselves or their relatives among the countless
photographs from the archive. In this respect, it can be said that the archive has
also been imagined as a register through which a work of linking the broken pieces
of the community back to their home that they had to leave behind could be done.
As Sahwn Michelle Smith notes, the “orphan” as in orphan images “connote not
only loss, but also a desire to reconnect such images with their first owners, or to
truly identify them” (Smith 2020, 313). While I acknowledge the stark differences
between the two contexts, I think this contemporary desire to reconnect orphaned
images with their primary contexts alludes to the regeneration work within which
the surviving Armenian communities in the early decades of the Republic that Lerna
Ekmekçioğlu (2016) analyses, for which reconnecting orphaned Armenian children
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(and women) had been a central task.
Another similar project along the lines of reconnecting the orphan photos from
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive to their particular histories has been conducted by the
independent feminist researcher Anahit Ghazaryan, who has been collecting the
print versions of Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs as once possessed by their original
beholders by tracing them in auctions, fly markets and second-hand booksellers of
Istanbul. These photographs in print matter to Ghazaryan precisely because they
carry material signs from their previous contexts, which are mostly in form of notes
and messages that are written at the backsides of the photographs. Photograph
in print attest to the various different contexts that the photographs in Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive have once belonged to. Ghazaryan exhibits the backsides of
these photographs she has collected on a website she dedicated to Maryam Şahinyan
(Ghazaryan 2021).
***
As the different examples I have discussed in this chapter demonstrate, Maryam
Şahinyan’s archive today present itself to its public audiences as a repository of
“ordinary affects” (Stewart 2007) that demands creative engagements. It can be best
understood as an interface which occasions several creative memory-works. In these
memory-works the realm of the ordinary everyday life figures for one that is shaped
in relation to the dominant logics of power, and in this respect it can be said that the
“ordinary affects” from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive often facilitates a memory-work
that is attentive to the political nature of the everyday and the personal realms.
Liminal nature of the studio photographic practice permeates the ways in which the
photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive gain significance in the present. It is
precisely this liminality of the studio photography that enables the intertwinement
of personal and public memories to emerge from them in their belated contexts.
The contemporary trajectories of the photographs I recounted in this chapter can
all be considered as the different ways in which contemporary actors attend to
the affects that spur from the archive in order to articulate “better stories” out of
them to borrow the term from Dina Georgis (2013). In fact, it can be said that the
punctum of photography that Barthes (1981) conceptualises demands an action from
its spectators insofar it posits “a kind of subtle beyond” in the photographs (59). In
this respect, the engagements with these photographs in their contemporary settings
attest to an attention by their spectators to what is beyond these photographs. It
is through the capacity of these photographs to communicate a beyond that they
start operating as connectives for collective (post)memories in the hands of their
contemporary audiences. I suggest that this beyond operates as an imperative for
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narratives, for “better stories.” While I attended to these “better stories” in this
thesis, I think my very writing of this thesis itself can also be considered as a
response to the imperative that the beyond of photography occasions.
As the examples I have discussed in this chapter show, there is a multiplicity of issues
that Maryam Şahinyan’s photographs enable different actors to connect to. How can
we think of this multiplicity? While I do not aim to reduce the different forms of
remembering that the photographs from the archive facilitate to one another in a
way that neglects the particularities of histories of violence and erasure that each
of these engagements with the photographs evoke, I think the multiplicity of these
modes of engagements suggest that Maryam Şahinyan’s archive operates as connective
between these different forms. As Marianne Hirsch (2012) suggests, visual
representations can work as “connective tissue conjoining diverse memory communities”
by hinting at the various “gaps and silences—[as] signifiers of a violent erasure”
(248). The various affects that the photographs from Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
communicates hint at the different processes of violent erasure and neglect, which
can all be understood in relationship to the destructive process of nationalist and
normative modernity as it manifested itself in Turkey. The picture that emerges
out of this multiplicity of engagements attest to what Meltem Ahıska (2019) names
as “conative memory,” which highlights the connotative operation of memory. Connotation,
she argues, can be regarded a “an effective mechanism for crossing the
thresholds of concealment through the activation of multiple meanings”(141). Evaluated
through a lens of connotation, it can be said that Maryam Şahinyan’s archive
operates as a dynamic interface in our contemporary setting for multiple ways of attending
to the connotations of a catastrophic historical process that disenfranchised
various communities in specific ways.
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5. CONCLUSION
In the summer of 2020, a curious incident involving a photography studio at the
provincial city of Karamürsel, Kocaeli in northwest of Turkey made its way into
the national news. The incident involved Başak Onay, a 27 year-old owner of a
photography studio in Karamürsel, who published a couple of photographs from a
photoshoot she conducted at her studio online, for the occasion of the LGBTI+
Pride Week that had happened a short while back, and the subsequent, violent
backlash that she met. Mehmet Özalay, who were the leader of the provincial
organisation of the conservative-right Saadet Partisi [Felicity Party] was in the lead
of the backlash. Hours after Onay published the photographs from the photoshoot
in which she asked her two models to pose side by side topless in a manner that
gently assumed a homoerotic intimacy between the models, Özalay, offended by the
photographs, targeted Onay on his social media account. Özalay’s social media post,
which incited the backlash that subsequently took an explicitly violent character that
lead to the moving out of Karamürsel of one of the models in the photoshoot and to
recurring threats that Onay received demanding her to shut her studio down, read:
“A photography studio that operates within our Karamürsel, which had brought the
first naval commander of the Ottoman Empire from its heart, which have always
been the blending spot of numerous heroes and wrestlers, and for which a climate
of piety has always been a touchstone, is spilling its LGBT photoshoots under the
name of a so-called social responsibility project virtually as a poison toward our
houses, streets, roads, and even to the whole city” (translation is mine, (KaosGL
2020)). To an event that was as “ordinary” and seemingly inconsequential as a
photoshoot at a provincial photography studio, the reply was through History.
The seemingly stark incommensurability of scales between the event of photography
and the form of backlash it lead to is quite informative for the ways in which I would
like to conclude my thesis. Özalay’s words are significant not only in the sense that
they show the potential of backlash that publicly circulating images of queer intimacy
might receive in contemporary Turkey, but also (and even more importantly)
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for their recourse to the constructions of heroic and nationalist history in formulating
this backlash. They attest to how nationalist construction of the history operate as
to imagine the national territory in terms of a unitary entity on a temporal scale that
in turn allows a habitable space only for subjects that it deems proper and worthy
within its boundaries. But Özalay’s words also attest to the potentiality that the
realm of the everyday is infused with due to its mess of subjectivities in threatening
and disrupting these narratives, especially when they go public. This story urges us
once again to think the realm of homogenising official/public narratives and that of
the messy everyday not in oppositional but in relational terms in which the power
operates to subjugate the realm of the everyday to a trivial (private) position so that
it does not threaten the seamless structuring capacities of the official narratives.
An archive as populated as Maryam Şahinyan’s with traces of various differences that
can haunt the homogenising narratives by disrupting their fantasies of unity across
time thus carries a political significance. As the contemporary engagements with it
that I discusses exemplify, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive works as an interface through
which the violence that structures the ordinary and permeates the everyday life can
resurface in a manner that re-politicises a realm that is aimed to be kept apart from
what is deemed as the appropriate space of the political by dominant structures.
The liminality of the studio photographic archive between private and public thus
figures also for its political significance as a tool that bridges the separation of these
realms according two their relevance for politics. If the private is indeed political,
then Maryam Şahinyan’s archive across time accounts for how that would be.
While it was the same processes of historical construction that rendered the story
of Maryam Şahinyan unintelligible and unthinkable within the cartographies of official/
public frames of thought as I discussed in the beginning of my thesis, the
contemporary reveal of the photographic register that she kept is infused with potentialities
that can move these very frames out of their joints as my discussion of
her work moved on to show. Many viewers of her archive have turned it into a
repository for creative engagement and intervened in it through peculiar repertoires
as to reconstitute its meanings in new settings. As the examples I investigated in
the last chapter also show, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive has eventually turned into
an affective interface for engaging with the difficult pasts that its story and content
recalls. Maryam Şahinyan did not only survive the stark circumstances that aimed
to render her story unthinkable even if posthumously, but she has also gifted the
here and now with a peculiar material through which we can keep on pricking the
history of our present. Her gift in form of an archive is not only a civil one that is
populated by photographs of anonymous ordinary people, but also quintessentially
a civic one, which allows room for encounters and work of reconciliation on the level
88
of the ordinary, through the participation of everyday people on a non-hierarchical
basis. Differing peculiarly from an official archive, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive is infused
with potentialities that pertain to a memory work lingering around the issues
of identifying, affiliating, recognising in/through difference and working through the
troublesome legacies of the past.
As my discussion in this thesis makes clear, today, Maryam Şahinyan’s archive derives
its utmost significance from its promises as a non-hierarchical, openly accessible
public archive. In a constant state of becoming, the archive gains its true significance
as different audiences engage with it, transforming and reconstituting its meanings
each time. In this respect, I find it extremely unfortunate that this archive, which
has been revealed by persistently underlining the democratic potentials that it entails
as an open archive is now being kept away from public access, and that only
about 0.5 percent of its content is publicly available, as printed in Foto Galatasaray
(2011). In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida writes: “There is no political power
without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always
be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to
the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (Derrida 1995, 11). Kept private,
Maryam Şahinyan archive cannot make it up to its promise. I find this situation
also problematic from a perspective of ownership, as the constitution of the materials
that compose the archive imply entanglements various “stake holders.” Whose
photographs are they? What are the ethics of claiming ownership over a collection
of photographs that depict hundreds of thousands of different subjects? What responsibility
do we have towards them and towards Maryam Şahinyan? These are
all crucial yet troubling questions that haunt vernacular photographs today.
I imagine the work I undertook in this thesis as one that resonates with what Linda
Zerilli (2021) names as “feminist pearl diving.” Not only I imagine my method as
resonant with feminist pearl diving, but also I contend that Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive as a public interface invites its spectators to do a work of pearl diving. As a
repository of fugitives, it provokes practices of cruising in its depths. The affective
relationship that it offers is one that cannot be accessed through conventional epistemologies.
Coming from an Arendtian theoretical premise, Zerilli suggests that we
see the making of our present in terms of a successive episodes of catastrophe, which
ripped us apart from the traditional continuity of time and created an irreducible
gap between the past and the future. Within such circumstances, historiography,
in a denial of this gap, tries to make sense of the time as a process that connects
the past to the future in an illusory fashion (Ibid.). For Zerilli, feminist pearl diving
is the alternative that Hannah Arendt suggests for the illusion of historiography,
deriving from Walter Benjamin. For Arendt, the work of Benjamin that deals with
89
the past is fed by the present, and by its need to be fed by “thought fragments”
from the past (Arendt 1968, 205). The pearl diver, Arendt writes: “descends to
the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry
loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to car
them to the surface” (Ibid.). For the pearl diver, the ruination that the process of
decay entails also means crystallisation on a different register. In this respect the
pearls that the pearl diver belatedly chases serve as “rich and strange” resources, as
“thought fragments” in the present (206).
Maryam Şahinyan’s archive and the kinds of memory work it occasions can be
considered along these lines. Moreover, her story in fragments also demand a work
of pearl diving, which I aimed to pursue in this thesis. While Maryam Şahinyan’s
story was rendered unthinkable by the catastrophic progress of dominant history,
the belated reveal of her and her archive occasions a moment in which she haunts
this dominant narrative. Maryam Şahinyan’s archive is abundant with “new figures
of the thinkable” that Zerilli (2021) discusses, deriving the term from Cornelius
Castoriadis. Figures of the thinkable in Costoriadis’ formulation account for “new
and other forms, types, figures/schemas/significations: and of other ‘problems’”
(Costoriadis 1984, xxii). For him, they determine the horizons of inquiry. As an
affective register infused with a potential to prick us by way of making us feel the
costs of historical process that we have endured, and as a source that relies on and
empowered by the realm of everyday, ordinary life in doing so, Maryam Şahinyan’s
archive resonates well with Costoriadis’ conceptualisation. It offers us new horizons,
and it demands and facilitates new questions. I hope, I have done justice to its call.
90
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