Over the past week, I've been spending some time returning to the digital archives made available via
SALT Research and
Şehir University. Out of all the photos and documents that I've skimmed, two photos that stand out:
 |
| "Eyüp." Taha Toros Archive, Şehir University (001560020008). |
And:
 |
| Outer courtyard of Maktul Mustafa Paşa Mosque; Nişancı, Eyüp, Istanbul. Ali Saim Ülgen. SALT Research (TASUDOC0426020). |
Both of these photos come in this moment -- the 1950s for Taha Toros, 1962 for the Ali Saim Ülgen photo -- when heritage is becoming a new object of management and contestation. How was heritage practiced and produced? Thinking about the ways that photography -- as an act of documentation but also an act of mediation -- intersected with the social life of the city. And then the way that both of these men were part themselves not part of the world that they photographed, something captured for me in the blurred boy running across the frame in Ülgen's photo.
Toros -- and I'm assuming he was the photographer in the first photograph -- must have known his shadow would be included in the frame of the photo he was taking, this composition of home, cat, and the shadow of the photographer who both does and does not belong.
Comments