This essay by Pelin Aytemiz emerges from her research supported by the inaugural Eidolon Grant, awarded in 2024. As she writes, “Exploring different practices of photographing and representing the dead, my dissertation examines how deceased loved ones are remembered and longed for through vernacular photography within the context of family in Turkey. Approaching mourning as a long-term experience, the primary objective is to analyze the alterations of the absence/presence of the mourned one in mourning photography, different from European examples. This study aims to expand the parameters of the discussion on the relationship between different types of photography and mourning, remembering, longing for, and bidding farewell to the dead, and to establish a new area of study concerning death photography in Turkey.”
Figure 1:
A family portrait staged before a domestic “memory corner,” combining calligraphy, portraits, and Turkish flags
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
Have you ever created a small corner in your home to remember or mourn for loved ones—a place where photographs, objects, and mementos quietly gather? It is as if the pages of a family album have been unfolded and pinned directly onto a wall. What was once a private collection becomes part of the domestic interior, visible to anyone who enters. In such a setting, the act of looking is no longer confined to the intimate gaze of the family itself; it also anticipates the gaze of visitors, friends, and relatives, as if turning the home into both a private archive and a semi-public exhibition space that narrates the family’s history. I think which images are chosen for display, how they are arranged, and to whom they are shown are all decisions that speak volumes about loss, memory, belonging, and identity. As Annette Kuhn reminds us in Family Secrets, family photographs never simply “reflect” private memory but participate in the cultural production of it, weaving personal histories into broader social and ideological narratives.[1] Reading these domestic displays, therefore, requires attention not only to what they show but also to the cultural frameworks of family, class, religion, and nationhood that they silently encode.
These small but layered corners reveal how families stage memory and absence within the domestic sphere. They ask us to consider: what happens when mourning is made visible, not only to the household but also to visitors? How do such displays reconfigure the boundaries between private memory and collective identity? As Marianne Hirsch argues in Family Frames, the “familial gaze” produces both a sense of intimacy and a structure of ideology, mediating between personal remembrance and collective narratives.[2] In this sense, photographs and memory actively participate in shaping how memory and belonging are imagined and communicated. This article approaches these questions through the close reading of photographs and memory corners in Turkey, situating them within the broader transformations of family, religion, and nationhood during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods around 1920-1940’s.
It is within this framework that we can consider the photograph in Figure 1 as a starting point of this study. At first glance, it presents a modest, even slightly asymmetrical composition of a nuclear family, carefully posed in front of the camera. Slightly faded, uneven in tone... The elderly women of the family are seated in chairs, while behind them stand two young boys dressed in suits and ties. In the foreground, a crouching male figure—likely the father or a central figure in the family—appears as if enacting his desire to be included in the frame, despite conventionally being the one behind the camera. A blurred cat, held in the lap of one of the women. Yet beyond this small constellation of living family members, the photograph draws in others through its spatial arrangement. Yet, those physically absent are also drawn into the frame through the presence of a carefully arranged “memory corner” in the background. Placed within a niche, this display includes a large framed, possibly a calligraphic inscription (likely a Qur’anic verse) at the top, with another framed portrait or significant scene just below it. Around these central frames, smaller passport-sized photographs have been symmetrically arranged, often unframed and pinned directly to the wall, resembling an album unfolded into the domestic space. These absent family members visually return through pinned photographs, embodying what might be described as a “presence of absence”[3], long before the term was theorized. Such passport-sized photographs were not only popular for their affordability and easy circulation, but also carried a bureaucratic function in the late Ottoman and early Republican period—serving as standardized images required for identification documents, permits, and state records. Their reuse in the domestic sphere reflects how official, bureaucratic images were recontextualized into intimate family narratives. The symmetry is reinforced by the inclusion of Turkish flags, signaling not only family pride but also an explicit reference to national identity. This arrangement reveals the family’s desire to represent not only their present members but also their roots, ancestors, and absent loved ones as part of the photographic moment. Thus, the frame extends beyond the five individuals present, visually incorporating a broader genealogy and the sense of belonging simultaneously enacted. It can be read as a reflection of the reconfigured family ideology during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. As traditional elements (the elderly women’s clothing, the religious inscription) coexist with modern symbols (the young men’s suits and ties, national emblems, and a cat), bringing together continuity and transformation within the same frame.
So, I can say that this study began with a curiosity about how photographs function as material objects within the domestic sphere and how they operate through intimate, family-based interactions. Yet this curiosity soon extended beyond the micro-scale of individual or familial acts of remembrance. As the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic reshaped both ideology and kinship structures, photographs such as these mediated the tensions between continuity and rupture, loss and renewal. They made visible what might be described as a paradoxical state: the holding on to genealogical and spiritual pasts while embracing the new ideals of modern citizenship. In this sense, domestic photographs and memory corners exemplify not only private acts of mourning or remembrance, but also the visual negotiations through which families positioned themselves within the broader project of national transformation.
From Individual to Collective Mourning in Domestic Spaces
Since the 1990s, contemporary mourning theories have increasingly challenged the traditional Freudian notion that grieving requires detachment from the dead. Instead, they emphasize the mourner’s capacity to sustain bonds with the deceased through what has been termed continuing bonds[4]. From this perspective, death does not terminate social participation but reconfigures it, allowing the deceased to remain socially present through narratives, rituals, and commemorative practices[5]. Walter’s (1996) influential ‘biographical model’[6] articulates this by suggesting that grief is a process of constructing durable biographies, whereby the memory of the dead becomes integrated into the ongoing life of the living which is achieved through conversation with others who knew the deceased.
Photography plays a central role in this process. As Hallam, Hockey, and Howard[7] observe, photographs preserve the physical features of the deceased and provide them with a visible presence within domestic spaces. Whether displayed in albums, framed on walls, or incorporated into memory corners, these images enable the bereaved to weave the memory of the dead into everyday life. In this sense, photographs function simultaneously as material objects and mnemonic devices, embodying absence while sustaining presence.
Yet mourning cannot be confined to the private domain. As Durkheim[8] classically argued, rituals of mourning reaffirm the collective and reweave the social fabric. Judith Butler[9] similarly emphasizes the political dimensions of grief, questioning whose lives are recognized as grievable. In this context, Marianne Sturken’s[10] concept of tangled memoriesis particularly useful: memory practices often intertwine individual loss with collective histories, blurring the boundaries between private mourning and public commemoration. As Yael Navaro[11] also argues, memory can never be entirely disentangled from political conditions; instead, it emerges as a dynamic and often ambivalent negotiation between loss and continuity. Building on these perspectives, I consider domestic photographs and memory corners in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkey as sites where these dual registers of mourning—intimate and collective—intersect. On the one hand, such photographs provided families with material anchors for continuing bonds with their dead; on the other hand, their spatial positioning within the home and their visual entanglement with national symbols, religious texts, or portraits of ancestors placed them within broader narratives of collective belonging. The images I focus on appear not only in their original form but also as modified, annotated, or otherwise altered objects—inscribed with dates, dedications, poems, or symbolic marks that weave personal narratives into the photographic surface. In this way, photographs mediated both the micro-politics of family intimacy and the macro-politics of national transformation, embodying what might be described as visual articulations of continuity and change.
As Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem[12] note in Camera Ottomana, the social life of photography can be traced through the ways images are stored, displayed, and circulated—from medallions and family albums to desktops and workplace walls. Following this track, I examine how such practices evolved in the Ottoman and early Republican context, shaped by religious sensibilities, domestic spatial arrangements, and technological change. It highlights how these factors produced distinctive modes of visual commemoration, expanding the understanding of photography’s role beyond its European-centered histories. As Christopher Pinney[13] has argued, much of the critical literature on photography assumes that the ontology of visual representation derived from the Western experience applies universally, often overlooking non-Western traditions. By situating the analysis within a mostly Muslim society, this research offers an alternative lens on how photographs were integrated into daily life, challenging the Eurocentric canon. In doing so, it extends existing contemporary mourning theory into a non-Western context and contributes to discussions of how photographs, as both images and objects, participate in the making of family history in the material world.
Empirically, the study draws on materials located through in-person visits, official and unofficial (such as flea and antique markets) archive research, university collections and online searches, bringing to light previously unexamined sources[14]and contributing new data to the history of vernacular photography in Turkey. Analyzing photographs alongside related ephemera I recovered a repertoire of everyday strategies for integrating images into domestic life. Such practices, often absent from official histories, reveal how photography functioned as a medium of familial continuity, bridging temporal and spatial distances, and anchoring personal histories in the home. The material collection process took place between November 2024 and September 2025.[15]
Historical Background and Context
Photographs, once integral everyday objects within domestic interiors, have largely been displaced by digital images—an evolution that fundamentally alters Roland Barthes's[16] notion of the photograph’s indexicality or the “that-has-been”.[17] Their material presence -inscriptions, handwritten dedications, symbolic markings—rendered them deeply personal and multi-layered communicative objects[18]. In the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, the significance of photography extended beyond representation to embodied social rituals.
Figure 2:
Mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture designed to display photographs, exemplifying how late Ottoman interiors materially integrated images into everyday life
(Photo Albums of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842–1918), Istanbul University Rare Book Collection
Within elite interiors, their significance can be traced through specially commissioned furniture designed to accommodate and display images—such as the mother-of-pearl inlaid and latticed wooden set produced by Musa Karvani and Partners in Damascus in the style of the Sanayi-i Nefise-i Şarkiye during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842–1918), preserved in the Yıldız Albums collection. This set (Figure 2) visually exemplifies how photography was materially embedded into domestic life: the inlaid surfaces and framed niches were not merely decorative but specifically designed to integrate and elevate photographs as central elements of the interior. In this sense, the furniture itself functioned as a material extension of the family album, turning the act of photographic display into a permanent architectural feature of the household.
At the same time, the introduction of photography intersected with Islamic discourses on the permissibility of figurative representation. As Aytemiz[19] and Ottoman art historiography argue, prevailing aniconic tendencies favored calligraphy and abstraction, making portraiture within elite and private domains—such as dynastic photography—exceptional[20]. The cautious public stance towards photography is exemplified by Basiretçi Ali Efendi's criticism of displaying photographs of Muslim women in 1871, which highlighted tensions between the private and public visibility of images[21]. Basiretçi Ali Efendi, editor of the Basiret newspaper, who in 1871 voiced his disapproval of the “shameless display of photographs of Muslim women” in the shop windows of photography studios on Pera Avenue in Istanbul’s European district. Eldem interprets Ali Efendi’s remarks as revealing the tension between the intimate, private nature of the photographic portrait and its public exhibition, especially in relation to Muslim women. His concerns were deeply rooted in the Islamic notion of mahrem—intimacy or privacy.
Figure 3:
A bride posing within a domestic interior, framed by a portrait of an ancestor in a mother-of-pearl frame. The scene illustrates the migration of Ottoman Palace display practices into homes by the early 20th century.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
Advances in photographic printing techniques and the proliferation of urban studios in the late 19th and early 20th centuries democratized photography in middle-class homes[22]. Formats that invited personalization—postcards with space for inscriptions, decorative miniature portraits—fostered practices such as exchanging photographs as gifts or used as intention for celebration of important days (See Figure 6), curating household memory corners, and display strategies shaped by Islamic spatial norms, where portraits were often placed high on walls near sacred inscriptions or textiles (See in Figure 8). In figure 3 we see a young woman in a bridal gown, most likely posing for the occasion of a wedding. Behind her, the portrait of a man in a mother-of-pearl inlaid frame—most likely a family elder, the father, or a deceased relative—has been placed as the focal point of the space. This suggests that mother-of-pearl inlaid frames, once typically commissioned and used among Ottoman elites, had by the early twentieth century entered into the interiors of the middle classes as well.
These entwined contexts—of photography’s embedded materiality, Islamic spatial and representational norms, elite adoption, and middle-class domestic practices—were also deeply shaped by the ideological project of the early Turkish Republic. As Özge Baykan Calafato[23] demonstrates in Making the Modern Turkish Citizen, vernacular photographs from the 1920s and 1930s were more than markers of family memory; they were instruments through which urban middle-class individuals visually performed the modern citizen. These images served dual functions: they preserved familial identity within the private sphere while simultaneously projecting alignment with Kemalist ideals[24] of nationalism, secularism, and modernity. In this sense, family portraits not only documented kinship but also staged modern citizenship, embodying the paradoxical continuity of tradition and rupture with the Ottoman past.
Figure 4-5:
Republican officers framed by portraits of Atatürk and nationalist iconography. Domestic strategies of display reappear in public offices, sacralizing the secular.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
The two photographs of military officers seated at their desks, each framed by visual symbols of the Republic, exemplify this process in the realm of public space. In the first image (Figure 4), the officer’s presence is staged beneath a prominently displayed portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and a framed collection of military ranks, visually affirming his allegiance to the new order. In the second (Figure 5), the officer is situated beneath a monumental painting of a soldier figure, accompanied by charts, maps, and a bust on the desk—objects that collectively transform the office into a visual performance of authority, discipline, and national loyalty. In both images, Atatürk’s elevated position within the visual field echoes Islamic spatial traditions in which sacred inscriptions are placed high on the wall, signaling reverence. In this spatial arrangement, the elevated positioning of Atatürk’s portrait produces what might be described as the sacralization of the secular, reconfiguring older spatial codes into a new political iconography. Taken together, these photographs highlight how the private display practices of earlier periods—such as arranging portraits and symbolic objects in a memory corner—were echoed in public and institutional settings, now charged with the task of materializing national identity. They also reveal the continuities between domestic and official spaces: just as families curated walls with ancestral portraits, state offices curated their interiors with images of leaders and military hierarchies.
This analysis underscores how photography mediated both personal memory and collective ideology, bridging domestic intimacy and national belonging. Yet the role of photographs was not confined to public or institutional contexts. As the following section will show, within private interiors photographs were assembled into intimate memory corners, where they sustained family bonds, preserved the presence of absent loved ones, and inscribed individual lives into broader narratives of continuity and change.
Unfolding Memory Corners: Family Photographs between Intimacy and Ideology
Figure 6:
The Or family Bayram card, front and back side (1939, Izmir). Atatürk’s portrait appears as a family elder, while a typewritten greeting transforms the photograph into a secularized holiday card.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
This 1939 family portrait, taken in Izmir, presents a carefully staged composition prepared for the occasion of the Ramadan holiday—referred to here in its secularized form as Şeker Bayramı (Sugar Feast). The handwritten-looking but actually meticulously inscribed white letters across the top of the photograph read: “These are the Or family offering you sweets / They wish you a happy Sugar Feast.” This added text with a rhyme, transforms the image from a simple family record into a greeting card, meant for circulation beyond the domestic sphere.
The arrangement of the scene is deliberate: in the foreground stand the parents and two daughters, each holding bowls and baskets of sweets to be offered; in the background, a table is adorned with a portrait of Atatürk. Here, Atatürk is positioned almost as a family elder, inserted into the domestic space and made part of the celebration itself. By inserting Atatürk into the ritual of Bayram, the family both acknowledged the absence of the empire’s old religious codes and created new genealogies of belonging under the Republic. This act can be read as a negotiation of absence and presence: the absent Ottoman order replaced by the presence of a national father figure.
Archival research also revealed how such negotiations were inscribed on the reverse side of photographs. Many examples I encountered bore handwritten Ottoman Turkish notes in Arabic script, (like in Figure 10) while others used the newly adopted Latin alphabet. This duality is striking: on the one hand, ephemeral inscriptions preserve the traces of an empire and language in disappearance; on the other, typed notes or mechanically inscribed dedications, like the Or family’s Bayram greeting prepared with a typewriter, seem to deliberately embrace modernity Figure 6. The typewritten message (the names of the family members—Vahide Or, Nazan Or, Belma Or, and Müeyyet Or—are typed) contrasts sharply with the smudged and intimate handwritings that cover the back of so many photographs, as if seeking to forget the past and proclaim a new order. Yet the coexistence of both alphabets within the same corpus underscores the contradictions of the era, where memory and forgetting, absence and presence, were literally written onto the material surface of the photograph. Interestingly, this very Or family card, despite its carefully typed format, contains a small glitch on the front side: a spelling error in which the greeting reads 'kutlular' instead of 'kutlar.' This conspicuous mistake disrupts the otherwise polished modern presentation, drawing attention to the human fragility of inscription and adding another paradoxical layer to the memory object. One can say that, modernity’s fractures become legible in such glitches.
This composition operates on multiple levels of meaning. First, the religious dimension of the holiday—traditionally celebrated as Ramazan Bayramı—is reframed through the secular vocabulary of the Republic as Şeker Bayramı. Thus, an Islamic ritual is linguistically and visually embedded into the Kemalist secular order. Second, the family’s use of the photograph as a greeting card highlights the hybrid nature of the practice: it bridges a modern visual medium (a modified, text-bearing photograph prepared for wider circulation) with a long-standing cultural ritual (the offering of sweets to visitors). The sweets held by the children do more than symbolize the holiday; they evoke the sensory memory of taste and the warmth of holiday visits, making the image itself a carrier of affective and tactile experience.
In this sense, the photograph is more than a family memento: it is also a visual performance of secular citizenship. By including Atatürk’s portrait as if he were a family member, by adopting the language of Şeker Bayramı instead of Ramazan Bayramı, and by turning the image into a reproducible holiday card, the Or family staged themselves as modern Republican citizens while simultaneously preserving the traces of inherited traditions. The photograph thus exemplifies how familial memory and national ideology became intertwined within the intimate setting of the home.
Figure 7:
A parliamentarian seated before a dense domestic memory corner, where family photographs, postcards, and Atatürk’s portrait weave intimacy with nationhood.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
This photograph presents not only the formal portrait of a man—identified as a parliamentarian—but also the intimate yet carefully arranged visual presence of family memory. Behind him, a niche (on the left) has been transformed into a domestic memory corner where photographs, postcards, and objects are densely layered. At the center, a wedding portrait of the couple in their bridal and groom’s attire anchors the display, surrounded by smaller family images and decorative frames. Postcards at the bottom with bird illustrations and inscribed letters expand the display beyond the family, weaving personal memory with everyday ephemera. A draped textile, possibly silk, covers an object—perhaps a silver mirror—adding another tactile layer of memory and concealment. The carpet (on the right side) on the wall functions as a secondary frame, embedding the photographs within a traditional domestic object while simultaneously elevating them into a form of visual reverence.
Placed above all these intimate images, however, is a portrait of Atatürk, positioned at the highest point on the left. Its prominence suggests that national belonging and the reverence for the Republic’s founding figure were integral to the visual ordering of private space. Although the man appears alone in the foreground, he is visually accompanied by the “shadow” of the family album and the national icon above him. The carpet as backdrop and Atatürk’s elevated portrait above the corner articulate continuity and rupture: while traditional domestic objects anchor the family’s past, the republican iconography reframes the absent Ottoman authority into a secular-national presence. The portrait thus exceeds the function of an individual likeness: it materializes the interplay between personal identity, collective family memory, and the overarching framework of national ideology.
Posing in Front of the Carpet and Frames
Figure 8:
Family portrait in front of a pictorial carpet depicting an urban coastal scene with - palm-lined promenade.
On the backside, it reads: Ankara 1942.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
Carpets and kilims in Ottoman and Anatolian domestic culture were not merely functional floor coverings, but also visual elements that endowed interiors with identity and status. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, the display of carpets on walls was both an aesthetic choice and a means of representing cultural memory within the home. The central motifs, rich colour palettes, and technical mastery seen in Ottoman-period kilims and carpets played a crucial role in anchoring these objects in architectural and social memory. These practices can also be read through Tim Ingold’s concept of task-scape, for carpets are not simply objects placed within a space but living sites of memory created through acts of weaving, placing, maintaining, displaying, and showing. As Ingold[25] notes, a task-scape is to be understood not merely as a physical location, but as “an array of related activities” - the totality of daily practices, functions, and social interactions that take place there (Ingold, 1993). In this sense, the carpet becomes part of a “landscape of tasks” that is both physical and symbolic.[26]
In this (Figure 8) 1942 family portrait taken in Ankara, a touristic pictorial carpet is seen hanging on the wall in the background. The carpet depicts a coastal promenade lined with palm trees, with a seaside road suggesting the city of İzmir, and at its centre, one might suggest that there is the slender silhouette of the İzmir Clock Tower - built in 1901 in Konak Square to mark the 25th anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s accession to the throne. The adjacent building may be Konak Pier (1867) or the symbolic Yalı (Konak) mosque. This stylized shoreline might be read as İzmir, and can be said that it represents one of the symbolic urban landmarks of İzmir’s modernisation. Such woven depictions of local cityscapes became popular in the mid-20th century both as tourist souvenirs and as elements of interior decoration, embedding the visual memory of a place into the home and creating a symbolic link to a city that was physically absent.
The fact that the photograph was taken in Ankara in 1942 adds further layers of meaning to this decorative element. Displaying an image of İzmir within the domestic interior functions as a symbolic connection to a place physically distant from the family. In doing so, the family not only sustained a nostalgic sense of belonging but also, quite possibly, expressed a visual assertion of their ties to their place of origin. The carpet, therefore, can be read not only as an aesthetic backdrop but as a bridge to the past, maybe to the homeland, or to personal memory.
Accompanying this spatial representation is another visual layer: portraits of family elders hung above the carpet, at the corner where two walls meet. These portraits are placed not at eye level but at the very top of the wall, above head height - a visual realization of the Turkish saying “her zaman başımın üzerinde yeri var” (they always have a place above my head). This placement parallels the tradition of hanging sacred texts or hilye-i şerif calligraphic panels high on the wall, encoding respect and moral value for the family elders through spatial positioning.
The large portrait of an elder with a fez, meanwhile, recalls a world already outlawed by the Hat Law of 1925, preserved visually even as it disappeared socially. Beneath this portrait frame, small, cut-down or passport-size photographs of family members have been inserted, creating an intergenerational unity within a single frame[27]. This arrangement mirrors the act of gathering for a group portrait, transforming a transient moment before the camera into a permanent spatial composition. The symbolic grouping of images within the frame and the actual physical gathering of family members before the camera seem to echo one another.
While all family members in the portrait face the camera, the central woman (likely the grandmother) turns her gaze outside the frame. This outward gaze appears to signal toward absence, as if thinking of those not present, shifting the meaning of the photograph from a statement of “presence” to an evocation of “felt absence.” The presence of the dog, an uncommon element in family portraits of the era, underscores pet ownership and a modern lifestyle. The attire of the family members reflects the early Republican ideals of modernisation: formal uniforms, tailored skirt-and-jacket sets, and neatly styled hair, reinforcing both individual identity and the new national narrative. This photograph reveals how space was constructed both physically and symbolically, and how family memory and a sense of belonging were built through objects, portraits, and representational spatial elements. The İzmir Clock Tower carpet, the portraits of family elders hung high on the wall, the small photographs inserted into the larger frame, and the inclusion of the dog together transform the interior into a living corner of memory.
Figure 9:
The Multi-Layered Memory of Carpets and Postpartum Photography.
On the backside, it reads: "Siirt 30.01.1935, In memory of the birth of my son Mete (Oğlum Mete’nin doğum hatırası. B. Büyükkesen)" (Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
In this example Figure 9, the domestic interior is notable for both its visual richness and the symbolic layers it contains. The scene, with a postpartum mother and her newborn positioned at the head of the bed, presents a classicized iconography. The photograph grants us access to one of the most private areas of the home: the bedroom. Normally reserved for the immediate family, this space temporarily takes on a more public function following the arrival of a child. For forty days, the mother is not left alone, visitors are received, and in some cases, mevlid recitations are performed -all of which turn this most intimate part of the house into a stage for social and familial rituals.
As Calafato has observed, postpartum mother-and-baby photographs were not merely private keepsakes commemorating the moment of birth; they were also staged scenes in which the family structure was visually constructed[28]. Often taken in carefully arranged interiors, with selected curtains, bedspreads, and pillows chosen to project an atmosphere of dignity, health, and prosperity, these images also reveal - and this is the focus of the present study - the layered memory of domestic space. In the background of this photograph, two distinct carpets can be seen: to the left, a figurative tapestry in the Western gobelin style depicting a pastoral scene with a dog, a woman, and a man in a rural setting; to the right, an Anatolian kilim with a central medallion motif and geometric borders, clearly of local production. This juxtaposition encapsulates the cultural hybridity of the period: a Western-imported romantic rural ideal coexisting with a traditional weaving aesthetic within the same bedroom. On the far right, a board is pinned with postcards and portrait photographs - a clear example of a “memory corner” arrangement. Here, images of previous generations visually coexist with the newborn and mother within the same pictorial field.
Such arrangements do more than frame the mother and child; they visually reference family elders and past generations. In some cases, the framed portraits may depict deceased relatives; in others, they might display the couple’s wedding photograph or other significant family images. Regardless of their original purpose, their presence in the frame - whether intentionally staged or simply part of the room’s pre-existing arrangement- brings the moment of birth into visual dialogue with the symbols of the family’s and individual’s past.
Conclusion
Figure 10:
A couple with a photo album (dated 1331/1915), staging remembrance through the act of looking at an album. Ottoman script on the reverse anchors the image in a soon-to-vanish linguistic world.
(Private collection of Pelin Aytemiz)
This study has traced the material and spatial life of photographs within domestic interiors, highlighting how images were not only preserved but displayed, adapted, and woven into familial spaces of memory. By situating memory corners at the intersection of intimacy and ideology, the analysis has shown that such practices were never merely decorative arrangements. Rather, they constituted a visual language through which families navigated the seismic shifts of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods. The transition from empire to republic was marked by profound ruptures: the disappearance of the Ottoman political order, the replacement of the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet (1928), the Hat Law (1925) and reforms in clothing, the Civil Code (1926), and the secularization of law and education. While these reforms, as Zürcher[29] notes, aimed to construct a modern, secular, and national identity, they also engendered cultural loss, leaving ordinary families to negotiate the absence of familiar practices in their everyday lives. In this sense, domestic photographs and memory corners I observe might act as quiet responses to reform, absorbing rupture into continuity by sustaining bonds with both deceased relatives and displaced cultural worlds.
What emerges in these images is a paradoxical dynamic of presence and absence. In some instances, this visual ordering even amounted to what might be called the sacralization of the secular, as portraits of Atatürk assumed the elevated spatial positions once reserved for sacred inscriptions, transforming older codes of reverence into the iconography of the nation-state. Following Mikkel Bille, the “presence of absence”[30] marks not only the lost bodies of family elders but also the vanished empire, discarded scripts, and outlawed garments that continued to cast their shadow on the new republic.
The act of displaying photographs alongside Qur’anic inscriptions, Turkish flags, or portraits of Atatürk exemplifies how absence was transformed into visual presence, binding the memory of what was lost into the fabric of the living household. In some instances, this meant creating “continuing bonds”[31] with the past; in others, it meant rewriting genealogies of belonging within the framework of republican modernity.
Memory corners thus illuminate how mourning, even when unacknowledged, can operate at the heart of historical transformation. I feel that they allowed families to cope with cultural rupture by embedding absence into presence, preserving continuity while accommodating change. Positioned between the intimacy of domestic life and the demands of nationhood, these small household displays reveal how ordinary practices of remembrance participated in the larger work of negotiating modernity.
In this regard, one final photograph In Figure 10 extends the discussion beyond memory corners. A couple sits together at a table, an open photo album in their hands, staging themselves in the act of remembering. The image is dated 1331, (1915) written in Turkish but using Arabic script, just before the transition to the Latin alphabet. Behind them, a framed photograph of what seems to be a religious figure -perhaps an imam- quietly anchors the scene in a spiritual genealogy. Unlike the memory corners displayed on walls, here remembrance is embodied in the gesture of looking back at the album, while simultaneously posing for the camera to be remembered in turn. The handwritten Ottoman note on the reverse literalizes this tension: the past is recalled in a language and script soon to be abandoned, even as the couple projects themselves forward as modern subjects. The photograph thus exemplifies how remembrance and anticipation, absence and presence, rupture and continuity, converge in intimate acts of photographic self-fashioning
Ultimately, they remind us that the history of photography is not only about technological progress or visual representation, but also about the fragile ways in which people live through loss—whether of loved ones, of empires, or of entire worlds of meaning. Like the Or family’s Bayram card with its unintended glitch—‘kutlular’ instead of ‘kutlar’—modernity itself was marked by small fractures. Such errors remind us that rupture and continuity, absence and presence, progress and imperfection, always coexisted within the material traces of everyday life, and remind us that the history of photography, like modernity itself, is always lived through fractures.
This research was supported by the Eidolon Grant 2024 programme of Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography.
[1] Annette Kuhn. Family secrets: Acts of memory and imagination (2nd ed.). (Verso 2002) 17-18.
[2] Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 9-13.
[3] Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Sørensen, eds., An Anthropology of Absence: Materialization of Transcendence and Loss (New York: Springer, 2010).
[4] Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (New York: Routledge, 1996)
Thomas Attig, The Heart of Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[5] Jenny Hockey and Janet Draper, “Beyond the womb and the tomb: Identity, (dis)embodiment and the life course,” Body & Society 11, no. 2 (2005): 41–57.
Robert A. Neimeyer, Scott A. Baldwin, and James Gillies, “Continuing bonds and reconstructing meaning: Mitigating complications in bereavement,” Death Studies 30, no. 8 (2006): 715–738, https://doi.org/10.1080/07481180600848322.
[6] Tony Walter, “A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography,” Mortality 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–25.
[7] Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, and Glennys Howarth, Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p.35.
[8] Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995; orig. pub. 1912).
[9] Judith Butler, “Violence, mourning, politics,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 1 (2003): 9–37
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
[10] Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
[11] Yael Navaro, “Diversifying death,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 566–573, https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/ca32.2.05/151, p.5.
[12] Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem, “Introduction,” in Camera Ottomana: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda fotoğraf ve modernite 1840–1914, ed. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015), 13.
[13] Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography’s Other Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
[14] In addition to the author’s private collection, photographs were found in official archives such as the Koç University Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center (VEKAM) and the Turkish Historical Society Archive in Ankara, the Milli Saraylar Başkanlığı Archive, and the Salt Galata Archive in Istanbul. Online searches included institutional collections such as the Istanbul University Rare Books Library, Yıldız Palace Collection (https://kutuphane.istanbul.edu.tr), the İzmir City Archive and Museum – APIKAM (https://www.apikam.org.tr) and the Akkasah Photography Archive, Özge Calafato Collection (https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/akkasah/ad_mc_007/). Informal sources were equally important, with field visits to antique shops and flea markets including the Ankara Ayrancı Flea Market, Samanpazarı Antique Bazaar, Ankara; Feriköy Flea Market and Kadıköy Antique Market in Istanbul, Bornova and Şirinyer Flea Market and the Kemeraltı Antique Bazaar in İzmir. The search also extended to online marketplaces such as Kitantik (https://www.kitantik.com), Nadirkitap (https://www.nadirkitap.com), Fotokart (https://www.fotokart.com), and Sahibinden (https://www.sahibinden.com) as well as auction platforms like Antikalar.com(https://www.antikalar.com) and Müzayede.com (https://www.muzayede.com) (also available as a mobile app). By aggregating sellers from across Turkey, these online platforms significantly expanded the geographical and thematic scope of the research, enabling access to a wider and more diverse range of vernacular photographic materials.
[15] One of the main challenges encountered during the archival and field searches was the absence of thematic cataloguing related to the research focus. Since the subject concerned the use of photographs in private domestic interiors, identifying relevant material required scanning images for specific visual cues. This meant closely examining interior photographs for details such as framed pictures hanging on walls, the presence of photographs as objects within the space, or any interaction between sitters and displayed images. Such characteristics were rarely indexed in archival systems, making the process reliant on visual inspection rather than keyword searches. At certain points, I shared a detailed brief of my research focus with existing contacts among ephemera dealers, asking them to search their own archives with these criteria in mind. This collaborative exchange proved instrumental in locating relevant material, underscoring how the research process unfolded not only in formal repositories but also through personal networks and ongoing dialogues with those embedded in the trade of historical photographs.
[16] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 2000; orig. pub. 1981).
[17] In the present moment, the emergence of generative AI introduces yet another epistemological rupture: images can now be produced from text prompts without any referent before the camera, fundamentally challenging photography’s indexical bond to what Barthes (1980) called the that-has-been. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to how such technologies destabilize long-standing assumptions about photographic truth, authenticity, and visual evidence (Ritchin, 2023; Paglen, 2023). While these debates exceed the scope of this article, they nonetheless underscore the urgency of rethinking the ontology of the image in the age of algorithmic vision. Trevor Paglen, “Invisible images (Your pictures are looking at you),” The New Inquiry (2016). Fred Ritchin, “The synthetic eye: Photography transformed in the age of AI,” Photobook Journal (2023).
[18] Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, “Introduction: Photographs as objects,” in Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images,ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004), 1–16. Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs as objects of memory,” in Material Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 221–236.
[19] Pelin Aytemiz Karslı, “Visual narratives of Islamic funeral practices in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic,” Visual Anthropology, February 4, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.2024.2409592.
[20] Schimmel, qtd. in Göran Larsson, Muslims and the New Media: Historical and Contemporary Debates (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Charles Le Gai Eaton, Islam and the Destiny of Man (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985)
John Esposito, What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bahattin Öztuncay, “The origins and development of photography in Istanbul,” in Camera Ottomana: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda fotoğraf ve modernite 1840–1914, ed. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015), 66–105.
Bahattin Öztuncay, Hanedan ve Kamera: Osmanlı Sarayından Portreler / Dynasty and Camera: Portraits from the Ottoman Court (Istanbul: Aygaz [Koç] Publishing, 2011).
[21] Edhem Eldem, “Powerful images: The dissemination and impact of photography in the Ottoman Empire, 1870–1914,” in Camera Ottomana: Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda fotoğraf ve modernite 1840–1914, ed. Zeynep Çelik and Edhem Eldem (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2015), 108–110.
[22] Filiz Işık, 19. Yüzyıl’da kartpostallarda Osmanlı toplumu: Max Fruchtermann kartpostalları (Unpublished master’s thesis, Gazi Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 2008).
[23] Özge Calafato Baykan, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022).
[24] Kemalism refers to the founding ideology of the Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, emphasizing secularism, nationalism, modernization, and Westernization through wide-ranging political, social, and cultural reforms.
[25] Tim Ingold, “The temporality of the landscape,” World Archaeology 25, no. 2 (1993): 152–174, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235.
[26] Marika Sardar, “Carpets from the Islamic world, 1600–1800,” in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/crpt/hd_crpt.htm.
[27] For a more detailed discussion of this practice of assembling passport-sized portraits into framed family images, see the author’s “Making Grandfather Come Out Better: Portraits of Ancestors and Digital Manipulation in Contemporary Turkey,” There, Aytemiz explores how digital artists and families in 2010’s Turkey use retouching and montage to reunite deceased ancestors with the living, creating composite portraits that transcend real time and space, and turning family photographs into icons of continuity and presence.
Pelin Aytemiz Karslı, “Making grandfather come out better: Portraits of ancestors and digital manipulation in contemporary Turkey,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8, no. 2 (2015): 355–373, https://doi.org/10.1163/18739865-00802010.
[28] Özge Calafato Baykan, Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (London: I.B. Tauris, 2022), 121-125.
[29] Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, 3rd ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
[30] Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Sørensen, eds., An Anthropology of Absence: Materialization of Transcendence and Loss (New York: Springer, 2010).
[31] Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman, eds., Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (New York: Routledge, 1996).
