Photo Essay on Globalism & Modernization in Turkey

An impressive set of photos, made during an eight-year period and focusing on modern construction, appeared recently in The New York Times' photo-magazine, Lens.

I find Georgiou's photos evocative of landscapes I have seen in Turkey, and sad too. These sorts of helter-skelter projects are not sustainable any more than America's suburban sprawl. I doubt that the next age will be an automotive one.

Without cheap inputs of energy for large buildings or private cars, neither Turkey's nor America's visions of suburban housing will long endure. And the world's oil supply has probably peaked already. Perhaps with solar, wind, and Turkish ingenuity, their nation will succeed while mine stumbles, mired in our own intractable and, finally, self-destructive political and cultural wars.

image: by me, free-trade zone Near Sabancı University, east of Istanbul, 2005.

Seal and Loti: Orientalist Traps?

Was Jeremy Seal chasing the same ghosts as Pierre Loti?

I've been puzzled by this after re-reading A Fez of the Heart with the class. Had Seal, arriving 70 years after the end of fez-wearing, simply repeated Loti's mistake and arrived when "the tulips and tortoises were long gone" (28) from Turkish life?

While I can see the fez as a metaphor that carries a great deal of symbolic weight, it may not even be the most appropriate metaphor to describe the pull between secular and religious, East and West. The bridges across the Bosporus, one looming over the Ortakoy Mosque (shown in an image on our syllabus), capture the tensions in Turkey, even in cosmopolitan Istanbul, for me. They look delicate, but they link continents and histories.

As I've written elsewhere, such tensions produce memorable and interesting art.

Here's a footnote if you plan to visit Istanbul soon. The modern-art museum planned for the fez factory never came to be at that site. There's a story from Bloomberg about what transpired.

Final irony: when looking for information on the Istanbul Modern our group visited in 2005, I found at this site this paid advertisement: "Fezzes by D. Turin: Your number one fez supplier and your fez accessories."

Well, old symbols die hard. It may be Orientalist of me, but now I want a nicely made fez. I do not want the one pictured above, found at D. Turin's site.