Curated by İdil Çetin and Ahmet Ersoy, the exhibition approaches the social diversity and visual memory of the period from different perspectives with images selected from the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection and Press Photos Archive, consisting of more than 90 thousand negatives.
Spanning the 1920s to the early 1950s, the exhibition looks at the Istanbul of the period from an unusual perspective. The selection makes visible the daily life of people on the street, the rhythm and spaces of the city, the social and political events of the period, and even scenes that have never made it into the newspaper pages.
"The exhibition focuses on a group that we can date between the 1920s and the 1950s."
Speaking at the opening meeting of the exhibition held at Pera Museum, Gülru Tanman, director of the Istanbul Research Institute, stated that the press photographs archive is the most crowded and complex group of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection and said, "It consists of more than 90 thousand glass and acetate negatives. Roughly starting from the 1910s and extending to the early 1970s. However, the exhibition shows that of this huge group of 90 thousand, 20 thousand are dated between the 1920s and 1950s." "It focuses on one group." he said.
Tanman informed that the press archive was taken by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation in 2011 and continued as follows:
"After a restoration and digitization process of about two years, the archive started to be used in 2013. However, when it started to be used, we realized that the archive is a very complex, messy archive with origin problems. Therefore, although we have been using the archive for about 15 years, we could not answer a lot of questions. I can say that the exhibition enabled us to focus specifically on the archive and find answers to a lot of questions we did not know. Of course, there are still many questions we cannot answer. However, it is a part of the personal archive of Selahattin Giz, one of the early press photographers of the archive. "We were sure that it was a personal archive as well as a professional one. We guessed this from the family photographs we came across from time to time. At the same time, most of it consists of photographs of Giz's master, Namık Görgüç, and photographs of other photojournalists who were his contemporaries."
"The collection is an archive compiled by Selahattin Giz for himself"
İdil Çetin, one of the curators of the exhibition, talked about the Selahattin Giz collection, which has been known for many years in Yapı Kredi Historical Archive, and said, "We generally tend to perceive this collection as the photographs taken by Giz himself. However, it should be underlined that this is not an archive containing only Giz's own photographs. Giz was born in 1914. Therefore, we know that there are negatives of press photographs taken long before he started photography. He also collected the negatives of photojournalists of the period, especially those working in Istanbul, among them. "We know that the photographs of his teacher Namık Görgüç, with whom he worked at the Cumhuriyet newspaper, occupy a large place in this total. Therefore, the collection is an archive compiled by Selahattin Giz for himself." he said.
Çetin stated that they were very impressed and surprised by what the photographs in the collection showed for the first time and said:
"While we were looking at these photographs, we came across photographs one after another that did not fit into the visual repertoires identified with the early republican period. For example, it was very exciting for us to encounter a whole range of examples that have not been conveyed until today, from urban problems in Istanbul to various forms of entertainment in the city, from eerie teeming streets to the nature of the city and the animals that share urban life with humans. When we decided to start this exhibition, our first assumption was that the photographs had not been published in their own period. Therefore, we were saying that photo journalists were exposed to these scenes during their daily work. "They made pictures as they came across them, but I guess they didn't publish them at that time either."
Stating that they designed the exhibition based on the problems of the city, the daily life of the people and the entertainment forms of the period gaining visibility in the press, Çetin stated that they divided the archive into political, city, judicial and entertainment news, preserving the four-page newspaper structure of the period, and in this way, they aimed to bring together different aspects of the pluralistic life of the period.
"It enabled us to stay away from very monolithic, very established narratives about the early republic."
Curator Ahmet Ersoy stated that they, as the curatorial team, aimed to stay in the background in the exhibition and to bring such an archive to the fore, and said, "We tried to reflect a little bit the patterns in which we are embedded in a thousand-odd photographs. The archive we encounter here is the daily, raw outputs of the practice of photojournalism, or even the daily waste. We are talking about photographs, most of which were taken on a daily basis and most of which were not used in newspapers. Therefore, one of the most prominent features of this archive is its disorder, unstructured, unintegrated structure. We actually think that this is the archive's nature." "We think it's his greatest blessing." made his assessment.
Stating that they had the chance to approach the very raw, very rough, and in some respects harsh texture of the daily life of the early republican period with the photographs in the exhibition, Ersoy continued his words as follows:
"This situation is very important for us. Because it enabled us to stay away from very monolithic, well-established narratives and some very easy perceptions about the early republic. There are some very dominant ways of remembering about the early republic, there are some very ready-made, established, reductionist patterns that we are all familiar with, and when we look at the complexity of this archive and the texture that touches the people of the republic, it is far outside these patterns, both aesthetically and ideologically..."
A multi-layered visual memory consisting of more than 90 thousand negatives
The "Behind the Scenes of the Republic" exhibition focuses on the visual material that remains behind news production. Behind the news, which turns into a single frame on the newspaper page, there are many images documenting the few seconds before and after the same moment.
By juxtaposing the published photographs with other frames of this flow, the exhibition reveals different details of the events and the photographer's preferences. Interventions such as decoupage, scraping or masking made on the negatives also show the editorial journey of the image to the newspaper page.
The selection, which also includes frames where clarity is distorted, light changes, images overlap, or bear the physical traces of time, brings new visibility to images that fall outside the traditional archive and exhibition criteria in a technical context, while expanding the ideological framework of the period in terms of content.
The exhibition reveals the daily life of early republican Istanbul with scenes from neighborhoods, crowded streets, sports fields, entertainment venues and working life.
Accidents, fires, crime scenes, prisoners, injured people and people waiting in court corridors also reveal the harsh face of the news world of the period. Sometimes the event itself comes to the fore in the photographs, and sometimes the curious crowds gathered around it and looking at the camera stand out.
The shots of family meetings, trips and circle of friends in the archive make visible the transitions between professional photography and private life.
An archive resulting from the joint production of photographers
The selection in the exhibition, designed by Pattu, is prepared from the first group of the Press Photos Archive, consisting of 12 thousand 586 glass and 8 thousand 97 acetate negatives. It is thought that a significant part of this group consists of journalist and photojournalist Namık Görgüç.
Görgüç, who created the photography service of Cumhuriyet newspaper together with Benli Kemal in 1924, when the newspaper was founded, contributed to the development of press photography in Türkiye while recording Istanbul step by step.
It is known that after Görgüç's death in 1947, the archive was preserved and expanded by photographer Selahattin Giz. The collection also includes shots of other photographers of the period, such as Cemal Göral and Faik Şenol.
Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation purchased the archive, which contains 90 thousand 52 negatives, dating from approximately the 1910s to the 1970s, most of which were shot in Istanbul, in 2011. The repair, enveloping, boxing and digitization works of the archive were completed in 2013.
The cataloging process continues to evolve with new information about the people, places and events in the photographs. The exhibition, which is a continuation of IAE's efforts to research, preserve and make accessible the multi-layered memory of Istanbul, brings the 20 years of experience of the Istanbul Research Institute to Pera Museum.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication
The catalog accompanying the exhibition discusses the Press Photograph Archive on the axes of photography history, press culture, archiving and visual memory. Bringing together the contributions of Gülru Tanman, Kerim Suner, Mehmet Erken, Cengiz Kahraman, Geoffrey Batchen, Wolfgang Ernst, Ahmet A. Ersoy, Özge Baykan Calafato, İdil Çetin and Sidar Bayram, the publication expands the topics covered by the exhibition from different perspectives.
"Behind the Scenes of the Republic" can be visited at Pera Museum until March 28, 2027.
Pera Museum can be visited between 10.00-19.00 from Tuesday to Saturday and 12.00-18.00 on Sundays. All visitors can see the museum between 18.00-22.00 on Fridays as part of "Long Friday", and all students can see the museum on Wednesdays as part of "Young Wednesday".
