"Woman in Life" 1975
"The next morning, after breakfast, we set off on foot. We had our way until evening. Mustafa had a transistor radio in one hand to keep me busy, and a thick stick in the other. With him, he protected us from dogs several times. There was a radio but the folk songs were in Kurdish. He would summarize what the lyrics were saying to me when the song was over. When we were hungry in between, he would cut the thick-stemmed herbs, peel them off and offer them. We ate instead of for cucumber. We came across a small hut in a valley with caves on steep slopes. A husband and wife lived in a dark one-room house. This was a good opportunity for me. I took a portrait photo with a high-speed film with my medium format camera, with the man in the front and the woman in the back. I chose an open aperture to make the portrait of the woman blurry behind the clear male image. This photo would win first prize at a national competition at the end of the month." Agri, July.1975
"Easter Ceremony of Christian Arabs" 2013
"Antakya (ancient Antioch) holds a special place in the history of Christianity and remains one of the cities where different religious traditions have continued to live side by side. The Christian Arab community in the center of Antakya is a small but deeply rooted part of this cultural landscape. Members of the community conduct their worship and religious rituals in Arabic, and the Bible is also read in Arabic during the services. Easter comes at the end of the fifty-day Lent and is celebrated not only as one of the most important days of the Christian calendar, but also as a moment when families and generations come together around a shared tradition. During my photographic work I was particularly interested in the way the ceremony brought together faith, language, memory and everyday life. The prayers, gestures, encounters and faces inside the church revealed a living tradition that had been carried from one generation to the next. Rather than photographing only the formal stages of the ritual, I tried to follow the human atmosphere surrounding the celebration and the relationship between the community and its church." Antakya, April.2012
