Berin Gölönü (Rochester Üniversitesi’nde doktora öğrencisi – AB)
25 Ocak 2016 Pazartesi saat 15.00’te IFEA’da
Modernizing Nature/Naturalizing Modernization:
Late Ottoman and Early Turkish Republican Landscape Imagery, 1860-1939
“The Nature of Modernization: Late Ottoman and Turkish Republican landscape imagery” investigates how processes of institutional modernity are reflected in the region’s landscape imagery created between the years 1860-1939, and how these processes contribute to the formation of an Ottoman and Turkish modernism. This research project looks historical accounts that narrate the development and transformation of Ottoman and Turkish provinces and cities, and looks at how these processes are both reflected in and also enhanced by new forms of landscape imagery that emerged at this time, such as photography, painting in the Western mimetic tradition, and the successive development of modernist painting styles during the transition from Empire to Republic. It focuses on the relationship between administrative centers of government and the outlying provinces, making the argument that as capital cities and the countryside came to be more closely intertwined during this period of technological and political modernization, concepts of the city and the country became more starkly defined in contrast to one another.
The first portion of this research looks at how state sponsored photographic documentation of Ottoman rural lands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries served as both a surveillance and publicity tool in the hands of the Ottoman government in efforts to exercise more centralized administrative control over the Ottoman provinces. The second portion examines paintings of Istanbul made by Ottoman painters between the 1860s and 1914 to locate signs of the city’s growth, commercialization, and increasing integration with the provinces through trade and transportation routes. The third portion of this research focuses on the emergence of peasant iconography in Turkish Republican landscape imagery in the 1920s and 1930s and looks at look at how urban intellectuals attempted to represent the provincial periphery. Many of these images not only document a land’s ongoing transformation, but also express a will to transform the land into a more productive and developed vision of the future. In short, they utilize modernist tools and styles in the service of crafting the “modern” urban and provincial landscape on Ottoman and Turkish territories.
Berin Gölönü is a Ph.D. candidate in the Visual and Cultural Studies Graduate Program at the University of Rochester.