I usually take pictures of buildings and landscapes rather than people, but there are by now so many it seems easier to show you some people I've seen. Not actual people, you'll notice: I'm not sure of the ethics of that (since I scrupulously avoid posting pictures of people I care about, it seems only right to extend this care to strangers). It may also be that the aniconic tradition of Islam is affecting me ... though I suspect it's mainly Orhan Pamuk, whose wondrous The Black Book describes a mannequin maker who decides o make mannequins who look like Turks. Stores want nothing to do with them so he keeps them in a basement, and then documenting the disappearing visages of the city becomes an obsession... And Pamuk in turn is surely shaped by the sense it's hard to escape here that people (indeed peoples) come and go but objects and images have ways of surviving...What you've seen: Turkish Doritos hipsters, Constantine's column, dervish trinkets, Gallipoli's Mehmet statue, images from a printer's window in Ayvalik - who knew that Golum was Turkish, though given Tolkien's proclivities it makes a certain sense!, frieze from Ephesus and an Eros from the Selcuk Museum, 12th century fresco and mosaics from two Byzantine churches in the north of Istanbul, mannequins from a part of town where many women are covered except for their eyes, some of the many faces of the inescapable Atatürk, and rental costumes for circumcisions in the Covered Market. There's a story or two begging to be told about each of them...
