In his essay at the end of Olay, photographer Emin Özmen writes about the first traumatic incident that he remembers. It would also set him on the road to document his country. “When I was eight years old, on a warm July day in 1993, I was holding my mother’s and father’s hands as we waited for a bus near the highway. We were heading back to Sivas, the city where I was born and where we were living. It was a beautiful day but the atmosphere was heavy. My parents were tense, their faces closed, sad, and silent. They had just learned that the Madimak Hotel in Sivas had been attacked by a mob of radical Islamists after Friday prayer. On that day, thousands of angry people had set fire to the hotel, slashing the fire hoses of the firemen to prevent them from extinguishing the flames that consumed the lives of thirty-seven people trapped inside, mainly Alevi intellectuals and artists.”
Emin Özmen grew up in Slivas, in central Turkey. It is a high-altitude town surrounded by mountains, where the winters were long and cold. While in high school he joined the basketball team. When the team went to a regional championship, he borrowed his brother’s camera and some 35mm color film. He wanted to record those days, and his memories. It was not something he would put down. He discovered that photography was a tool to go to different places, look at others’ lives, and explore the world around him.
While he went to study Physics, in Samsun, a small city near the Black Sea, his mind was still drawn to photography. “I tried to educate myself by accessing all the photographic resources I could reach there”, he recalls. “It was not enough, and in a few years I decided to break my ties with Physics and go deeper into photography. During those years I met with greek photographer Nikos Economopoulos at a photography festival in Bursa city. Discovering his work, and then other photographers of Magnum had a big influence on me.”
This led him to Istanbul, where he began studying photography at Marmara University. And to be able to have a source of income, he got a full-time job at one of the national newspapers, which also provided him a chance to travel.
However, the media in Turkey have a complicated role. According to Reporters Without Borders, the country ranked 165th out of 180 countries in 2023, the most recent year, for the Press Freedom Index. Currently 90% of the national media is under government control. Censorship, lawsuits against critical media outlets, and attacks on journalists for their work is widespread.
Özmen first encountered this in May of 2013, during the Gezi Park Protests which began with people contesting the urban development of the park. After spending two weeks documenting the scene, his newspaper didn’t publish any of the work, and ignored the movement and people involved. Two months later, he was working in Northern Syria, and when the paper again refused to show his work, he resigned.
“Since that day, when I became a freelancer, I have not worked with any other Turkish media, because they have been silenced one after the other, or are owned by businessmen sympathetic to the government,” says the photographer. “Hundreds of journalists have been imprisoned and foreigners expelled. There is no longer any way of understanding what happened back then.”
Olay is Emin Özmen’s look at what happened in Turkey over the last 10 years. It is a document of a succession of incidents and events from a coup d’état to wars, government crackdowns, political and social unrest, and pain. A timeline in the book chronicles all the major events from 2013 through 2023. It runs for 13 pages, reinforcing just how much has happened in the country.
“Telling it to an outsider is of course important, but my main goal with this book is to talk to the next generations of my country. We Turks have a very bad memory; we forget everything very quickly. Of course, I’m not blaming anyone, because it’s impossible to keep track of everything that happens almost every day. And when I look back, I see that so many important events have taken place over the last 10 years. I tried to record as many of them as possible, because I thought they were important. I wanted these events and these people not to be forgotten so that we can learn from our mistakes and hopefully change them. It’s also an attempt to open up a healthy conversation – with the next generations, I hope. I say the next generations because I know that this dialogue is impossible in the toxic political atmosphere that currently reigns in Turkey.”
Throughout all of the predominantly black and white photographs of such events, you are also confronted with scenes of love, tenderness, playfulness, and simple moments of daily life. Even in the worst of times, life continues. These images are also as much about the photographer himself as it is Turkey.
“Olay also reflects my state of mind, how I feel as a Turk. Living a thwarted love. I think a lot of Turks feel that way. We are constantly tossed between the violence and the calm of everyday life. No respite. Never a week without a drama, never a month without a major event. Here, nothing is simple, everything is intermingled and confronted, the beautiful as well as the ugly, sadness as well as joy. We are constantly fighting with demons, which we are struggling to bring out the light from the depths of violence.”
Images like these also take a toll on the photographer. It can be very hard, if not impossible, to unsee what you have seen, or forget the pain, trauma, and violence one has seen. And for Emin Özmen, it is no different. But the book also has deep meaning for him personally. “When I look back to all these years now, I will probably carry all these painful memories forever,” he adds. “This book is a way for me to bring closure, to put an end to this whirlwind that has left me exhausted and drained. Olay is my tribute to the people in Turkey who marched for justice, to those who wanted nothing more than peace and who in return were beaten, imprisoned, robbed of their dignity or died for freedom and equality. It’s also, in a very personal way, a symbol of what my wife Cloé and I went through during those difficult years. We lived through it all together, and putting the book together made us realize just how crazy and sadly remarkable those years were.”
Olay is published by Mack Books, and can be purchased through their website here.
Emin Özmen first joined Magnum in 2017 and became a full member in 2022. More of his work can be found on the Magnum website here.
