“Was I what?”
“Insulting the state?”
“I was trying to understand the world through a lens,” he says more to himself than to her. “I was offering some kind of description. I guess I was framing the world in a specific way that pissed the government off.”
“And now?” she asks.
Now I make and sell kilims, thinks Orhan. “I don’t do that anymore,” he says.
“You don’t do what? Take photographs or understand the world?” she asks.
“Both, I suppose,” he says. Now that the words have escaped him, his insides feel like a cavern. Did he really understand the world back then?
“The truth is I was never really that political. Not intentionally. I have some of my earliest work here with me, if you’re interested,” he says, reaching into his satchel.
“I don’t want to see any more pictures of that house,” she says.
“Most of these are of Istanbul,” Orhan says, ignoring her.
He pries the thing open. The first image is a black-and-white photo of a horse-drawn wagon loaded with heavy burlap sacks in what looks like Taksim Square in Istanbul. The wagon has stalled in the middle of the street and behind it a man in a Mercedes-Benz is shouting out of the car window. The man and his wagon look as if some time machine accidentally spit them out into a modern city square. Orhan remembers the colorful insults the man in the Mercedes was shouting on that day. He remembers the light and the deep ache he felt in his heart for the old man trying to survive in a time and space he wasn’t equipped for.
Seda turns the pages slowly, giving each photograph its due respect. Orhan hasn’t seen the photos in years. The memories come flooding back. Each image is a living, breathing moment of his life laid bare before him. Watching her watching him as he once watched the world makes him feel transparent.
The faces in his compositions are intentionally blurred. No human expression. All eyes are turned away from the camera. All faces obscured. The black-and-white images depict a city riddled with contradiction. Crowded and forlorn, ancient yet modern. So many of the photos are architectural, devoid of their human subjects. Doors, arches, minarets, alleyways, and fountains appear against the dark sky. The few people captured in the frame are fractured somehow, blending into the structure of his compositions. Orhan realizes, perhaps for the first time, that the true subject of these photos is the melancholy that lurks mysteriously in each and every image. There, in the spaces between darkness and light, a sadness hangs in the air, invisible to the human eye yet heavy on the heart.
Then the photographs change dramatically, the monochromatic cityscapes being replaced by colorful images of village life. There is a series of photos dedicated to tavli players, old men wearing skullcaps and newsboy hats, bent over the backgammon table in their button-down shirts, smoking. Orhan can still hear the sound of die smacking the side of the backgammon board and someone yelling “shesh, besh!” above the clamor. Unlike chess, tavli is a game in which your kismet plays a much larger role than strategy.
“In these, I began focusing on what I called the ‘other Turkey,’” he says. “The part we don’t always like to think about. The part no tourist would want to visit. It is the Turkey of my childhood.”
“Anatolia,” she says, looking up at him.
“Yes,” says Orhan. “Anatolia.”
The old woman turns the final page of the album, where a group of peasant women sit weaving before a giant wooden loom. They are seated in a small courtyard where a rainbow of wool strings hang from hooks in a weathered wall. She stares at their hunched backs, bowing before the colorful altar, and strokes their curved spines with her index finger.
“You look as if you’re willing them to turn around,” he says, in what he hopes is a light conversational tone, but his words snap the old woman out of her revelry. She shuts the album and hands it back to him.
“You don’t take pictures anymore?” she asks.
“No,” says Orhan.
She nods her head in acknowledgment. “You want to avoid being political,” she says.
“I’ve been focusing on the family business.”
“Everything we do is political,” she says. “Even the things we choose not to do.”
Orhan remains silent.
“Do you have those papers for me to sign?” she asks him abruptly.
“Yes,” he says, “but I was hoping we could talk for a little bit. Would you like to go to the garden? I could get us some tea.”
“A cup of coffee commits one to forty years of friendship,” she says, reciting the proverb in Turkish.
Orhan gives her his best smile.
“It wouldn’t be so bad,” he says, suddenly longing for a cigarette. “We could enjoy the good weather.”
“Here’s fine,” she says. “I don’t want anyone interfering.”