It is not as if she hadn’t already succeeded in many careers. She worked with refugees after World War II. Her photographs of the monuments of Byzantium and the great Islamic monuments in Iran and Afghanistan are housed in Edinburgh, Harvard and the British Museum. It was only in the latter part of her life -- the last 35 years -- she adopted Istanbul as her home and devoted herself with the zeal of the obsessed to the life and the tremendous aesthetic of Turkey’s nomadic people.She had a Ghandi-like quality about her -- although this requires a word of explanation. She led a simple life by choice, having rejected the status befitting the scion of a comfortable Manhattan family. Although she died at the age of 87, even when I first met her aged 61 she looked as though she would sail off in the first puff of wind. She also had that rasping cough which I assumed was the result of the scrawny, hand-rolled cigarette perpetually glued between her fingers. And like Ghandi she commanded armies, not as a result of any formal position but through force of personality and the conviction she inspired. The people she met willed her to succeed. Bankers and professors, diplomats and the odd camel driver were never too busy to lend her a hand.
But unlike Ghandi, she had lots and lots of stuff.
Josephine was a collector. The mission of her later years was to find a permanent home for her invaluable collection of kilims and all the accompanying artifacts to do with the production of flat weaves and the accoutrements of nomadic life. She took thousands of photographs and was determined to have them catalogued and digitalized and made accessible to future generations of scholars. Stored away in her mind and in every cranny of her Cihangir flat were the contents of a major ethnographic museum. Finding the right benefactor with the means, intentions and ability to look after this extraordinary record of a vanishing world turned out to be a far more difficult task than one might think, and at times in her later years Josephine dropped her shoulders in despair. Eventually a donor came along -- the Vehbi Koç Foundation -- which agreed to include Josephine’s collection in an expanded Sadberk Hanim Museum. The foundation is now the guardian of her entire legacy -- an agreement signed shortly before her death.
Although her friends and colleagues appreciated her knowledge and cowered before her sly wit, it was only in her later years that Josephine became better known. The American-Turkish Conference presented her with a trophy slightly heavier than herself at their annual Washington jamboree. Only a few months ago the Textile Museum in Washington organized a gala award dinner in her honor.
I feel vaguely responsible for her sudden recognition (or at least she used to blame me for it). Elsewhere in this paper is an abridged version of an article reprinted from Cornucuopia magazine that appeared a few years ago along with many of her photos. It seemed to provoke a sense a wonder unlike any piece I have written before or since. Like an Arabian story-teller she would let drop a tidbit of information that hinted at a life full of incident -- like the time she was ushered into the salon to show her photos to the legendary connoisseur Bernard Berenson, then aged 90. Or the unexpected journeys she made by horse or battleship, or her trusty Volkswagen bus.
She died with many projects still unrealized. She was preparing a catalogue for a major display of her kilims at the International Conference on Oriental Carpets to be held in Istanbul in April. She was also preparing to display “kilometers” of her photographs in an exhibition space at that same event. This obligation now falls to the Vehbi Koç Foundation, her intellectual heir.
The measure of her life is not just what she accomplished. She could have died at 187 and still have had a long list of things still to do.Josephine PowellBorn New York City, 1919. Died in Istanbul 2007
