The lives of the invisible: Turkish immigrants through the pictures of Ahmet Sel

The visual and written stories of these people told by documentary photographer Ahmet Sel, who has lived in Paris and Moscow for many years, is currently on display at the French Cultural Center in İstanbul’s Beyoğlu district. Titled “Demir Atanlar” (Anchored in Place), the show has already been exhibited in Paris twice.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about this collection, which depicts the troubled lives of these immigrants, is the simplicity of the photographs, as opposed to another collection from Sel, “Gens de Moscou” (The people of Moscow), for example.

According to the photographer, the simplicity of the photographs arose naturally because the visual expression of a monotonous life will also be monotonous. “Even if they have been living in Europe since the ’70s, we cannot say that the Turkish immigrants in France really kept up with the Western way of living. The first-comers founded transient lives, thinking, ‘As soon as we save some money to buy a house, we can return Turkey and continue our lives there like before,’ and the ones who came illegally were thinking, ‘We can go back any time.’ Their first years were spent in the corners of hotels and immigrant dormitories. They moved from workshop to workshop, and one suitcase was more than enough,” Sel explains in an interview with Today’s Zaman.

In the context of this life, these people were not in a psychological situation that would allow them to alter their environment and collect objects that carried meaning for them, Sel says. “They did not have anything that was not necessary for daily life. They only had photographs of their wives or children in their wallets. Moreover, I think Turkish people do not have an interest in collecting objects. Especially the immigrants coming from rural areas, they do not express their emotions and memories through objects; they simply settle for the minimum necessary things in life,” he adds.

The collection on the people in Moscow, on the other hand, featured subjects that were more urban and educated, some of whom were established artists or writers, Sel points out. “They were able to express their inner selves to the objects around and with their personal settings. They were distilled from highly complicated lives. The richness of the visual materials in the photographs and the rather longer written texts for the frames were a natural outcome of the richness of their personal lives and intellectual worlds,” he elaborates.

For “Anchored in Place,” Sel worked for six months in various regions of France. “I photographed and listened to the stories of around 150 families or individual immigrants. The series is a selection from these photographs. I found these people through friends or immigrant support foundations,” he explains, noting that he wanted pictures that depicted traces of their lives.

“The actual thing I am interested in is the human stories. Telling stories seems more meaningful to me,” the photographer says. “The most important thing for me is to tell the stories of people who spent an important part or the whole of their lives in a totally different culture in order to make money and provide a better life for their children. To give visibility to the people who became invisible by being brushed aside or treated as second-class citizens by Europeans,” he explains, emphasizing that his objective was to highlight the existence of these people.

Sel has documented many other remarkable stories in various parts of the world. “Kabul: portraits, poses” in 2001-2002, following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, “Chechnya,” depicting the invasion of the Botlik region of Dagestan in 1999, and “Ivdellag, camp no:56” in 1999, documenting the conditions of the Russian convicts on death row whose sentences were commuted to life by Boris Yeltsin are just some of them.

Sel worked in TV for many years prior to his career in photography. “I started to take photographs at a very old age, in my 30s. One day I realized that TV videos were very trivial and fled from the screen and from our minds very quickly. Photography is more permanent and thought provoking,” he says, pointing out that we remember the important moments of recent history through iconic photos, not from TV.

Sel lived in Russia as a correspondent and bureau chief for Sipa Press and became the agency’s chief editor in Paris in 2005. His work is published in major international newspapers and magazines through Sipa Press, Fede Photo and Opale. He won the Fujifilm Press Photo Award France in the portrait category in 2003 and the Gold Award from Canada’s National Magazine Awards Foundation in the “Words & Pictures” category in 2004.

“Anchored in Place” will run through March 8 at the French Cultural Center. For more information, visit www.ahmetsel.com.