A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

Dated Snapshots

“We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.”

John F. Kennedy 

The act of writing the date on snapshots has the effect of preserving the image not just in its immediate surroundings but globally. Knowing what we do about the past we can wonder (pointlessly) how people can appear so blasé with what’s unfolding in other parts of the world. We don’t know the exact day this photo was taken but in Saskatchewan at the very beginning of June 1936 the snow had melted from the prairies, the sun was out and this young foal born weeks earlier was still finding its feet. The boy, not a great deal older than the foal, certainly with more time to learn life’s valuable lessons, had a long summer vacation to look forward to. In Iraq, Princess Azza, sister of the King, was not so relaxed. She had recently married a hotel porter from Rhodes so was stripped of her royal privileges. Meanwhile, the Chinese Government in Nanking was pushing for an immediate declaration of war against Japan. Rumours were circulating that a British officer had killed a Japanese soldier. The British delegation denied reports and ascribed them to Chinese paranoia. In eighteen months time an estimated 40 000 Chinese civilians would be killed in the Nanking Massacre.

 

 The earliest photo in this collection comes from Quebec and was taken on April 18, 1927. Over in Europe the weather was mostly fine with reports that air traffic over the English Channel was exceptionally busy. In Bath, Thomas Hampshire, a 48 year old chauffeur, was so terrified of an upcoming operation than he jumped out the hospital window, so saving the surgeon from another messy job but upsetting his wife greatly. In Antrim, Northern Ireland, Mr R. J. Anderson, president of the National Association of Headmasters let it be known what he thought of feminists and their male supporters. “No woman can train a boy in the habits of manliness. (Such a woman) might be an admirable proprietress of a Wild West saloon but we have no room for her in our boys’ schools.” 

 

 On April 27 1931 the prospect of war troubled Reverend James as he spoke at the Fellowship of Reconciliation at Bury St Edmunds. “If Christianity does not destroy war,” he warned, “then war will destroy Christianity”. Meanwhile in Belfast Edward Cullen’s murder trial opened. He had arrived in England four months earlier in the company of Ahmet Musa and Zara Agha, reputedly the World’s oldest man. A manhunt began when Musa’s naked body was discovered in a field outside of Carrickfergus. Across the water the World’s largest airship, the Akron, began her maiden voyage from Akron, Ohio.

 

 On October 5, 1935 the Dundee Courier was full of praise for Montreal, a city with an abundance of sunshine to appeal to sports lovers. In Blackburn Lancashire Robert Cotton took a slug of whisky to cure his cold. It helped so he took another, which also helped. An hour and two bottles later he was arrested after assaulting a fellow passenger on a bus.  In Tokyo Colonel Yamada went home and committed ritual suicide after he shot dead General Negata of the War Office. In Melbourne Mr W. Smith showed off his giant marrow measuring over three feet long and swore beer was the best fertilizer he knew of.

 

 On February 15, 1936 newspapers reported that across Turkey twelve people had frozen to death during blizzards that also killed thousands of cattle and destroyed hundreds of ships and boats. Meanwhile, in response to accusations its oil was fuelling the Italian war machine The U.S was considering an oil embargo. Spanish elections scheduled for the 16^th had the rest of Europe on edge. The contest was essentially between communist and fascist parties and whoever won the result was a warning of an insecure future for the continent. In South Africa a bill was before the Government that would effectively disenfranchise black voters.

 

 Members of the Twelfth Annual Congress for the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship were welcomed by President Ataturk in Ankara today. In Glasgow meanwhile a group of men from Barra Island in the Outer Hebrides made their first ever visit to the mainland. They were reportedly terrified by the sight of a tram. Paul Wharton, dress designer to Hollywood stars, was shot dead while his bed-bound mother could do nothing. The killer also shot dead William Howard while law professor Henry Bolte remains in a critical condition.

 

 As war drags on the Allied press report that in the Jewish ghettoes across Axis controlled Europe starvation rations are in place. Other citizens have to accept 44 ounces or just over a kilo of bread a week while only children are given milk. At the Oswald Sat Zoo in Glasgow the performing lion walks a tightrope then plays a round of darts. Two million Japanese soldiers are reported to be occupying the islands just north of Australia. Chinese actor Kim Wong has been signed to play a Japanese soldier in a new MGM film.

 

 Twenty days after Germany signed the Instrument of Surrender, the Canadian Government has announced it will lift bans on Atlantic travel. In Birmingham meanwhile, Canadian soldier George C. Cummings had been caught breaking into a house and attempting to get away with over one thousand pounds worth of jewellery. Seventeen year old Robert Allsop has been charged with the attempted murder of an Italian prisoner of war. His boast that he killed Italians was not taken seriously by the magistrate, who did not think Allsop’s frustration that he had been too young to serve during the war was justification. 

 

 An American ship docked in Melbourne has a cargo of almost 500 000 bottles of beer. It had transported the bottles to the American base in Manila but arrived after peace had been signed and the Americans had moved out. No one knows what to do with the cargo. At Eaglesham in Scotland a fifteen year old boy has been charged with the murder of 29 year old Mrs Smith and her two children. Forty five women prisoners are on the third day of their strike at Portage la Prairie, west of Winnipeg. 

 

 On the first day of August 1948 China and Turkey play off against each other in football at the London Olympics. Meanwhile in Glasgow a golfer has been reported for playing a round with his shirt outside his trousers. In Australia the Country Party has submitted a plan to see Communism curbed, if not actually extinguished.

 

 No one is too sure how many were buried in the infirmary graveyard in Johnny Ball Lane in Bristol but there may be as many as two thousand in the relatively small plot of land. Demonstrations for independence by African nationalists have continued in Kampala. The International Committee will most likely decide that the time has come to readmit Japan to international sports federations.

 

 Turkey has welcomed the new Republic of Indonesia while in Malaya two British patrols opened fire on each other. In Greece Queen Frederika has made an international appeal for the 28 000 children taken during the recent civil war. Meanwhile, the coalition government in France looks set for defeat only two months since it was formed. Meanwhile, poison, fences and traps failed but the recent heatwave in Australia may have killed most of the rabbit population.

 

A recently published report indicates that the crime rate has dropped in Britain, which is news to chaplain G. H. Fawell, who says there is a noticeable lapse in morals and rejection of traditional religion. Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies has launched the Jindivik Mark 1 pilotless aircraft. The Australian cricket team has suffered another early collapse against an English team. Meanwhile President Eisenhower, or “Ike” to most Americans, is warning the USSR, or “the Reds” to most Americans, to leave Pakistan well alone, or else. 

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

THE BACK COUNTRY

Back stamps and design on cartes de visite and cabinet cards.

 “Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”

Walt Disney

For some people, the pleasure in collecting cartes de visite and cabinet cards lies entirely on the reverse, in the stamps that identify the studio and sometimes advertise the range of services. This is understandable. The images on the other side are often commonplace and uninteresting while the back carries an intricate design that can also be a code. This stamp on the back of a cabinet card from the Phebus studio in Constantinople is dominated by Apollo, the god of the sun and of light – AKA Phoebus Apollo - an obvious choice for a photographic studio. Apollo could also be a god of truth, which again makes sense for a photographic studio, since that was what they purported to offer. Note the idealized Ottoman script at the top and the French Photographie. Without knowing who runs the studio we can tell from the French that he was Armenian, because French was the lingua franca of the Armenia business community in Constantinople. Sure enough, Phebus was run by Boğos Tarkulyan, one of the better known photographers in town around the turn of last century. The Art Nouveau pattern was a deliberate nod to contemporary ideas in Western Europe, identifying Tarkulyan as someone less, or even not, interested in Ottoman traditions. The choice of flower in the frames at the top would have been conscious too. It may be amaryllis, which has some connection with Apollo, but that’s only a guess.

 

 The study of the backs of CDVs and cabinet cards is a branch of iconography, specifically one that can trace its origins back to the frontispieces found in books from the sixteenth century through to the beginning of the nineteenth. The frontispiece could be a declaration of intent or an acknowledgement of a patron’s greatness but were never just random images. It was intended to be read in minute detail and required knowledge of biblical imagery as well as more demotic symbols. By the 1860s, when this carte was produced, the art and meaning of frontispieces had fallen out of use but Theophile Gastonguay evoked them with the image of a beaver. Although the beaver did not become the official emblem of Canada until 1975, it had been commonly used as a symbol of Canada since the seventeenth century.

 

 Archibald McDonald ran a photography studio in Melbourne throughout the gold rush. Like every other studio photographer in Melbourne at this time he came from another country, from Nova Scotia in fact, just a spit away (in Canadian distances) from Theophile Gastonguay. You might wonder why St George and not a kangaroo but there we see the difference a century and a half of colonization can make. Although by the 1860s people around the world recognized the kangaroo as Australian, it wasn’t a national symbol. Australia (AKA “The Colonies”) didn’t have such a thing, or if it did it was likely to be St George’s dragon, which, like Australia, was proudly British. Archibald McDonald: logic tells us he was of Scottish background and he might have been the type to give a Glasgow kiss to anyone who called him British, but St George here doesn’t stand for England so much as a landmark in Melbourne. Long gone now, once upon a time everyone in Melbourne knew where St George’s Hall was.

 

 A similar thinking may have been behind Louis of Paris’s depiction of the Porte St Martin, which then as today was close by the central shopping district. Firstly it told customers the studio was located in one of the more salubrious areas, and then it told them how to get there. Notice it was opposite the Theatre de l’Ambigu, a place made famous by Louis Daguerre’s set designs.

Migevant’s studio may not have been at such a desirable address as Louis’ but no Parisian had to ask where the Place de la Bastille was. When this CDV was produced in the early 1870s there couldn’t have been too many people around who remembered the Revolution and the storming of the Bastille in 1789 but enough would have recalled the glorious revolution of 1830, which the July Monument seen here honoured. Essentially the French replaced one monarch with another, which is a little like stumbling from one failed relationship with a drunken philanderer straight into another. Today the Boulevarde Beaumarchais is lined with shops selling antique cameras.

The back stamp can be evidence. In 1876 Alfred Mayman took over the Temple Photographic Gallery at 170 Fleet St in London. Two years later the City of London dismantled the Temple Bar on account of Fleet Street needing widening and the structure was dilapidated. The sections were carefully stored and in 1880 Henry Meux bought it and reassembled it on his estate in Hertfordshire. In 1984 it was bought back from Meux’s descendants and re-erected in Paternoster Square. All this to say that there was only a two year period between 1876 and 1878 when there was any practical purpose for Mayman to have an illustration of the structure on the back of his CDVs. We don’t need any other information to date the image.  

 

 Images of cherubs with cameras are common, as is the inclusion of an artist’s palette, but what does it mean? Strictly speaking, these round and flabby infant creatures are Putti: cherubs have several heads and bits of eagle and lion attached to them. The precise symbolic meaning of the Putti is not understood but since the late Renaissance they have had an association with the arts, and music in particular. Originally the true artist had his muse, a goddess, who inspired him and for whom he created. The little toddlers might have been intended to suggest the playfulness every serious artist needs but also, babies were the inevitable result of creative coupling. In the way that a red and blue barber’s poles once indicated a place to have a bit of bloodletting and these days means a haircut, Monge, and every other photographer who used the imagery saw it as an icon not a symbol.

 

 Just to reinforce the point (somewhat), we find exactly the same image on the reverse of a CDV by a studio located on Rue de la Sabliere. The companies that printed the blanks for CDVs usually have their name in small letters down the bottom. We don’t get any such on either Monge or the Sabliere studio card and while we could assume the same company produced the blanks, it is also possible that several bought their designs from another source. Somebody could have produced this image of the putto, sold it on to the printers who then customized it for the various studios who used them.  

 

This palette is also very common, with a fairly obvious interpretation although it ought to be pointed out that few commercial photographers thought of themselves as artists in the way that people used that word even in the relatively staid 1860s. ‘Artist’ was a kind of password for quality of technique rather than ideas. Apart from being a photographer, Camille Benoit was an art dealer, so he may have seen the image as a pun. 

 Harrison Nathaniel Rudd ran his studio in Costa Rica around the turn of last century, as board mounted photographs were giving way to postcards. Costa Rica was relatively prosperous and peaceful at this time, meaning an American could operate a studio with some confidence it would not be closed down or he would have to get out at short notice. This rather elegant design may have also come from a template customized to his requirements. Or not. There is a pun here as well, in the idea of the woman’s hand holding out a carte or cabinet card. A camera is depicted at the top of the crest.  Maybe Rudd also had cartes with the same back design that the hand holds out.

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THE BACK COUNTRY

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Snapshots and postcards from Istanbul’s glamorous past

 “It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”

Frank Zappa

 The discovery of a copy of Cornucopia magazine at a bazaar in Ottawa was timely. Issue 51 from November 2014 has the cover story Istanbul Unwrapped part 2: Beyoǧlu Boogie splashed across a photo of five men in dinner suits laughing over their cocktails. The picture was a message to readers that back in the 1940s Istanbul had been more Paris than Paris, and a lot more fun.

The timeliness has to do with news reports indicating that Washington has finally realized that Ankara’s deeper loyalties lie with ISIS, not the West. Long time observers may wonder why the U.S was so slow to catch on to the bleeding obvious but quite a few Turkish people will nod and remind whoever is listening that it only looks like Washington has acknowledged things very recently. In the grand chess plan, this admission is only a feint hiding darker ambitions. Turkey didn’t invent the conspiracy theory but it made it a work of art. In any case, what Washington is also admitting is that Turkey is no longer that beacon of Western Civ flashing its light across the barren sands of Islamic Asia. It has literally gone over to the dark side. Not so long ago - as in during the Cold War – that was unthinkable. Secularism was actually built into Turkey’s constitution, and it was one of the few countries that proclaimed religion as bad as Communism (How tres Camus!). It was also desperate to be European, particularly in the sense that European meant wearing hats by Dior, smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and driving Mercedes Benzes. To President Erdoǧan and his associates secularism was an era that has now ended. Ultimately they want it purged from the national consciousness. Cornucopia is a magazine that wants to preserve that past in aspic. It and the Government conduct their affairs apparently oblivious to each other. What’s interesting to us is the myths they both construct about that era.

  

Cornucopia’s aesthetics lie somewhere between those of National Geographic and Food and Wine. On one page we have a dervish whirling in the afternoon light filtering through a dusty window, on the next an array of white cheeses discovered at a local market. You can imagine. Politically it belongs somewhere between 1920s nationalism and 1950s secularism. Secretly, it longs to be woken at dawn by the graceful ululations of the muezzin (without the crackle of cheap loudspeakers), to sit down to a breakfast of yoghurt, figs and dried apricots before a morning practising on the baǧlama or learning the traditional methods of dyeing wool and spinning it into kilims. Its commitment to history may be sincere though its sentiments are dubious. To Cornucopia the era between the 1923 revolution and the 1960 coup was a golden age of Turkish culture, unrivalled except for that other semi-mythical age when Ottoman Constantinople flourished under Suleiman the Magnificent. 

To President Erdoǧan and his faction in the AKP, this rose-tinted nostalgia isn’t just a longing for an age that may be more legend than reality but a Western attitude that is fundamentally orientalist. They have a case – the magazine advertises itself as “Turkey for connoisseurs”; a warning to lesser mortals to steer clear – but they (the AKP) actually indulge in an even more absurd nostalgia. For them there was an age more fabulous than Cornucopia’s; when Turkish culture was governed by pious asceticism. Concrete evidence for the existence of this time and place is hard to find, except ironically in the writings of European travellers. For writers like Gustave Flaubert and Pierre Loti, the sight of a white robed muezzin calling from the balcony of a minaret evoked something Europe had lost in the Enlightenment. 

Thanks to Cornucopia we learn that Maxim’s of Taxim (sic) was established and run by Frederick Thomas, a black American who had run nightclubs in Moscow during the Bolshevik Revolution: why isn’t he better known? It’s a bit like giving Dooley Wilson the lead role in Casablanca. Instead we got a 1957 remake, Istanbul, starring Errol Flynn and Cornell Borchers. Back in town after a brief spot of diamond smuggling, Flynn turns up to a hotel in Sultanahmet to discover former girlfriend Borchers towing behind her new husband, while Nat King Cole is the house pianist. Well, who wouldn’t be delighted? Of course, when Hollywood portrayed Istanbul as sophisticated, what it really meant was that it was exotic. As usual with all its films set in the eastern Mediterranean, we know the city’s male inhabitants can’t be trusted because they are either slovenly or effeminate. 

  

Istanbul’s music scene of the 1940s was heavily occupied by Turks quick not just to embrace but make a Xerox copy of Western music and especially jazz. Meanwhile black musicians having a tough time in the States were heading over to Europe, which led them to Istanbul, where they discovered eastern modals. In the 50s Turkish jazz bands would be pumping out the very worst of Dixieland while over in the U.S Art Blakey, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane were discovering a whole new way of thinking based on Turkish music. 

A conceit of Cornucopia’s article is that this world can still be found. Turn left here and walk down a laneway that hasn’t changed in half a century. Enter this shop and step back in time. Nostalgia is a form of fraud, as is its opposite (a concept that interestingly enough has no single word for it in English). In post revolution Turkey history was something best to forget, or at least to rewrite, and if they were difficult then laugh at it. 

 

 The past hasn’t completely vanished. Anyone who wanders through the narrow strip of laneways between Istiklal and Cihangir can tell at once that this was once a land of seedy yet staunchly à la mode nightclubs. Until about five years ago some of the old cinema palaces around Istiklal, like the Alkazar and the Emek, survived. The Emek was vast, with elaborate galleries and even the way the curtains drew back on the screen was graceful and majestic. The film might be rubbish but you felt you were at an event. This image was taken at a cinema over in Aksaray in the 1940s. Back then the neighbourhood was a residential area under the shadow of Istanbul’s great mosques and the nearby Grand Bazaar. Today it is ugly and dishevelled, dissected by a highway and best known as a centre for sex trafficking. 

 

The long Ottoman era – but especially the last century – had been defined by exclusion. Women were not permitted here, non-Muslims could not go there, Muslim men could only enter this place so long as they didn’t eat this or touch that eat this and so on, ad nauseum. Even Protestants had more fun than that. As Ataturk understood secularism, people could believe and do as they wanted. To the neo-Ottomans this effectively unleashed a form of anarchy upon a nation conditioned to doing what it was told.

  

Even so, Turkey’s entrance into the modern world remained a celebration for the privileged: wealthy Turks who privately supported westernization, and the still powerful non-Muslim communities of Armenians, Greeks and Jews. In his memoir, Portrait of a Turkish Family, Irfan Orga describes the morning after the proclamation of the republic as quiet and still, the streets mostly empty, the businesses shuttered.  No one was really sure what the end of empire meant.  

 The feeling Cornucopia wants to impart is that Istanbul 1923 – 1959 was about the most exciting city on the planet. The French may disagree but they never had that sense of kicking against the pricks that drove Istanbul’s culture; or as Parisian Jean Cocteau put it: ‘Originality consists in trying to be like everybody else, and failing’. Only when it wanted to be Paris did 20^th century Istanbul discover its real identity.

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REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

THE ART OF DYING

Turkish snapshots of death. 

“As nothing in this life that I’ve been trying

Could equal or surpass the art of dying

Do you believe me?”

George Harrison: The Art of Dying

 One afternoon I was being driven in a taxi along the highway to a job in one of the industrial zones that ring Istanbul. Whenever someone says,  “I was in a taxi in Istanbul” assume that unless it was stuck in a kilometres long traffic jam it was moving at breakneck speed. A hearse was parked on the shoulder ahead. Turkish hearses are not elaborately converted Oldsmobiles or Cadillacs. They look more like green farmer’s trucks with open beds at the back and, like the one ahead, are often dilapidated. A pine coffin was jutting out the back. As we drew level I caught a glimpse of the driver puffing on a cigarette before the scene swiftly fell away into the distance.  No doubt this was a situation with a plausible explanation but it’s the case that in every other country I’ve lived in, a driver pulling his hearse over for a fag on the highway wouldn’t be tolerated if he had a coffin in the back. That said, when we see something strange in other countries it is easy to think that it’s part of the culture. Who knows what the other drivers zipping past thought of it. One thing I’m sure of: in an age of increasing cultural homogeneity, we can eat Turkish food, wear Turkish clothes, use Turkish phrases, have Turkish style weddings and give our offspring Turkish names and we don’t even need to visit the country. We cannot however have Turkish funerals. The rituals and customs surrounding death remain inviolate. To suggest a Turkish style funeral for a non-Turkish person would be in bad taste, not to mention disorientating to mourners. This is why snapshots about death can tell us things about a culture others can’t. Anglo-Saxon funerals are solemn affairs. Grief is personal and expressed discreetly. Not so in Turkey where they can be noisy and public.

 

 Another story: I was sitting in the shop going through a box of photos when the owner leaned across, asked, “do you like Rembrandt?” and passed this one over.  He was thinking of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicholas Tulp (1631). Google it and you can see why. One difference is that in Rembrandt’s painting only two of the observers are looking towards the camera, so to speak, whereas in this photo they all are. I found several snapshots taken at dissections or autopsies at Turkish student hospitals. It’s something you think would have been disapproved of in Anglo-Saxon hospitals, if not actually forbidden. We still think that it is disrespectful to the deceased, even when logic tells us the person on the operating table is beyond caring what we think, and it isn’t as though these students are behaving offensively. 

 

 Another thing that bothers us, and more so now than when these were taken, is the danger that the photographer is going to profit from the image. Financial gain is bad enough but worse would be the kind of voyeuristic pleasure achieved by sharing them. We live in contradictory times. We’re told that in the age of the smart phone news isn’t news without images and it’s up to us the citizens to take them and put share them online. We are also told that if we do that we are contributing to the decline of western civilization. When this photo was taken (circa 1940s) press photographers in the U.S tabloids were taking far more graphic images of murder and suicide victims than we see in the mainstream press. If this photo bothers us it could be because images of death have actually become unfamiliar to us as we forget how common they once were.

 

 Not that Turkey’s second-hand stores were overflowing with images of the dead but there were what statisticians call a significant factor, and most had something to do with the military. This is not surprising when you think that Turkey has always had a large army of conscripts and that soldiers of all ranks who die while on military service receive some kind of official ceremony (unless they were spies or deserters). This coffin has a flag draped over it, which means something.  Either the deceased had a high rank or died on active service. The second doesn’t seem likely as Turkey’s conflicts 1930s to 1950s were internal and the military would not have been considered to be on a war footing. Though a snapshot in size, this has the look of a press photo. 

 

 Another military funeral, notable for the presence of the imam. In recent years any association between the armed forces and religious organizations has been seen as provocative, controversial or scandalous, depending what paper you were reading. Technically the military upheld Ataturk’s secularist principles but you can of course be secular and believe in an afterlife, or be religious and not wear the fact on your sleeve. Only in recent years has secularism been equated with atheism in Turkey. Even when Kemalism was at its strongest in the 1940s it would have been strange to send a soldier off without some religious element in the service. Even the most hard-bitten generals wonder what lies on the other side. 

 

 Story number three: A Sunday afternoon in Tarlabașı and the body of a man from across the road from the apartment is lying in the street. He is in his mid-thirties and his body does not look particularly diseased so it is likely that he suffered a heart attack or an overdose. Most of the inhabitants of this part of Tarlabașı are Kurds and Rum, what other Turkish people call marjinals, which means what it sounds like. The street is narrow and potholed. There is no pavement. Because it is Sunday a market is at the bottom of the street and so there is a steady line of people coming back and carrying bags of fruit and vegetables. No one stops to gawk at the body. There is a small group of women who perform histrionic displays of grief. One throws herself at the body and others pull her back. Someone else tosses her head back and emits a long wail that sounds like a small engine motorbike leaving a paddock. Eventually a doctor arrives to file a report. An ambulance turns up but apparently it’s a bit late so after a discussion it drives off. Perhaps an hour later four men arrive with a carpet. They put the dead man’s body in it and carry it down the hill. Did I photograph any of this? Of course not. I come from a culture where grief is expected to be private, and if it must be public then at least restrained. To have photographed the scene without anyone’s permission would have been in bad taste and an invasion of the family’s privacy, and yet the man’s death, or the initial mourning procedure, was absolutely public. They had no qualms about placing his body out where everyone could see it, so why should they be upset if strangers photographed it?

 

 It used to be normal to photograph a funeral in Turkey. They were events, like weddings and birthdays and they were public. They are still that. It isn’t unusual to find a street blocked by a crowd with a coffin surfing above it, but there’s no longer one man with a camera; there are dozens. An imperative has become an option.   

 

 In Anglo Saxon countries we can spend a week organizing the funeral but in Muslim cultures the body must be buried as soon as possible, ideally the next day. This leaves no time for family members from out of town to get to the funeral, let alone if they have to drop everything and fly in from abroad. In that situation photographs of funerals can give absent mourners some kind of contact. Notice the ripped and stained coat of the man in the foreground. Most of the people in this photo look dirt poor. In the way that post mortem photos of children from the previous century were often the only images the family would have of them, maybe it was the case with this funeral. People wanted to remember the deceased but also the event of his passing. If you couldn’t make it maybe you’d want to know who did. Note the jacket draped over the headstone? Try getting away with that in Australia.

 

 One other thing you’ll notice about the three photos of funerals above: there are no women. This brings me to story number four. When the father of someone at a religiously minded institution died the men were talking about going to Izmir for the funeral, which would leave me and the female staff to take care of things. When I wanted to know why the women weren’t going, one of the men explained that women aren’t wanted at funerals because they get emotional. I’ve always assumed that a funeral was one situation you were entitled to get emotional but I guess the men-folk figured that would kind of spoil it for everyone else. Women have to do their grieving elsewhere, or turn up to the grave later. She has her hands out, palms facing upwards in the manner of Muslim prayer. Was this a case of someone being asked to come along and take a photo or did they just happen to have a camera with them? Is this evidence of something we understand a bit or not at all?

 

 If you are visiting Istanbul, you might take a look at the Orientalist galleries at the Pera Museum and see a world as depicted by Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems life for the Franco/Italian crowd amounted to lying around in billowing gowns listening to flutes and zithers. Around that time a cemetery occupied the slopes between Taksim and the Bosphorus. It was demolished – I don’t know when – and later some of the monuments were moved to Zincirlikuyu Cemetery. They became part of a frieze running along a back wall. Here you can encounter seventeenth and eighteenth century Western European merchants and diplomats brought down by outbreaks of the plague or cholera. Clearly Constantinople was a lot of fun until the fleet from India dropped anchor. We share with Turkish people an approval of photographing the headstones of our deceased family members. At least we must assume that is why this headstone was photographed. Traditionally Turkish headstones were taller and narrower, had prayers in Ottoman script inscribed and were never as elaborately carved or surmounted with saints and angels as western European one were. Nevertheless, for the mid-twentieth century this is a very European monument. Sipahioǧlu means son of a cavalry officer. It tells the family was well off and like a lot of affluent Turkish families secularized early on.

 

 Sion, which is French for Zion, means the Promised Land, the sweet hereafter, and in this case is also the family name. How apt all round. These days Turkey’s government is keen to show off its credentials as an enemy of Zionism, blithely forgetting to mention its ongoing arms trade with the Great Enemy or the detail that for all its bluster it has been quick to promise and slow in paying aid to Gaza. This tomb reminds us of another age. Not necessarily a better age; despite commonly read claims that Istanbul’s Jewish community lived in harmony with everyone else during the last century there were frequent reports from the 1930s and ‘40s of persecutions and pogroms, and we shouldn’t forget Elza Niego, the Jewish typist whose murder by a jealous Turkish official in 1927 sparked riots against Jewish citizens. It was more acceptable for a Turkish man to kill a Jewish citizen of Istanbul than it was for her family to complain at the way they had been treated. This tomb would be in one of several Jewish cemeteries in Istanbul. Today there are very few Jewish people living in Istanbul compared to the old days and today most of the protestants and Catholics are likely to be ex-pats, so one way to read the history of the city when its citizenry (as distinct from its inhabitants) was more cosmopolitan and multicultural is to count the number of old cemeteries catering to the non-Muslim communities. Visit some if you can. It’s like getting a history lesson from someone who was there.

 Story number five: more than twenty years ago I was travelling through the far east of the country, around the Iranian border, and in villages I kept seeing gravestones out the back of houses. If I asked anyone about them I can’t remember their answer but I thought then and still do that the backyard is a perfectly respectable place to bury our loved ones. We read that in prehistoric societies around the world it was common to have a room in the house or underneath it for the ancestors. Unfortunately we in the west live with the expectation that we will own and live in at least a couple of houses (one for the family, one for when they move out) so the idea won’t catch on again too soon. This man probably isn’t sitting is by a family plot in his backyard but the photo asks a related question. Is he asking the photographer to take a snap of him, or is he asking the photographer to take a snap of him together with his wife?

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THE ART OF DYING