I am a photographic artist originally from Istanbul Turkey. I immigrated to the United States in 2015. My work in Turkey explored themes of childhood memories, indoctrination, and one's relation to a place. These questions evolved and took on new meaning after becoming an immigrant to the US as an adult. The title of the work I am submitting comes from an interview conducted with James Baldwin in Turkey in 1969. He lived there for ten years starting from 1961 and completed Another Country in Istanbul:

“JAMES BALDWIN: (...) I am full to the lid. I have a curious dilemma, because perhaps I do not like some people, although even that is very rare. I am not capable of not liking people; I am much more intelligent than I look and I know a lot more than what I say, but I really like people. I like people because I think that they have something; yes they do, I know they do. They have something they don’t trust. If only they could trust that “thing,” they would be less afraid of being touched, less afraid of loving each other, less afraid of being changed by each other. Life would be different. Our children would not be victims that they are now, we would not be either. But for some reason love is the most frightful thing; something that the human being is most in need of and dreads most. I do not know why... Ibsen wrote a play called Ghosts about this and we all are still in that play which was written a hundred years ago. Like all poets, like some women and men, like some of us, I am full with the question of how the human being will be put to right (...)”

Full With The Question is a series of photographs I took in different parts of Cuba, a country whose mirror-like similarities (particularly in terms of demographics) as well as its oppositional relation to my new homeland the United States intrigue me personally and photographically.

Archival pigment print, 16 x 24 inches.