George Georgiou

‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk’

“When you first arrive in a place, you are so informed by images you have already seen that it is a burden you have to lose,” says George Georgiou, the London-based photographer who has recently returned from 8 years working in Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. “The next thing you do is look for difference, which is something else you need time to get over. Once you have done that, you start to look at what is familiar and then, and only, then can you appreciate what is different - because only then can you appreciate that it is really different.”

The differences of Turkey became apparent to Georgiou from the start of his four year residency in the country. Whilst working on a feature on where Europe ends and Asia begins. Georgiou quickly discovered the diversity of a country where the secular and religious, the military and the civil, the traditional and the modern coexist in an uneasy harmony. “To start to understand a place, you need to stay a long time,” says Georgiou. “So I started working on this idea of Turkey being the meeting point of east and west.”

The result of that work is Fault Lines, a book (to be published later in the year) that reveals the complexities of a country that is struggling to reconcile its multiple personalities. Taking centre stage in that work is the Turkish landscape. “We are used to seeing Istanbul or the Mediterranean resorts,” says Georgiou, “but most of Turkey is on a huge plateau above 1,000 m. I wanted to get this non-romantic version of Turkey where the landscape represents the harshness of its geography and its topographical place in the east.”

So we see snow-capped mountains standing as a backdrop to brightly coloured flats. Mount Ararat, the mountain where Noah’s Ark landed, edges into the background of an image of a woman standing on her front porch. A dusty road, a tree in bloom and a line of telephone cables complete the image. Big mountains and big skies with lots of clouds are everywhere in Fault Lines, the raw beauty of nature overwhelming the humanity which inhabits it.

And beneath the mountains Georgiou shows newly built tower blocks, their modernity a symbol of the oppositions that Turkey must reconcile. “Fault Lines is about the idea of what east and west is, but it’s also about the idea of home. You look at different countries and you see where people have moved from the more traditional to the more modern. It happened in British cities in the 1950s and 1960s. There was the appealing element of moving from old tenements into clean new homes with indoor toilets and hot running water, but there was also the element of dislocation from their neighbours and loss of community. The buildings are also fragile, they are often badly built and will quickly lose their good looks. In Turkey, a lot of life, especially for men, is lived on the street. With these new tower blocks a lot of that will disappear and that is something that will be missed.”

The Turks who live in these tower blocks are overwhelmed both by the physical environment Georgiou shows us, and by the political environment they inhabit. Modern Turkey was established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the nationalist leader who tried to transform the nation into a secular, western-looking democracy. “Being Turkish was narrowly defined by Ataturk,” says Georgiou. “He came up with the saying, ‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk‘, which reduces Turkishness to something very simple. But Turkey is so ethnically diverse. People will say their grandmother was Serbian, Albanian, Tatar or Armenian, and you’ll see their ancestry in their body or in their faces. But people don’t like to talk about it because everyone gets bogged down in the divisions and oppositions of Turkey. Turkey should celebrate its differences and not see them as a threat.”

The threat is apparent in his pictures of the Gallipoli celebrations, a huge event where political and military leaders gather to celebrate the Turkish victory. Georgiou photographs security guards standing on guard before a newly-turfed embankment. Turkish flags dominate the background, a canvas awning bearing the austere face of Ataturk staring into the camera.

There is also something threatening about the new architecture that dominates the book. The tower blocks seem a little off-kilter and out of step with their surroundings, the new roads and power lines forced and artificial. It’s as if everything has been built by central planning, by somebody trying to portray a certain vision of what it is to be modern and European. It is the same with Georgiou‘s portraits. He captures the diversity of the nation, but also the split in its identity, the split between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern.

Capturing these contradictions on film was both time and cash intensive for Georgiou. Fault Lines was a self-financed project, and funding the work was always a problem. “I always start work off my own back. Once I get out there, I let people know and people will commission me. Then I sell work through my agencies in the UK, France and Italy. I keep work back and wait for the right time for it to be published. I don’t especially like working for the media. That frees you up in the visuals you make and the stories you do because you are not beholden to your editors and you‘re not desperate. And not being desperate really helps because people can see you have something you really care about - and they have to ask for it.”

“I’m hugely in debt and have made huge financial sacrifices. But as I don’t own anything, I have no fear for the future. Also, I’m optimistic that everything will come out right in the end. 7 or 8 years ago we sold a flat to fund a great adventure but we don’t regret it because we are both enthused about making work and having new ideas. If we had stayed in England we might have just ended up chasing the pound. You have to make money just to live so you end up doing more commercial work and the more commercial work you do the more you neglect your personal projects and in the end you can’t remember why you started in photography in the first place. The rewards will come in time, but we’ll probably be pensioners when they do.”

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