PhD project, Özge Calafato (2016-2020)
My research project focuses on photographic representations of the urban middle class in Turkey between the 1920s and the 1950s in the context of a society undergoing rapid secularization and Westernization. In particular, the project investigates the ways in which the urban middle classes used photography as a tool to generate shared memories in the four decades following the foundation of the republic, and the role of their photographic representations in negotiating an identity for themselves as a newly minted citizen of a modern nation state.