Eastern Anatolia, Turkey · 2017
A Face Out of the Dark
This is the one portrait in the series I made against a dark cloth, indoors, out of the wind.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
Everything else here was made in the open — in yards and doorways and snow. But she was the oldest woman in the village and I did not want to keep her standing in the cold, so we went inside and I hung what I had behind her and put one light to the side.
The white veil held all of it. Against the dark there was nothing for the eye to do but read her face, line by line, and there were a great many lines, and not one of them was sad.
She sat very still. People who have lived a long time are often the easiest to photograph; they have stopped performing and have nothing left to prove to a lens. She looked at me as if she had seen a hundred of me come and go, which she probably had.
One frame, maybe two. Then I thanked her and we let her go back to the warm.
— Sefa Yamak, Istanbul-based portrait photographer. Eastern Anatolia, winter 2017. From the ANATOLIA series.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm · Signed & numbered on verso · Certificate of Authenticity included
If this photograph interests you, write to me directly. I'll answer any questions about print sizes, paper, and process. Studio visits in Istanbul are also available.