Eastern Anatolia, Turkey · 2017
A Year of Evenings
She came out holding the kilim folded over one arm, the way you bring out the thing you are proudest of.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
I had not asked to see it. Someone in the house must have told her the man with the camera was here, and she came to the door with a rug she had almost certainly woven herself — the pattern was the kind that lives in one family and one valley and nowhere else.
She was smiling before I lifted the camera. Not shy. Pleased. A woman showing a stranger a year of winter evenings' work and curious what he would make of it.
The wall behind her was breeze-block, the light flat and grey. None of that mattered. The whole frame organised itself around the rug and the face above it, both turned slightly toward me, both offered.
I made the portrait and then, because it would have been rude not to, I admired the kilim properly.
— 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
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