Eastern Anatolia, Turkey · 2018
What the Glass Held
There was a sheet of glass between us and a lace curtain behind it, and she was on the far side of both, looking out.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
I had been photographing in the yard when I saw her at the window. She did not open it. She just looked, the way children in these villages look at a stranger — steady, unsmiling, taking your measure before they decide anything.
The glass had its own life. It threw back a faint reflection of the yard behind me, the roofline, the white sky, all of it laid over her face like a second exposure I did not plan and could not have made if I tried. The lace ran across the frame in pale loops.
She held still long enough. One frame, through the window, through the curtain, through whatever she was thinking. I never learned her name. A girl of maybe twelve. I have wondered what she made of the stranger with the camera, looking back.
— Sefa Yamak, Istanbul-based portrait photographer. Eastern Anatolia, winter 2018. From the ANATOLIA series.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm · Signed & numbered on verso · Certificate of Authenticity included
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