Eastern Anatolia, Turkey · 2017
What the Hands Remember
Her hands came up to the cloth at her throat and stayed there, and after a while I stopped looking at anything else.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
We were inside, against the dark again. The veil was wound close around her head and under her chin against the cold, and her hands — folded over each other at her chest, holding the edge of the cloth — had done every kind of work a long life in a cold place asks of a pair of hands. You could read the years in them more plainly than in the face.
The face was gentle. A little tired. Watching me without suspicion and without much expectation either.
I made the frame low enough to keep the hands in it, because to crop them out would have been to tell half the truth. The face is who she is now. The hands are everything that got her here.
One frame. She did not move them the whole time.
— 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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