The Fear of Being Censored

The Early Years

In the movie Mambo Italiano, the queer character Angelo Barberini says: “Being gay and Italian is a fate worse than . . . actually there is no fate worse than being gay and Italian.” To that I say, well, try being gay and Turkish and Muslim and an artist! In my experience, these components never sit well together, especially when your artwork consists of nudes and fetishes.

As someone who was born Muslim, I believe that people should be free to wear headscarves (or not) or to go to the mosque (or not). I don’t separate people into groups designated by whether they are Muslim or Christian, gay or straight, Kurdish, Turkish, or another ethnicity. For me, any of my friends, colleagues, or models can have any background. But the conservative government in Turkey is very rigid in their view of who is “bad” and who is “good.” If you are not one of them, you are seen as being against them.

I first faced censorship when I was studying photography as a freshman in college at Canakkale (18th March) University. I was participating in a juried competition held by the University, for which I was given an award for one of the three works I exhibited. When I went to the opening, I noticed that the title of one my photographs had been changed. It was a picture of a sweet eighty-year-old French woman by the name of Madame Brigitte. In her youth, she had fallen in love with a Turkish man and made a life for herself in Turkey. I set the photograph in an inner garden and called it “Tears of Madame.” It was meant to be an emotional portrait full of sadness. At the opening the name had been changed to read: “The Woman Looking at the Skyline.” Despite giving me an award, and honoring my work, the University administration interpreted the use of a French word as a slight to Turkish nationalism.

Upon speaking to my photography classmates about the incident, they told me that they had also been censored at the group show. One student used cropped semi-nude and full-nude images from magazines and newspapers in collage technique. The piece had apparently been removed for “political reasons.” In Turkey, sex or nudity is not something you talk about or show often. As this is an Islamic country, there are lots of boundaries. At the time of this exhibition, a progressive government was in power, but the University’s administration was conservative and religiously driven. Nudity, even when it had nothing to do with sex or sexiness, was forbidden.

During this time, I also hosted a weekly cultural show on local television. My best mate, Neslihan Can, and I interviewed local artists and played music and dance videos. On our shows, we broadcast conversations with local painters, sculptors, and musicians. The art shown during the program contained no sex. After four weeks, we were told by the University administration that we had to cancel the show. When we asked the reason, they answered with an ultimatum: cancel the show or be expelled. Again, the vague charge of “political reasons” was employed to pressure us into stopping the broadcast, which we reluctantly did.

Nude Photography

After graduating, I started to work in street photography, sports, and male nudes. I took hundreds of semi-nude and occasionally full-nude photographs of men, mostly European models and couples. In the beginning, I didn’t have a defined goal. I was simply documenting their diverse beauty. As time passed, I started to feel like something was missing, and I tried to discover what that missing element was. In the end, my latest project on male beauty and nature came together.

My photography series Project Pamucak started in this way. Pamucak is the second longest beach in Turkey. The setting of my photos includes a little lake made by the river during the winter season. Thus, three sides of my shots include water. In the beginning, I shot portraits and semi-nudes, but soon started to shoot nudes as well. Years passed, and the...