INTRODUCTION and Buket Özatay's Biography
Everyone starts the day with the daily routine of their
lives, but I do so with a concern regarding how to discover life with
photography and finding beautiful things in life. I say “beautiful” but in fact
it does not matter whether it’s good or ugly. Whatever there is that looks good
to the eye I strive to capture them from the moment in life and carry them to
another dimension. I do know that it is not possible to come across anything
that is “beautiful” at this exhibition. However it is a fact that as long as
“hope” sparkles in the eyes of the people, beauty will continue to live inside
us and in the eyes that see the sun regardless of whether we are imprisoned
behind closed doors. How did I start the project concerning the women’s wing at
the Lefkoşa Central Prison? I had woken up early one morning and wondered again
about “What kind of a photography project I should start?”. A voice inside me
was saying that the photography project which I had been contemplating for a
long time but failed to give a shape to in mind could be the “women’s wing”. I
made up my mind that morning to start this project.
The project work lasted about ten months. I started taking
photographs at the women’s wing of the prison during the second half of 2014
and continued until today. For the first time in my 18 yearlong existence as a
photographer I wanted to open a solo exhibition and the theme that was
blossoming in my mind was the lives of women convicts at the prison. The reason
why I concentrated on a project which has a high emotional impact and effect
was a curiosity towards the lives of these women. In other words, I wanted to
create an awareness about the stories of the women at the prison, the
unfortunate wounds that they sustained during the breaking points in their lives,
their feelings and thoughts and to bring them together with art lovers.
I had made up my mind that morning when I started a new day
with these thoughts. I simply had to realize the project. However I found
myself confronted with the question of “Where do I obtain a permit to enter the
Lefkoşa Central Prison?” I was excited and impatient. A couple of days later I
found myself explaining my project to Interior Minister Teberrüken Uluçay. The
Minister found my project interesting and novel and granted the permission
there and then. I was overjoyed.
Before the necessary permits were granted, I went to the
prison on 3 September, 2014, to meet Lefkoşa Central Prison director Metin
Bilmem. The guards at the entrance had been informed of my visit. The huge iron
gates were opened and I was told to follow the warden in front of me. I was
overcome with conflicting emotions. I was entering a prison for the first time
in my life. I was not an inmate but I felt as if I was stepping from freedom
towards imprisonment. The gates of the prison closed behind me. All my ties
with the outside world had been severed. The first step had now been taken and
the only thought that I had in my mind was to touch the shutter release button
of my camera during the times that I would spend with the women. While I was
swimming in a sea of such thoughts the director stressed that despite having
the necessary permits my project could only go ahead if the women gave their
permission to be photographed. Then I had to talk to the women and accompanied
with a female warden I started to walk towards the building that housed the
women’s wing. The warden on duty took me to the room used by her and the female
inmates. She gave me information about the prison and the inmates. That day
there were only ten female in mates . (Their numbers ranged between 10 and 19
during the visits that I paid later when all the necessary permits had been
secured). Two of them were serving sentences for serious crimes, the rest were
convicts serving sentences for minor offenses or inmates awaiting their court
trials. “Criminals” serving time for murder, theft, drugs, fatal traffic accidents,
forgery of documents.
When the time to meet the inmates came, the iron railings
were opened and the announcement of “there is a visitor” was made. All the
women had gathered together and they were looking at me with bewilderment and
vice versa. We all stood in a room that had a dining table, chairs, armchairs,
a LED television set hung on a wall and a washing machine in a corner, and we
all looked at each other. A little while later Rukiye who was serving a
sentence for a serious crime said “I know who you are from the press and I
recognize the merit of the competition you organize in memory of your father”.
Immediately after this first dialogue everyone started
sharing their memories of when they had first seen me. Some of them had seen me
on the television, some in the newspapers, some in a book. Meeting the women
was exciting but meeting Rukiye’s dog Alfie was interesting. Alfie was a
present from the former prison director. Alfie’s fate was the same as the women
of the wing.
Eventually I talked about my project and explained how
important it was for me. The first question that they asked was “How do you see
us when you look from the outside?”. When I answered they said I could take
photographs. Maybe I shall share the details at a later date. What was
important was to start the project and to share our worlds with a handful of
women at the Lefkoşa Central Prison. They showed me their living quarters,
dormitories, workshops and “airing gardens”. My first impression was that it
resembled more of a women’s hall of residence than a prison. It was not dark.
Contrary to my expectations it was a light and airy place. I felt that it was a
good place regarding the “rights of the convicts”. But despite all the good
conditions it was still a place where life was restricted. You walk in the
company of the sky that you can see behind high walls with barbed wires, from
one wall to the next. This is called “pacing up and down” and as you pace up
and down, freedom smiles at you as you look up to the sky from your confined
limits.
Yes I am bang in the midst of sorrow and excitement of the
moment as a photographer. I am at the prison which everyone has such a bad
perception of, and looks at the convicts there with pity and pray that God may
free them from there. What I had experienced that day during my first visit to
the prison was an unsettling feeling, a feeling that felt as if my brain and
soul was in pain- as if they had shouldered a huge piece of rock. Having
informed the prison director of the positive response, I wanted to get away
from there as fast as I could and as far as I could. I spent days on thoughts
concerning the next visit. Where and how should I start. I made up my mind. The
project had to focus on the human beings. I had to get to know them through
chats and somehow I had to touch their hearts through the cracks of the walls
of their lives. I went to our second meeting not to take photographs but to
talk, chat and listen to the women. Later shooting photographs were added to
our chats. In natural poses that were not set up, the women –either alone or in
groups- were caught by the camera. I did not stop with taking only photographs,
a little while later I started recording the brief moments on the video. With
small notes, I was recording all the moments that we experienced together and
later I started getting lost in the worlds of these women whom I did not know
at all until very recently, as I looked at the short films I had recorded, the
notes that I had taken and the photographs that I had repeatedly shot. “Getting
lost” had a good impact on me. From another street of life and by staying at a
place that is in between and is always dark and opens on to a dead end street,
one can only look at one’s self from other people’s stories. I do not know
whether I held a mirror to myself or to the stories of the women before their
time in prison. I can say that a while later I surrendered to the images that
were engrained to my mind and started questioning why.
Even though some of the women were uncomfortable about my
presence and my camera during the initial days, in time they got used to me and
I got used to them. I was able to establish good relations with them, and we
all had many productive hours. Maybe the fact of the matter is that I shared
the same environment with people that I would not otherwise have met in my lifetime.
I had luch with them and drank coffee. Every time I went I was introduced to
new stories and new heroes. I found out that listening to human stories and
observing their lives in that restricted environment was interesting. I came
across women’s tales that were very different from the ones that existed in my
own life and I listened. As a matter of fact the stories were very similar to
one another and one common aspect was always the existence of a man. I listened
to so many stories that at the end I started questioning and thinking “What is
crime?” I realised that nothing was as it seemed. But why? Why? What conditions
and reasons had forced them to commit a crime? Why does a human being change
his/her direction?
Throughout the project shoots, I witnessed that women can
strike a friendship with each other and set up families under every condition,
even at the prison where hope is exhausted. They know how to laugh and have a
good time. No matter what, life goes on in a fashion everywhere. During my
prison work I experienced that the closeness and conflict created by group
pscyhe was happening there and thus life was continuing behind those walls as
well. It is as if the “Women’s wing” is a symbol of family for us that live on
the outside.
The Women’s Wing is where the life outside comes to an end
and where you pay for the sins that have been committed. This wing is home to
women who have been given prison sentences for a variety of crimes. Their
crimes are different but their fate is the same. They are confined within four
walls. Only four walls and those walls could not speak.
I have to say that I was not under the influence of any
book or film but I did have an emotional turmoil. I went on a journey into a
sad tunnel of life. It was my choice. The project and taking photographs was my
priority at the beginning but later they were replaced by my conscience.
Therefore my work did not prove to be easy. Moreover, I experienced a number of
negativities caused by prison red tape and physical conditions of the prison.
Despite all the objections and negativities, I was able to take photographs in
all parts of the women’s wing and at the seamstress workshop. Interior
Ministry, Prison Directorate, wardens and the other personnel were very helpful
towards me. Thanks to them the lives of women that I met and who belong to the
other side of life will remain with me as memories that I shall remember until
my dying day. The visuals that I collected, the moments I lived caused a
sensation for me that was akin to a journey taken by a photographer in a virgin
land.
No matter what the physical conditions of the prison may
be, I wanted to draw attention to the phenomenon of women who are imprisoned
and deprived of their freedom. I wanted to reflect the lives within four walls
without resorting to a theatrical description. I wanted to use the dramatic,
effective aspect of black and white photographs naturally without being set up.
I wanted it to be sincere, natural, uncensored. In addition to all that, I want
to tell you that I have completed my project by remaining within the limits set
up by the women and by respecting their privacy. I wanted to touch the women
who had been forced to live for a set time within restricted areas, as much as
I could. All photographs at the “The Sky Walks With Me” exhibition are
documents that send notes to the outside, from the in side, they allow us a way
to see the imprisoned women. At the same time they also show that even the sad
images of life in prison can be given an aesthetic expression in the
perspective of the artist. I wanted to draw attention to the elements of daily
life at the women’s ward that we are not aware of even though it is right next
to the town that we live in. I also wanted to draw attention to the details of
life in there. Every photograph points to the times and places that belong to
convicted women.
We can say that the common feelings of the photographs is
that they “hold a light to the details of life at the women’s prison from a
special perspective”. Over the high walls of the prison and its iron railings,
they turn into witnesses of the lives of convicted women through the lens of my
camera.
Since that day that I set out I hope that I have succeeded
in now making them visible to all. What you are seeing now is a voyage of
documentary photography of the prison which I entered asking the questions “why?”
and came out with stories belonging to those women. I can say that this is the
first documentary photography work on prisons in our country. Maybe the point
that we have reached is a starting point for the future of Turkish Cypriot
photography. But what really matters is to show and for us all to look at the
women’s problems from the reality of the prison. I believe that it can make a
contribution towards shedding light on many of the problems and hopefully
develop proposals to solve them.
Buket Özatay, AFIAP, RISF2, MICS
Nicosia, June 2015
Buket Özatay AFIAP, R.ISF2,
Master.ICS
Buket Özatay was born in 1972 in Nicosia, Cyprus and
studied business management and marketing in the USA before completing her MBA
degree in Cyprus. She then won an EU grant for a five month training programme
at the EU Commission and is now studying for an associate degree in Photography
and Filmmaking at the Open University Faculty of Anatolia University. Since
1995 she has jointly run her family company Özatay Photography with her two
brothers and is regarded as the first contemporary female photography
entrepreneur in the history of Cyprus Turkish photography. Ms Özatay has
produced and presented the television programme “Buket Özatay and Photography
Addicts” for national Bayrak Radio TV since June 2014 and also gives beginners
photography lessons at the Gönyeli Social Activities Centre (SAM).
Her early photographic portfolio of classical and
documentary works took an artistic turn from 1997 when her modernist and
abstract compositions brought her to the forefront of Cyprus Turkish
photography. Ms Özatay’s works include documentary, portrait, travel and street
photography and have been widely published, some as cover pictures, in
magazines, newspapers, catalogues and brochures or online. Her photographs have
been exhibited in international competitions in 48 countries across six
continents and she is the first Turkish Cypriot to have won a first prize in
South Cyprus. She was awarded the qualification badge in photography in the USA
and France in 2014. Ms Özatay is also the first female Turkish Cypriot
photographer to win a gold medal in her home country and at international
photography competitions held by PSA (Photographic Society of America) and FIAP
(the International Federation of Photographic Art). She is also one of the
first two women to win the AFIAP photography artist title from the organisation
which has consultative status at UNESCO thanks to her artistic works and
contributions towards international events. Ms Özatay also participates in the
judging of many short film and photography competitions held in her home
country.
In 2013 due to the success she demonstrated in the international photo contests
she won the right to enter the ''
Who is Who’’ list in PSA Photographic
Society of America. Her
photograph entitled “Admiration” was selected for the “2013 anthology” album of
the 22. Trierenbergl Super Circuit (Austria) in 2013, some 2000 photographs
which were considered the worldwide best of 2013, yet another first for Turkish
Cypriot photography. As a member of the organisation Images Without Borders ISF
, Buket Özatay exhibited four photographs at the ISF Women Photographers
Exhibition 2014 at Oltremare Park, Riccione Italy. Another of her pictures was
exhibited at the Shenzhen International Photography Art Exhibition 2015 and at
six galleries in China.
In 2014 together with photographer Tijen Yakup she
opened the “Exotic Morocco Exhibition” in South and North Cyprus. She has been
organising a photography competition and exhibition since 2009 in memory of her
late journalist and photographer father. The Öztan Özatay Photography
Competition and Exhibition is the most popular in North Cyprus, attracting
record numbers of high quality photographers and the highest volume of entries.