A wooden box, tripod and cloth The role of alaminüt photography in the making of modern Turkey

Mostly anonymous without any name or logo on their prints, thousands of itinerant photographers (commonly known as alaminütçü) operated across Turkey from the 1910s up until the mid-1980s. A decade of wars throughout the 1910s had left the country impoverished, which had a dramatic impact on the profession of photography. The destitution is reflected in the scarcity of photographic material and the delayed introduction of photographic technologies to the country. Turkish photographers used 6x9 glass plates up until the 1930s. Kodak Brownie cameras were already on the market and relatively affordable, yet it was not until after WWII that amateur snapshots became popular. Consequently, in the post-war conditions in Turkey, alaminüt photography filled in an important vacuum by penetrating remote towns and villages, reaching out to the lower classes, who might otherwise have no access to photo studios at the time. This chapter studies how the mobile camera and the alaminüt box, which produced two sets of images, a negative followed by a positive print, went beyond what was typically captured by studio photographs and how it negotiated the making of a new modern Republican citizen as promoted by the Kemalist regime.