Photo Exhibition and Book

Unprecedented stories of the first generation of women from Turkey

Starting from the late 1960s, more and more women from Turkey came to the Netherlands to build new lives here. What were those lives like? We know very little about them. The book ‘If only you knew’ and the eponymous exhibition by photographer and visual artist Çiğdem Yüksel bring these women's stories to light and secure them a lasting place in Dutch history.

"Bir bilsen... If only you knew..." This is how many women begin their life stories when Çiğdem Yüksel seeks them out. Women like Maviye, who fought for women's rights, and Selvet, who worked three shifts a day and barely saw her children. Twenty-two of them are portrayed through interviews, family album photos, and new portraits of the women, who are now between sixty and eighty years old. 

They speak of the pain of migration, homesickness, getting lost and finding their way. Working, taking care of children, learning the language. Love and unhappy marriages. Being restricted as women and emancipation. Their contributions to the Dutch economy as factory workers or cleaners, and their struggle for freedom and equal rights. Their stories are diverse, layered, ambiguous, like every human experience.

Left: Fatma Akın by Bertien van Manen, from the series ‘Vrouwen te Gast’. Right: Fatma Akın by Çiğdem Yüksel.

Çiğdem Yüksel: “I realized how much I miss the images that do justice to the story of first generation of women from Turkey, like my grandmother. An archive that is representative, where my generation and the generations after us can go to see who these women were and to understand where our story in the Netherlands began. If we do not quickly supplement our visual heritage, this history will remain invisible. These women are elderly; time is running out.”

About the artist

Çiğdem Yüksel (1989) is a photographer and researcher. In 2016, she won the prestigious Silver Camera award with her poignant portrait series of Syrian refugee children working in shoe factories in Turkey. She conducted research on our collective visual memory and the visual representation of Muslim women in the Netherlands. This resulted, among other things, in a widely discussed 2020 research report on the representation of Muslim women in the ANP image bank. She created the photo series A New Beginning as part of the transmedia project Shadow Game, which was exhibited nationwide and showcased in New York during the prestigious Photoville festival.