Qualifying Inclusion: Photo-Sharing Initiatives in Turkish Periodicals of the 1920s
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Portrait photography, as an indispensable part of modern life, has proliferated through various channels since its infancy in the nineteenth century. The popularity of contemporary social media platforms in the twenty-first century reaffirms the widespread and continued appeal of portrait photography around which self-fashioning, exhibitionist, and voyeuristic impulses are satisfied and commodified by an intermediary. Such images, no matter how staged, can shape viewer perceptions of themselves and the world around them. Long before the unparalleled access to self-illustrated personal profiles afforded by social media platforms today, communities formed around the physical and material mediator of the periodical, which allowed for a serialized exchange between publishers and readers. The Turkish press of the 1920s—including daily newspapers, bi-weekly and weekly satirical journals, and weekly and monthly illustrated gazettes—facilitated opportunities for their readers to be heard and seen. Many papers accepted letters from readers, even publishing responses to them in designated ‘Readers’ Columns’. Whereas illustrated gazettes solicited more experimental forms of participation from readers. In this vein, a wave of competitions involving the collection and publication of reader-submitted portrait photographs swept the industry in the second half of the decade. These initiatives brought a perceptively reflexive dimension to the readership community at a critical moment of state formation while contributing to the upwards trend in image-to-text ratios in serial publications. As regular, current, and affordable storehouses of images illustrated gazettes of the 1920s presented a wide range of subjects drawn from local, domestic, and international headlines. Accordingly, the portrait photographs of recurring characters such as film stars, athletes, politicians, and other public figures or celebrities were among the most abundant subjects worthy of illustration. Within this context, photograph sharing initiatives provided readers with a means of attaining fleeting recognition and noteworthiness in their favorite magazines. This focused and qualitative examination of such reader traces can aid in better understanding the audiences of periodicals beyond quantitative literacy rates or broader socio-economic class assumptions and shed light on the prevailing behaviors and attitudes informing vernacular uses and interactions with photography.
DOI: 10.21825/jeps.93145
Author: Yasemin Gencer
Institution: Wayne State University
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413782322