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Archival Trash: Photojournalism and the Cityscape in Early Republican Istanbul
Ahmet A. Ersoy
Ahmet A. Ersoy is Associate Professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Ersoy works on the history of the Late Ottoman Empire with a special focus on the changing role and status of visual culture in a period of modernizing change. He is the author of Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire (2015); and with Vangelis Kechriotis and Maciej Gorny (eds), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1775-1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol. III (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010). Ersoy’s recent research involves the entwined histories of new media technologies (in particular photography) and print culture. His publications include “Ottomans and the Kodak Galaxy: Archiving Everyday Life and Historical Space in Ottoman Illustrated Journals,” in History of Photography, 40/3 (September 2016); and with K. Mehmet Kentel, “Burnt Panorama: Forensics, Photography, and the 1870 Pera Fire in Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, K. Mehmet Kentel, M. Baha Tanman, On the Spot: Panaromic Gaze on Istanbul, a History (Istanbul: Pera Museum, 2023).

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Istanbul: Spaces of Freedom

Manca Juvan

Manca Juvan is a Slovenian photographer, videographer, and educator with over two decades of global experience. Known for her reportage and documentary work, she has recently embraced mixed media and audio-visual formats, with a special passion for books and film as forms. Manca's work, united by a belief in shared humanity, has earned numerous recognitions, awards and scholarships, including from the Magnum Foundation and EsoDoc. Her internationally acclaimed monograph "Guardians of the Spoon" won the 2017 International PhotoBook Award in Los Angeles.

Manca has exhibited widely, among others at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana and venues in New York, Brussels, Luxembourg, Tehran and Paris. Her work has appeared in major national and international publications such as The New York Times, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and elsewhere. Her other monographs include "Afghanistan: Unordinary Lives", which is the result of her long-term work in Afghanistan, documenting the consequences of the Afghanistan war through the stories of ordinary Afghans, and the most recent one "Istanbul, Faces of freedom"—an outcome of an interdisciplinary project with Oto Luthar and the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts exploring the concept of freedom within an urban setting and the vibrant tapestry of metropolitan life, using Istanbul as its focal point.

Manca currently works on the ongoing multimedia project "The Sacrificed Valley", exploring the effects of industrial pollution on human health and the environment, which recently received the EsoDoc 2023 Movies that Matter award.

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Chasing Freedom in the Streets of Istanbul: Then and Now…

Z. Umut Türem

Z. Umut Türem is currently a visiting researcher at the Departments of Education and Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna. Dr. Türem holds a PhD from the Institute for Law and Society of New York University. Before coming to Vienna, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies (2009-2010) and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2011-2012). Finally, he served first as an Assistant and later as an Associate Professor of Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University’s Atatürk Institute for ten years (2012-2022). His main areas of interest are sociology of law, modern Turkish history, international/global political economy, and “the state” as a theoretical and empirical object of research. His latest research examines authoritarian political formations and their legal and socio-economic foundations, particularly in the semi-peripheries of global political economy. He has co-edited The Making of Neoliberal Turkey (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), and he has published various book chapters and peer reviewed articles in notable journals including Law and Social Inquiry, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, and Journal of International Relations and Development.