Making the Modern Turkish Citizen is a welcome addition to the growing literature on modernization, nation building, and identity formation in the early Turkish Republic. Based on the cultural analysis of sixty photographs that consist of individual, couple, and group portraits, this book examines the role of vernacular photography in the construction of modern Turkish citizenship. By focusing on the photographs of the urban middle class, taken by studio and itinerant photographers or as amateur snapshots in the 1920s and 1930s, Calafato reveals the “classed and gendered nature of the emerging new and Republican Turkish identity” (5).

Informed by theoretical works on photography, gender, and visual culture, as well as the historiography on early republican Turkey, this book explores the relationship between the evolutions of photography and Turkish modernity during the period of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Adopting Elizabeth Edwards’s notion of “theaters of the...

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