New Mentality to the Old Village: Peasant Discourse on the Graphic Designs of İhap Hulusi Görey

İhap Hulusi Görey (1898-1986) is an extraordinary artist who has an important place in Turkey’s mass media history with his graphic designs. He made a great contribution to the shaping of the visual memory of the Republic with his works in many different genres from public institution posters to press announcements of private enterprises. Görey’s designs became a medium that conveyed the messages of the newly established regime to the public in the Early Republican Period (1923-1950), when visual, audio and printed mass media were weak. Görey’s designs were the most effective means of creating a change in attitude and behavior in an imperial remnant society, 85% of whom lives in villages and whose literacy rate is around 5%. Although Görey came from an upper class family, he analyzed the psychology of the peasants very well and encoded visual and verbal messages in an empathetic language in his graphic designs. These works, designed with a romantic point of view, carry all the handicaps of the ambivalent attitude towards the peasants of the Early Republican Period. The Turkish peasant, presented in an idealized composition on Görey’s designs, was positioned both as the real owner of the newly established regime and as the object of the behavioral engineering project of the Republican elites. The aim of this study is to reveal the reflection of the contradictory discourse of the Republic towards the peasants in Görey’s graphic designs, based on Mehmet Asım Karaömerlioğlu’s arguments about peasantism. In this framework; a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of ten designs belonging to Görey, which was chosen as the criterion sample within the scope of purposeful sampling, was conducted.