Inventing a Selfie Studio

Abstract Through a case study of Istanbul’s Foto Görçek, playfully dubbed ‘the world’s first selfie studio’, this article focuses on the changing photographic practices from the mid-1940s–1960s in modern Turkey, which experienced a dramatic political transition during the 1950s with the introduction of the multi-party regime following three decades of strictly secular Kemalist rule. This study explores how Foto Görçek challenged and transformed studio practices in Turkey, particularly during its increasing popularity in the 1950s–1960s, by allowing people to take up Elizabeth Edwards’ notion of the ‘theater of the self’, or when the self also takes on the role of the photographer. Accordingly, the article looks at the affordances of the photo studio as a space where citizens reimagined their desired selves and when new ways of imagining the self were made available to them. Moreover, this study investigates how such new imagined selves in the aftermath of the Second World War served to renegotiate a desired modern Turkish identity resulting from the rigorous state-controlled nation-building process during the 1920s–1930s.