A photographic journey in contemporary Turkey, looking for traces of the
protean presence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic, in more than 600 pages.
Everbody's Atatürk is a visual journey through everyday life in
contemporary Turkey. For this long-term project, Mine Dal, a photographer
born in Istanbul and now based in Switzerland, travelled widely in Turkey,
looking for traces of the protean presence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
(1881–1938), the founder of the Republic of Turkey. The upshot is a
multi-faceted portrait of Turkish society, for the symbolic figure of
Atatürk permeates virtually every area of present-day social and
public life there: at the tailor's, butcher's or greengrocer's
shop, at restaurants and schools, at the hairdresser's and the shoe
store—just about anywhere you look, you'll find Atatürk. Even more than
eighty years after the death of the founder of the modern state, his
memory is still alive and widely revered. Atatürk undertook far-reaching
social, legal and economic reforms to modernize and fundamentally redefine
Turkey based on Western models. Mine Dal's photographs show not only
“everybody's Atatürk”, but also day-to-day life in big cities as well as
in Anatolian villages and coastal and mountain regions. This painstaking
wide-ranging compilation of unique documentary
material also reflects the Turkish people's allegiance to an
openminded, cosmopolitan Turkey.
Mine Dal (born 1960 in Istanbul, lives and works in Zurich) is a
Turkish-Swiss photographer, schoolteacher and specialist in translation
studies.
