Since 2014, Berlin-based photographer Norman Behrendt has been photographing newly built neo-Ottoman-style mosques in the sprawling suburbs of Ankara and Istanbul. His interest in these buildings is less architectural than political: his pictures reflect how Turkey has changed over recent decades from Atatürk’s secularism to the Islamic state under Erdoğan. The subject is quantified as well as seen. Since 1987 the number of mosques in Turkey has grown from 60,000 to more than 85,000 in 2013, an increase of almost 1,000 mosques per year.
Greetings from Turkey, published by Hartmann Books in 2017, gathers a selection from Behrendt’s ongoing project “Brave New Turkey.” It is conceived as a small, experimentally bound object rather than a conventional monograph. Seventeen postcards are folded from a single complete printing sheet and held in a cellophane bag; the sheet can be unfolded, handled and read as one image or separated into its parts. The booklet appears under two covers in the style of Turkish passports, one green and one red, distributed at random. Graphic design is by Nadine Engler and Norman Behrendt.
Behrendt’s approach is cumulative and provisional. The images are offered as fragments of a body of work still in progress, and the publisher has stated that a larger book will follow when the series is completed. The book does not claim to sum up its subject but to show a country’s transformation as something continuing, counted in mosques and marked in the design of a passport.
