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Notes on Photography, Power, and Insurgent Looks

[by Stefanie Fock]

On July 8, 2015, twenty-eight year old Çilem Doğan got arrested in Adana, Turkey, after she had shot her ex-husband who had repeatedly abused her and tried to force her into prostitution. For their coverage of this case, Turkish and international media repeatedly reproduced a photograph in which Çilem Doğan is represented in between two police officers, handcuffed, but giving two thumbs up to the camera. While there is contradictory information about the date and incident of this shot, there seems to be a general agreement on the message communicated through it—Çilem Doğan does not regret her actions. The meaning of this conclusion, however, has been at least two-foldly interpreted. While the photograph has, on the one hand, been used to highlight the image of the unrepentant female murderer, on the other hand, it has been appropriated and widely spread as a symbol of feminist empowerment.

When I first looked at this photograph, my eyes confronted it in the latter sense. My body was immediately overwhelmed by a feeling of satisfaction that recurs every time I look at this picture in which I neither see a victim nor a perpetrator, but an empowered survivor. Even though (or exactly because) it implicates pain, grief, and rage this photo is encouraging. In Turkey and beyond it has caused a noisy echo of people claiming Çilem Doğan’s release, and speaking up against gender violence, femicide, and the criminalization of women’s self-defensive actions. For me the photograph has also been inspiring to reconsider the power inherent to photography, to think through the political relations that characterize photographs, and to deliberate about the transformative potential of insurgent ways of looking.

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