Photography as an Expression of Crisis: The Self-Portraits of Ahmet Öner Gezgin

This article conceptualizes the notion of crisis through psychological, social, and cultural forms, examining how photography in Turkey after September 12, 1980, particularly through the medium of self-portraiture, transformed into an indirect, allegorical, and multi-layered form of expression. The study analyzes symbolic imagery forms such as shadow, silhouette, void, layer, and reflection, which emerged as a result of the abandonment of socialist realist documentary photography due to censorship and suppression, through the self-portrait photographs taken by Ahmet Öner Gezgin between 1980 and 1988. A qualitative analysis based on iconographic reading, which focuses on the conceptual dimension of self-portraiture, was used as a method; the use of elements such as cups, pocket watches, curtains, glass, mirrors, and shadows was interpreted in the context of the uncertainty of time, the blurring of space, and the existential positioning of the subject between visibility and invisibility. The findings show that Gezgin's self-portraits are based on a practice that merges the subjective with the political rather than a narcissistic presentation; the photographic representation surface itself is transformed into a kind of battlefield consisting of a diagnosis, expression, confrontation, invitation, and challenge related to the crisis through elements such as tears, marks, shadows, and reflections. In conclusion, the study argues that Ahmet Öner Gezgin’s self-portraits after 1980 serve both as an archival record of society and as a means of subjective expression; that they highlight the transfer between personal memory and collective memory; and that self-portraits played a foundational role in the transition of Turkish photography from documentary to conceptual/fictional narrative.