SALT Galata invites all to Public Tagging Days

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The ‘Public Tagging Days’ at SALT Galata will be the first step in identifying the individuals who were photographed between 1935 and 1985 at Foto Galatasaray.

As part of the Foto Galatasaray exhibition, SALT will organize an event on Jan. 13 and 14 to introduce an innovative approach to the concept of “archive.”

The “Public Tagging Days,” to be held at SALT Galata’s Auditorium, will be the first step in identifying the individuals who were photographed between 1935 and 1985 at Foto Galatasaray, a modest studio in Beyoğlu owned by one of the first women studio photographers in Istanbul.

Everyone who might have left a trace in the Foto Galatasaray archive and all those interested are invited to the event where they may find their family members, friends and familiar faces and have the opportunity to make a contribution to keep alive such a unique archive.

Approximately 200,000 negatives in the archive were sorted, cleaned, digitized, digitally restored, categorized and protected by a team under the direction of artist and researcher Tayfun Serttaş over the course of two years. Consisting of photographs of one million people, the archive will be open to online public participation this year when the people photographed at Foto Galatasaray may be identified.

The Foto Galatasaray, on view in the Open Archive at SALT Galata until Jan. 22, is based on the re-visualization of the complete professional archive of Maryam Şahinyan who lived between 1911 and 1996.

Consisting entirely of black-and-white and glass negatives, the physical archive of Foto Galatasaray is a rare surviving example of the classical photography studios of the city’s recent past. The archive is a unique inventory of the demographic transformations occurring on Istanbul’s socio-cultural landscape after the declaration of the Republic and the historical period it witnessed. It is also a chronological record of a female studio photographer’s professional career.