Four

Wanted. Home.

BY Sarah McArthur, February 15, 2012

At last count the population of Istanbul, Turkey, was pushing through the 13 million mark. Defined as one of the worlds 27 or so megacities, Istanbul is now Europe’s third largest city behind the likes of London and Moscow. These megacities deal with all the challenges that you’d expect from sprawling metropolises, including how to deal with rapid growth.

For Istanbul, growth boomed in the seventies, as new industrial expansion and the promise of jobs lured many migrants there. This expansion led to increased infrastructure which rapidly enveloped surrounding areas into the greater metropolitan area of Istanbul. It was then the area of Üsküdar, previously a leafy outer suburb became a part of urban Istanbul.

Üsküdar today is a busy residential and commercial area and like the rest of Istanbul struggles to cope with a stray dog problem which has continued to plague the capital. The dog’s of Üsküdar, which today choose to call the disproportionately large number of cemeteries home have been captured in a series of images by artist and photographer Joanna Rajowska.

Rajowska’s series, The Dog’s of Üsküdar, was inspired by a story from early 20th century Ottoman-ruled Istanbul. In 1911 the authorities of Istanbul were so worried about stray dogs spreading disease and making the streets unsafe that they made a decision to ‘cleanse’ the city, banishing all strays to the uninhabited island of Sivriada. Not long after, Istanbul was stuck by an earthquake. The disaster was interpreted as a ‘punishment by God’ for their treatment of the dogs and they were soon rescued from the island and brought back to the city.

Rajowska saw the series as an opportunity to explore the issue of animal exclusion from society and the relationship between humans and animals, which can at once be detached and devoted. She also saw the individual graves, which the dogs had chosen to make their home, as housing units for the animals – an interesting parallel with the overcrowding problem in Istanbul.

The series of images taken by Rajkowska appear accompanied by text, written later by Sebastian Cichocki in a book also titled The Dog’s of Üsküdar. The text written by Cichocki does not relate directly to the pictures and is instead a multi-layered fictional narrative. The limited edition book and images were presented together for the first time in an exhibition.

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Photography by Joanna Rajowska
See the complete series and more of Joanna Rajowska’s work here

Tags Art, Book, Community, Exhibition, Photography, Reportage, Society