Anyone who has ever visited the house of a Turk can’t have failed to notice the family photos dotted around the living room. Children generally take pride of place followed by grandchildren and then other relatives. In some homes the photos are preposterously large, blown up poster size studio portraits that dominate the entire decoration of a room. These shrines to the occupants of the house demonstrate ego as much as familial love. As a breastfeeding mother I have been spending inordinate amounts of time sitting in my mother’s living room with not much to do but look around and ponder on what I see there. She has gathered 31 framed photos of her nearest and dearest and displayed them on her ‘Sideboard of Fame’.

The pictures tell many different stories and reveal much about my mother’s character and something of the people that they depict. On a material level they reveal my family’s relative affluence as the oldest photo of my grandma and grandpa is a studio shot of them in their late twenties. Not only did they have the means to afford a professional photographer but both are smartly dressed, grandpa in a suit with a barber trimmed pencil moustache and grandma delicately made up wearing gold earrings and brooch and an embroidered jumper. The second oldest photo shows that mum’s financial circumstances continued to be good after she married as the picture of me aged three with little sister Zeh shows not only the possession of a camera at home in 1974 but we are posing on a leather sofa and I am wearing pearl earrings. 

The photographs are in different groups, there’s the Wall of Achievement which has at its’ center a glamorous soft focus group photo of me and my two sisters. Hung to the left and right of the gorgeous girls are our graduation photos – or at least nearly all of them. Zehra and I are studiously present in our capes and mortars and so is Sinem, not an actual daughter but very much a spiritual one to my mother. Alev on the other hand graduated and had photos taken but somehow never got round to having them printed and given to Mum, apparently the negatives are languishing somewhere in a box in the garage. The absence of her graduation photo demonstrates the lack of importance that Alev gives to ‘official’ pictures and shows even more about Mum’s determination to treat all her daughters equally. Instead of a photo of a becaped Alev there is another photo of her success that Mum did have access to and thus Alev and the rest of her ten year old school rounders team pose proudly in their maroon sports kit.

There are no photographs of my mum and her friends, the living room shows nothing of mum’s personal life only her devotion to her family. All of the photos are either blood relatives or adopted family so amongst the frames are mum’s goddaughter Olivia and the aforementioned 4th daughter Sinem. The extended family is represented by cousins living in America and Cyprus and those who aren’t personally present are represented by pictures of their children. Mum says that she likes to have reminders of those who are far away from her and the pictures of her dead mother and father are proof of her desire to have those not physically with us still around us in some way. My grandma on my father’s side has taken umbrage with the lack of her own picture in this room but it seems she may have to wait until she has passed on before she gets her place on the sideboard.

Sometimes what is not present is as interesting as what is present. There are photographs of Zeh and I with our current partners but none of us with our first husbands. This is of course out of respect Sezgin and Caner but also shows how quickly those who are discarded are written out of our family history. There are no pictures of Alev with a boyfriend despite her having had at least one long and significant relationship with a young man my parents liked. It seems that male partners don’t count unless they put the precious ring on the daughter’s finger. Sadly there is no photograph of my parents together, except as part of a family group with us but there is a grumpy looking picture of my dad alone. My father is somewhat of a loner and this too is inadvertently reflected.

The other thing that becomes obvious when one analyses the choice of pictures is that there are in fact none of my father’s family, Mum has created a room that is very much about the people she holds dearest and, while she has learnt to love her husband’s family, in her private space she surrounds herself with her own relatives. My mother is an only child since the death of her brother in 1974 and an orphan since my grandparents passed away nearly ten years ago. In addition she left her cousins behind in Cyprus when she moved to the UK after marrying and no doubt there have been very lonely times for her but in the living room she is very much part of a big and loving family and the photos are her way of realising that on a daily basis.