Illustration: Aude Nasr

Last October, OMM, a modern museum in the city of Eskişehir in Turkey founded and run by one of the richest families of Turkey, Tabanca family, published a ‘photobook’ called The People Who Made OMM. It’s a book consisting of black and white, mostly close up shots of some of the workers who worked on the building's construction as plasterers, shovel men and brick builders. The text accompanying the announcement of the book read as follows: 

Consisting of short interviews and 18 monochrome portraits, some of the construction workers who made and transformed the museum building talk about their stories, craft, and the relationship they formed with the museum. (...) Highlighting the proximity of labour and artistic production, "The People Who Made OMM" celebrates the transcendent nature of works of architecture and art while immortalizing the construction team as part of OMM’s collective memory.

I have looked and looked but wasn’t able to see any such highlight of the “proximity of labour and artistic production” nor any celebration of any kind. To my burning eyes, what these photos -shot by a “renowned art and fashion photographer’’ showed, was the abusive relationship between the proletariat and the rich elite. They lay bare the gentrification of class and memory and the attempt to capitalize on the workers’ already exploited labour, this time through the good old colonial gaze. Reading through the positive and grateful comments under the museum’s Instagram post about the book, I wondered if I was missing something: was this actually a ‘warm’ gesture which managed to equalize the great social and economic gap between those who came up with the idea for the book and those who posed for it? Of course it wasn’t. I emailed the editor and learnt that the workers were not paid in exchange for the content they have provided, they were instead  “given books themselves and life-long free entry to the museum’’. However my follow up question asking if the photographer also was paid in free museum tickets was left unresponded. (Please note, a limited edition of 500 copies of the book were printed and are being sold for 140 TL each.)

OMM is not the first rich institution/company to have come up with such a lame idea. 

It is only one example of the imperialist belief that the rich elite has the right to look at whatever and whoever they want, in whatever way they see fit. History of Western civilization is a catalogue of supremacist gazes disguised as warm gestures.

Photography's relation to colonialism is historically recorded. It was the main tool that accompanied 19th-century European colonial propaganda, playing vital roles in the administrative, scientific and commercial justification of the invasion of  “far away’’ lands. It was the direct agent in creating the Other for the “advanced world’’ to exploit. Documenting it through the eyes of the invader, building the narrative of uncivilized/savage/exotic, fascinating creatures in need of a helping hand. The hand of the white, allegedly good-intentioned colonial man. 

The infamous remarks Dominique François Arago made in 1839 before the Chambre des Députés: “everybody will realize that had we had photography in 1798 we would possess today faithful pictorial records of that which the learned world is forever deprived of by the greed of the Arabs and the vandalism of certain travellers’’ remind us the shameful role photography played in the heart of colonialism. As Ariella Aïsha Azoulay explains further in her book Unlearning Imperialism, due to the central role of photography within the colonial superstructure, it was never considered as being invasive of privacy. It was always about the photographers’ rights, not the photographee’s, simply because they did not have any. This right, naturalized as the innate freedom of photographers was never questioned. As photography developed and was adopted by many forms, including news, street photography and art, it maintained the unearned right to freely invade. Caring for no boundaries other than its own, photography brought potentials of more exploitation to the dominant elite. It also paved the way to continue doing this in alternative ways, appropriated by art and other cultural means. But in a post-colonial, white supremacist world, photography will always carry its history with it. This is why it is still important to examine who gazes at who and in which context.

The right to photograph is still unquestioned because the eye behind the camera is assumed to be the universal eye. It represents the universal person who has the right to see everything. This right then becomes more important than the privacy of the person being looked at. The looker’s first crime is the assumption that there’s no privacy in the world that can’t be invaded. The self-appointed right to look at, the right to knowledge the gaze assumes, therefore, emerges as an act of violence. The saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, implies that power accompanies the beholder. It's the beholder who decides what is beautiful. Looking at a photograph necessitates identifying with the camera: the audience adopts the perspective of the storyteller who creates a world through their framing, rather than simply reflecting the existing world. 

Gentrification of Labour 

In its supposed intent to immortalize the workers with the photographs, OMM exposes that it will only recognize the subjects of these pictures if they stay as objects. The position of the photographer and the gaze it dictates, reveal a hunger to capitalize on all forms of labour. In this case, the time workers spend posing for, hence creating the core content of the book - for free. This specific colonial gaze seems to make sure that the objects understand they are only recognized through their labour; either as construction workers or as models. This gaze invests in the workers for the pleasure of high tastes, who would see them frozen in time and forget about them but applaud OMM for its humane effort to immortalize the workers. The gaze only recognizes the workers as resources and treats them as disposable human capitals.

As Franz Fanon suggests: “the supremacist gaze fixes its object and leaves no room for any ontological resistance to the white man’’. The gaze introduces an unknown species to its art-loving, educated upper-middle class audience. People they would never come face to face or recognize in real life. The People Who Made OMM does not dress the construction workers in special costumes, neither does it let them pose in their daily clothes. It photographs them in their natural habitat, on the construction site in their dirty work clothes. The black and white photos mostly consist of close-ups, focusing on the details of the faces or hands of the workers. This visual language uproots the workers from other aspects of their lives and romanticizes their labour by capitalizing on their personal, embodied histories. 

The People Who Made OMM is a performance for others. It invites the audience to become partners in crime by staring at the same scene together.  In fact, the photos reveal some sort of relief on the part of the targeted audience as well, because they love to see contentment in the eyes of the workers whose shoes they would never want to be in. This gaze makes the spectator enjoy the scene without feeling guilty since the scene naturalizes social inequalities in a constructed, romanticized setting. These photographs do not celebrate the workers, they create objects out of them for the spectator’s pleasure. This objectification serves to ease the extreme injustice between the workers and the people who stare at them for pleasure. This is an attempt to change the narrative from cruel structural hierarchy to ‘natural harmony’, reminiscent of the narrative of “one big family’’ which is widely adopted in corporate lingo. We are a family in harmony, everybody has their own place and within a family, we only give happy poses to the camera, we don’t talk about class distinctions and other forms of discriminations within. 

The photos are also an attempt to domesticate, hence gentrify the workers’ relationship to the construction site and the museum. It reduces the workers' history to simple and empty Q&As which seem to be edited ruthlessly in order to not allow any negative implication to seep through their words and their looks. It prepares the perfect background for the spectator to free themselves of all responsibility. It naturalizes the existing hierarchy and pats itself on the back for doing the decent thing: Immortalizing the workers.

Gentrification aims at getting rid of the abject through erasing both the collective and the personal histories of certain places. It aims at collective cultural amnesia. OMM’s photographs have a similar effect of destabilizing the reality of unpaid labour. The new narrative is also secured through the minimalist design of the book. The photos show the workers in fragments, as faces, hands, feet and always individually, never together with others. Zooming on certain body parts placed in wide white spaces in the pages, adds to the objectification of the workers through redirecting the focus to the aesthetic value of the book. 

Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of the controlling image suggests that those who control images, control stereotypes as well. These photos do the ideological work of masking the role of hegemony in structuring political social and economic relations. The interview questions, edited down to superficial one-line sentences amplify the violence. The answers are only there to fill up space, but they end up revealing the reality that OMM is trying to cover up: “What do you plan on doing when the building is completed?’’ asks OMM. 23-year-old Recep, master plasterer and painter responds: “If I find work in Eskişehir I’ll stay here, If not I’ll move somewhere else. We’ll have to see.’’ OMM does not care and will not have to see.

Deregulation of Memory

OMM is able to present its colonial motivations as art/goodness because it relies on neoliberal notions of profitable personal space and free time. This is evident in their disregard for the workers’ free time and space. These things can be invaded without feeling guilt or paying compensation. Unlike preceding forms of capitalism, neoliberalism prepares background conditions for the market to freely move in, rather than controlling market activities directly. So that regulation seems natural as life itself. With this facade of natural progression, it restructures daily life too. OMM’s photos are doing exactly this: through gentrifying the workers’ labour with a constructed fake setting and showing them temporary recognition, these photos deregulate their memory of the place. It recreates the museum as a utopian place where everyone loves each other and is connected in a way that transcends social conditions. With this attempt to cover any possible distasteful memory, the narrative of supreme benevolence emerges as a weapon to be used against ungrateful subordinates. The gaze as the sovereign’s narrative, erases all possibility of discord by magnifying the so-called harmony of warm moments.

And yet, there’s no clean way to separate photography from its inglorious imperial history. The spirit of imperialism is always there and ready to show itself depending on the identity of the gaze and the spectator the gaze represents. These images do not confront a historical division, on the contrary, they secure it and shamelessly present it to the consumption of a certain class without sacrificing any loyalties. In a sense, these photos are re-performing the colonial lies of liberation. They seem like they have a sacred mission but in fact, all they do is reinforce their own privileges. Make no mistake: This book does not celebrate the workers that make OMM, it celebrates itself and its own superficial appreciation of the workers that made OMM. This book is OMM congratulating and talking to itself in the mirror while creating a paying audience for this narcissistic show. The workers do not need to be immortalised through these empty gestures. If institutions like OMM want to recognize workers' agencies and celebrate their contributions to the world, they should start with paying them the money they deserve.