Cagatay Dogan, Binghamton University Ph.D. candidate in his 11th year and graduate of the Middle East Technical University at Ankara, Turkey spoke on Wednesday about photography’s role in the transition of Turkey’s image to a modern urbanized country.

The talk was a part of the dean’s speaker series on visual culture, VizCult, and took place in the Fine Arts Building. Dogan delivered the speech, titled “Re-imagining Istanbul in 1950s Turkey: Cityscapes and Urban Memory.”

Dogan graduated from METU where he received a master’s degree in architecture. Since coming to BU, Dogan has received several fellowships, including his dissertation fellowship from the department of art history, and has also taught courses both at BU and Syracuse University.

His talk focused on the work of Othmar Pferschy, who was the state photographer of Turkey in the 1930s, and how his photos impacted Turkey’s image — both in terms of place and identity.

Pferschy didn’t receive much attention until the photo curator of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art received a box — an archive of his work — from his daughter, Astrid von Schell, and organized an exhibition in 2006.

The original photos were featured in many state-sponsored publications such as “Turquie Kemalist,” a publication that aimed to promote a modern image of the new Republican Turkey after the capital city moved from Istanbul to Ankara.

“His works were used to create an image, a stable identity for the new and old capitals — Ankara and Istanbul,” Dogan said. “A difference was created to cut off the ties between the state modernity of Ankara and the remote Ottoman past, represented by Istanbul. This amnesia, however, did not last during the 1950s. The result was never a full recovery, but the perpetual state of loss and melancholy that eventually became a part of the city’s identity.”

While photographing Istanbul, Pferschy took pictures of the landscape and used distance as an important factor to bring about its beauty.

“The city was perceived as an aesthetic object interacting with the natural beauty of the landscape that could only be appreciated from a distance,” Dogan said. “Dissociation of the travelers from the city life corresponded to the aesthetic distance in the panoramic views of the city.”

While displaying Pferschy’s image of the Young Women’s Institute in Ankara, Dogan explained how the nature of the picture — as being devoid of people — became characteristic of the photographs taken during that time.

“In urban scale, photographing urban landscape as deserted space, places of emptiness and silence was started as technical necessity due to long exposure times, later acquired symbolic meanings in accounts of the modern metropolis,” Dogan said. “Ankara’s image of a modern city excluded the residential areas of the old city quarters and semirural peripheral views.”

Lauren Cesiro, a first-year graduate student studying photography, said she appreciated how the talk expanded her knowledge on the history of the subject.

“It’s always really great to hear about any kind of photography that’s happening, and expanding our idea of history as a photographer,” Cesiro said.

Mariah Postlewait, a second-year graduate student studying photography, said that the talk made her wonder about the history of the United States during the same time period.

“I didn’t know a ton about photography in Turkey, so it’s really great,” Postlewait said. “It’s really interesting and I like looking at that and thinking about the [events] going on in the United States in the 1930s.”