The Republic Behind the Scenes

The Republic Behind the Scenes is an exhibition of archive press photographs at Pera Museum, Istanbul, from 29 September 2026 to 28 March 2027. The Istanbul Research Institute organised it to mark its 20th anniversary, with İdil Çetin and Ahmet Ersoy as curators. The photographs on show date from the 1920s to the early 1950s and record daily life in Istanbul during the first decades of the republic.

Most of the pictures were taken by two photojournalists of the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Namık Görgüç and his student Selahattin Giz. Görgüç was born in Istanbul in 1895. In 1924, the year Cumhuriyet was founded, he set up its photo service with Benli Kemal. The negatives carry no labels, and many frames are the work of other press photographers of the period.

The images come from an archive of 90,052 negatives held in the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection since 2011. Giz built it from his own press files and the work of colleagues, Görgüç above all, and kept and enlarged it after his mentor died in 1947. The selection draws on its first group of 12,586 glass and 8,097 acetate negatives.

Many of these frames are flawed, damaged or at odds with the official picture of the young republic, and archives would usually pass them over. The photographs show the work of news photographers at the scene, and the people the period often left out: the poor, prisoners and passers-by in the street. Subjects include a crowd awaiting an Aviation Lottery draw at Beyazıt, athletes at Sirkeci Station, and Görgüç himself with a camera on the Beyazıt Fire Tower. The exhibition sets out neither to feed nostalgia nor to replace one official story with another. It centres on the public, the cumhur, of the republic and asks how those years might be remembered differently. A catalogue accompanies the show, with school workshops and tours in Turkish Sign Language.