Opinion | The Changing Colors of Istanbul

But on Jan. 19, 2007, my friend Hrant Dink, a journalist, was killed outside the offices of his newspaper, shot three times in the back of the head for speaking bravely and openly about the Armenian genocide. A few days after his assassination, one of his killers, who had been arrested, said on camera that I was the next target.

I had spoken about the same taboo subjects as my slain friend. I too had lamented a lack of freedom of thought in our country. Some nationalists had filed lawsuits against me, accusing me of insulting Turkishness.

And then, the Turkish government assigned me with some bodyguards. It is partly to my bodyguards that I owe my nighttime street photography expeditions. In the beginning, I was assigned three bodyguards. Going anywhere with the three veritable giants following me was difficult, and a little embarrassing.

In the late 2000s, I was not spending much time in Turkey, and when I did return home, I mostly avoided venturing outside. A few years later the threats began to fade away, and three bodyguards were reduced to one. I got used to walking around with a bodyguard. I would wonder what my bodyguard thought as he followed me through the same orange-hued streets at night. Sometimes, after he’d been following me at a relative distance, I would realize from the sound of his footsteps that he had edged closer, and I would know then that we must be approaching one of the more dangerous parts of the city.

Having a single bodyguard had completely altered my relationship with Istanbul. I would simply slip on a baseball cap, pull the visor low over my face and venture into Istanbul’s most disreputable districts without anybody recognizing or stopping me. Eventually I started taking a digital Leica with me to photograph these mysterious and distant neighborhoods. There was something enormously appealing in the knowledge that I could document the whole city now, for as long as I had my bodyguard with me.

Whenever I would take photographs in neighborhoods of Istanbul that lay beyond the purview of tourists, someone would always interrupt me and ask what there was to photograph in their ordinary, impoverished streets. Mostly they didn’t want me taking pictures at all, or they would demand that I obtain their permission first, as if to acknowledge their authority over those streets.