REVIEW Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era Özge Baykan Calafato London: Tauris, 2022 xii + 241 pages. ISBN 9780755643271 Reviewed by SERPIL ATAMAZ Making the Modern Turkish Citizen is a welcome addition to the growing literature on modernization, nation building, and identity formation in the early Turkish Republic. Based on the cultural analysis of sixty photographs that consist of individual, couple, and group portraits, this book examines the role of vernacular photography in the construc- tion of modern Turkish citizenship. By focusing on the photographs of the urban middle class, taken by studio and itinerant photographers or as amateur snapshots in the 1920s and 1930s, Calafato reveals the “classed and gendered nature of the emerging new and Republican Turkish identity” (5). Informed by theoretical works on photography, gender, and visual culture, as well as the historiography on early republican Turkey, this book explores the relationship between the evolutions of photography and Turkish modernity during the period of tran- sition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Adopting Elizabeth Edwards’s notion of “theaters of the self,” Judith Butler’s theory of “gender performativity,” and Nelson Goodman’s concept of “worldmaking,” it discusses how middle-class men and women “saw and wanted to present themselves, privately and publicly” (6). Calafato argues that “urban-middle-class citizens largely endorsed and actively participated in the making of the new Turkish man and woman through their own pho- tographic representations” (176). However, their actions were informed not only by state policies but also by their professional objectives and class aspirations, which were influ- enced by the economic, technological, social, and cultural developments of the 1920s and 1930s, including “fashion trends, movies, and the increasing availability of modern con- sumer items such as amateur cameras” (176). In that respect, “Kemalist reforms catered to the social aspirations of the already modernizing middle classes” (177). JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 20:3 • November 2024 DOI 10.1215/15525864-11412104 • © 2024 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 373 ADVANCE PUBLICATION Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/jmews/article-pdf/doi/10.1215/15525864-11412104/2141417/11412104.pdf?guestAccessKey=ce3aff92-ddac-4787-bc65-063e6bad7cdf by CALIFORNIA STATE UNIV user on 20 September 2024