Reversing the Gaze

When photographer Pinar Yolaçan moved from Ankara to London at 17 for university, she found herself in a culture that felt foreign to her own.

One thing in particular stood out to her: the image of the queen of England, which she encountered on money, in the media, and throughout popular culture.

Yolaçan explored the figure of the queen in her series Perishables. From 2001 to 2004 she photographed older women, several of whom were professional character actors, wearing garments that recalled Victorian dress. Yolaçan designed and sewed each piece of clothing using rotting animal flesh, a pointed reference to what she describes as the “decay” of the imperial era.

One of Yolaçan’s portraits is currently on view at the Getty Center as part of In Dialogue, which pairs contemporary photographs with historical works. Her photograph hangs alongside Flemish painter Michael Sweerts’s Head of a Woman, an expressive study of an anonymous woman in the genre of the 17th-century tronie (face). Together, the works invite us to reflect on the “type” or “character study” in art and visual culture, as well as the ways in which artists have represented aging womanhood.

Yolaçan recently shared her perspective on portraiture, identity, and crafting what she calls “new historical fiction.”

Pinar Yolaçan

I love the idea of my work from Perishables hanging alongside 17th-century Flemish portraits. They come full circle this way. In my early photographic practice, my research involved a lot of portrait paintings from that period, which informed my work both conceptually and formally, especially in terms of lighting. They are photographs but stem from a painting and portrait tradition.

I also consulted ethnographic images when working on Perishables. For me, the “type” and “the other” are concepts stemming from colonialism and imperialism. In former British colonies, photography was used to create a narrative of superiority—the “advanced, civilized one” versus the “primitive” or “savage.” This was a form of racist typecasting. The legacies of these images are still felt today. For example, only a month after I moved to the United States, September 11 happened, and there were pictures of “Arabs” and “terrorists” in national mainstream media, which led to a decade of stereotyping and hate crimes for innocent Muslims in America. So these kinds of images are still present in different forms.

I began to tackle the question, “How can I, as ‘the other’ in this society, create images using my own fictional narratives and visual constructs and use contemporary photography as a tool to question these falsehoods?” I was interested in using these ideas in my work to create new historical fiction. That was something that I was remotely beginning to experiment with in Perishables, which turns the lens on those constructed, in the series, to represent the colonists of the British Empire.

The queen of England archetype, an imperial symbol of whiteness as purity—not just racially but as a feminine beauty ideal—has its roots in Western art history with the Classical Greco-Roman period. This idea of racial purity and superiority, and Caucasian skin as a representation of that, was enforced during the Victorian era as a justification for colonialism and slavery. In Perishables, when choosing the type of meat that I wanted to work with, whether it was tripe or chicken skin, I made sure that it matched the tones of the women’s skin. The meat became a metaphor for the monarchy, mapped onto an archetypal image or symbol of the Victorian female, the queen, and the idea of white supremacy—all concepts that were “rotting” when I began the series in 2001 and are still “rotting” in 2022. I also emphasized whiteness by using only daylight and accentuated it in the printing stage too.

For me, experiencing people through a camera becomes about your identity. The work is not so much about the people you’re trying to photograph; it’s a result of your interactions, of how they see you, where they think you’re from, what they think you look like. I don’t describe my work as being about identity, but eventually it is—the camera and the lens create a reverse gaze, a reverse process. It’s more like an exchange.

In Perishables, it was also about how my models looked at me. If you think about the gaze and the fact that I was so much younger than them and looked completely different—not just because I was younger but also because I’m from a different cultural background. Their gaze was very different from my own. It was one thing that they were wearing these garments, but it was another thing that they were also interacting with a photographer who was not their contemporary, not their equal, not their age, not their race. I think that that was part of my experiment, along with this idea of the type.