Çiğdem Yüksel wins Prize for Storytelling 2024

Prize for Storytelling 2024 – Çiğdem Yüksel – If Only You Knew – The first generation of women from Turkey in the Netherlands

‘If Only You Knew…’‘ or ‘Bir bilsen…’ in Turkish. This is how many women begin their life stories when Çiğdem Yüksel visits them. Starting in the late 1960s, the first women from Turkey came to the Netherlands to build a new life here. Yüksel portrayed 22 women from this generation. She chronicled their stories, collected photographs from their family albums and made both powerful and loving photographic portraits of them.

The stories tell of the pain of migration, homesickness, getting lost and finding your way. They are about working, caring for children and learning the language. About love and unhappy marriages. About being curtailed as a woman and emancipation. About their contribution to the Dutch economy as factory workers or cleaners, and their fight for freedom and equal rights. The stories are diverse, layered and ambiguous, as any human experience is.

Yüksel missed images in public sources that do justice to the first generation of women from Turkey, like her grandmother. She found no museum or archive in the Netherlands where she or generations after her could see and understand who these women were. It lacked a representative archive that showed what their lives were like and where their story began. With If Only You Knew, Yüksel gives the stories of the first generation of women from Turkey a lasting place in Dutch history.

Among the few existing visual materials is the 1979 book Vrouwen te Gast, by documentary photographer Bertien van Manen, who died last year. Some of the women Van Manen photographed, Yüksel portrayed.

For more information about Prize for Storytelling 2024: Stichting de Zilveren Camera