If Only You Knew

‘If only you knew…’ or ‘Bir bilsen…’ in Turkish. That’s how many women start sharing the story of their lives with photographer Çiğdem Yüksel. These women’s stories remind her of her own grandmother, they all left their homes in Turkey to start a new life in the Netherlands. Their stories are starkly absent in our visual archives.

Yüksel brings about change in that lack of representation by sharing their photographs from family albums, interviews and portraits. The women speak about the pain of migration, homesickness, of getting lost and finding your way. Working, taking care of children, learning the language. Love and unhappy marriages. Being restricted as a woman and emancipation. Their contribution to the Dutch economy as factory workers or cleaners, and their struggle for freedom and equal rights. The stories are diverse, layered, ambiguous – just like any other human experience.

A number of these women were captured in the ‘70s by photographer Bertien van Manen in Vrouwen te Gast (‘Women as Guests’) (1979). Yüksel searched to find them and take new portraits. Now in their sixties and eighties, time is running out to give them a place in Dutch history.