A rock and a soft place.

15 October 2013

This week, while Ville was in South Africa (to introduce Turkish Ministry of Justice officials and law faculty deans to new methods of access to justice, and to Clinical Legal Education), my sister Hellen and two of her four boys came to stay. Hellen living in the UK, and me in Istanbul, I don't get to see her (or any of my other 7 siblings) half as much as I would like.

I loved getting the chance to document Hellen's loveliness this week. I love the texture of her skin as she gets older and the depth of her personality. I love that her beauty is not frivolous but forged through 37 years of trying to do right by herself and others. Around the time I first arrived in Istanbul Hellen had to give birth to a baby whose heart had already stopped beating. A couple of weeks later she sent me a picture of her holding her lifeless daughter in her arms. It is an amazing example of the power of photographs. Hellen, on what I am sure remains the worst day of her life, dared to look at her daughter and document her own pain. With that photograph she declared that her daughter was a real character in her story, and that her death would not be left unspoken.

I was thinking about that picture a lot this week after my friend Jo posted a self-portrait of her new haircut in preparation for her baby daughter's funeral. The power of the picture was immense. A marker on the journey to recovery from such devastating loss. I felt such pride in her for facing the camera. A few days later she carried her daughter's coffin into the church. A true hero of her own story. And a beautiful one at that.

When editing pictures it is too easy to remove the depth that been hard won through thousands of tiny victories. You can slide away definition in a stroke. Every day, looking at photographs, I see teenagers and children whose documenters have chosen to given them skin so flawless it has ceased to exist. Girls on the cusp of womanhood have all the character removed from their skin, and then their eyes sharpened and saturated. My own skin is a messy patchwork thanks to 'teenage' acne that lasted well past my first grey hairs, and heavy brown pigmentation that appears with every pregnancy and period of stress, and in between. It's hard to face the camera but I am equally determined not to edit my life away. While we were sharing a glorious moment, eating breakfast over-looking the Bosphorus, Hellen said that we are still beautiful but the range has become much greater: catch us in harsh light on a bad day and we can be ugly. I like this idea of having greater range, despite it being hard to see in the mirror.

Early on Sunday morning Ville arrived home full of tales of incredible heroes. We all felt overwhelmed by his experiences. While he slept off a night spent flying I dressed Neve in a Zulu necklace, fresh from Africa, and Hellen and I took the kids to dance to street musicians on Istiklal Street. Neve bears battle scars from a week in which she learnt to hold her own against her same-age cousin, and there is no way I am editing them away.