Photographic counter-memory as urban resilience: Evaluating Murat Germen’s photographic practice in Istanbul’s urban transformation since 2000

Abstract

In the post-2000 period, Istanbul has become one of the most intense cases of neoliberal spatial restructuring in the developing world, driven by state-market alliances that systematically opened non-commodified spaces to real estate capital. This article argues that such transformations operate not only in economic terms but also as mnemonic policies: the erasure of collective memory is a structural mechanism through which hegemonic power generates docile space and undermines counter-hegemonic potentials. The article distinguishes two modalities of erasure across two cases of urban transformation. The first is aggressive erasure, exemplified by Fikirtepe, where the accelerated application of Law on the Transformation of Areas Under Disaster Risk outpaced community resistance and made the continuity of embodied and collective memory impossible. The second is aesthetic recoding, operating in the transformation of Bağdat Avenue in Kadıköy, where the gradual replacement of neighbourhood-based social life by luxury apartments and commercial consumption spaces enacts what Neil Leach calls 'aesthetic anaesthesia'. Against this backdrop, the article treats the photographic practice of Murat Germen - a photographer and academic who holds the most extensive archive of Istanbul's contemporary transformation - as its primary object. Drawing on the counter-archive - the photographic refusal of the terms of official representation - the article examines Germen’s counter-memorial narratives across both sites and their public resonance. His Fikirtepe documentation captures the threshold at which anamnesis remains possible; his Bağdat Avenue work reveals the gap between spatial promise and eroded identity. Employing Gillian Rose's qualitative visual methodology alongside an analysis of Germen's reception across institutional contexts, the article finds that photographic counter-memory constitutes a meaningful but constrained form of ‘urban resilience’ - understood not in its technocratic sense of 'bouncing back', but as the social capacity of communities to sustain contested memory under conditions of imposed transformation - a formulation that draws on critical resilience scholarship. The article's primary theoretical contribution is a distinction between two functions of photographic counter-memory, whose efficacy is conditioned by the modality of erasure each confronts. A testimonial function - the preservation of evidence for future challenge - operates robustly across both erasure modalities, while a mobilizing function - the generation of counter-hegemonic solidarity - depends on the legibility of loss that each modality of mnemonic erasure permits. Photographic counter-memory does not reverse physical transformation, but it sustains the social capacity to recognize, archive, and contest ongoing erasure.