Fikret follows the life of Fikret Gül, a woman who has spent most of her life in agriculture and animal husbandry in a wooden house in Meşrutiyet Village, where time seems to move slowly. Married at the age of fourteen and brought from Ahmetli Village to Meşrutiyet, Fikret built a life shaped by labor, care, loss, and endurance.
I met Fikret by chance while photographing the old wooden houses of Şile. What began with her calling me into her garden gradually turned into one of the most intimate encounters of my life. Over time, she began to call me “my daughter,” and the distance between photographer and subject slowly transformed into a bond of trust.
The project documents Fikret’s daily routines, her solitude, and her attachment to life despite everything she has carried. The stove, the wooden house, the prepared meals, the objects left behind, and the changing seasons become fragments of a life shaped around repetition, survival, and memory.
Shortly before his death, her husband left behind a handmade photo album created from the pages of an old agenda. This album, together with the objects found in the house, opened another layer within the project: a dialogue between Fikret’s present solitude and the memories of a shared past.
Fikret is both a portrait and an archive. It is a quiet tribute to a woman’s life, her losses, her labor, and the fragile traces of love that remain within a house, an album, and the gestures of everyday life.