Soldier photographs: Recollections of manhood, icons of nationalism

Soldier Photographs: Recollections of Manhood, Icons of Nationalism

The soldier portrait photographs which are ignored academically and artistically will be examined in this presentation as discursive elements of nationalism, militarism and masculinity.  As a form of family photographs, soldier portrait photographs are produced as indivual representation forms of political identites in micro level which are aiming to articulate with hegemonic ideological structures of the nation.

The research is structured in three sections. First, the production process of these photographs, which are designed and modified by means of photoshop, will be described through the interviews conducted with the portrait photographers and the regular soldiers in Ankara in Summer of 2011. Second, a content analyse will be done according to the sample photographs which are collected during the interviews, and by cataloging the most outshining images, it will be comprised an image repertoir. These image repertoir will be interpreted according to their relation with the discourse of family, nation, women and military. And third, how the photographs are being distributed among the personal networks like family and friendship circles will be subjected in the paper.

In short, through these three sections, the paper attempts to see what is the function of these photographs in constructing the personal political identities and in which ways they reinforced the mainstream discourses of nationalism and manhood.