Hayal & Hakikat: A Handbook of Forgiveness & A Handbook of Punishment
by Cemre Yeşil Gönenli
Essay by Refik Akyüz Translated by Orhan Cem Çetin
Published September 2020
Co-published by FiLBooks & Gost Books
210 x 157 mm
3 book blocks (160 pages + 64 pages + 16 pages)
112 duotone images
Ziczac hardcover bound
ISBN 978-1-910401-50-7
Hayal & Hakikat won the ‘Award for Best Photography Book of the Year’ in the international category at PHotoESPAÑA 2021 Awards and the ’Best Published Book Award' at the 8th Singapore International Photography Festival. The book was also shortlisted for the ‘Photobook of the Year’ category in the 2020 Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards and the ‘Historical Book of the Year’ at The Rencontres d'Arles Book Awards 2021, and longlisted for Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards 2021.
Hayal & Hakikat by Cemre Yeşil Gönenli
"Hayal & Hakikat" contains photographs of 20th century prisoners from the photo albums of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Among Abdulhamid II's many interests were detective novels and crime fiction In the 25th year of his reign he ordered all murder convicts to be photographed with their hands visible, in preparation for a planned amnesty. He has been moved by pseudo-scientific information he had read in a crime novel that “any criminal with a thumb joint longer than the index finger joint, is inclined to murder.” To this end, the photographs in this book show the subjects’ hands for the purpose of classification.
They are presented in the book in categories – those chained with iron bracelets and those without. In the first section of the book (Dream), we see the hands of prisoners who were photographed for diagnostic purposes, as mentioned above, waiting to be forgiven. In the second section (Fact), there are prisoners in shackles who have received life sentences and are excluded from the amnesty.
Artist Cemre Yeşil Gönenli’s choice to crop out the prisoners’ heads—as if guillotined—might beinterpreted as a brutal act. However, this intervention essentially aims to save them, to give them asecond chance at life, restore their freedom, and perhaps forgive them, regardless of their crimes,instead of re-recording them as criminals. The ‘Dream’ of the title refers to the inmates’ desire forrelease and the ‘Fact’, their actual circumstances. The fate of the individual prisoners remainsunknown as there is no record of the verdict of Abdulhamid II after viewing the hands awaiting forgiveness.