Mary Ellen Mark, Beautiful Emine Posing, Trabzon, Turkey, 1965
It all begins with an inquiry. In 2015, a curator entrusts a young, then-unknown Istanbulite, Sabiha Gimen, with a singular mission: to find a little girl photographed half a century earlier by the legendary Mary Ellen Mark in an alley of Trabzon, a Black Sea port in northeastern Turkey. The picture, Beautiful Emine Posing, has travelled the world. A few phone calls, and the trail comes back to life.
Emine Kolay now lives in Gölcük, an hour from Istanbul, with her husband — the teenage love she ran away with at sixteen - and their two children. When questioned, she remembers in vivid detail an elegant stranger with a "tourist looking" air, camera slung over her shoulder, lingering in her street.
May 7, 2026
