Photographer unearths stories of the first Turkish women who migrated to the Netherlands
Çiğdem Yüksel spotlights the experiences of her grandmother’s generation in her new book If Only You Knew
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Trawling through the image archives of a Dutch news agency, Çiğdem Yüksel came across image after image of women in headscarves, all captured at a distance. The Turkish-Dutch photographer was investigating the depiction of Muslim women in Dutch media. She found they had been reduced to anonymous faces in crowds, emblematic of prevailing stereotypes about Islam and immigrant communities in the Netherlands.
Many of the women resembled her grandmother, who moved to the Netherlands from Turkey in the 1970s, and died when Yüksel was 14. But the stories the photographs told seemed incomplete.
“I started looking at our historical archives because I thought the media was focusing on something else and maybe we had archives in the Netherlands that show a more layered and complex image of my grandmother’s generation,” Yüksel says.
It was during that search in 2020 that Yüksel came across photographer Bertien van Manen’s seminal 1979 photobook Vrouwen te Gast (Women as Guests), in which van Manen had photographed immigrant women in the Netherlands from countries including Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia and Greece. Released by the feminist publishing house Sara in Amsterdam, the book had a profound impact.
“It got all sorts of things started for these women … to whom no one had ever paid any attention before. Dutch language courses for women were organised. Neighbours went to visit the women in their homes,” van Manen, who died in 2024, told Aperture magazine in 2015.
Several women had moved to the Netherlands following a family reunification act instituted in 1974. They joined husbands and male relatives who had arrived under the Dutch government’s guest worker programme to address a labour shortage in the wake of the second world war. Yüksel’s grandmother worked in a fish factory in the port city of IJmuiden five days a week, while her husband was employed by a steel company.
“I knew so little about my own grandmother and her whole generation,” Yüksel says. “How they felt, what their dreams were, what their expectations were.” This absence of information prompted Yüksel to begin photographing and collecting oral histories from the women of her grandmother’s generation in 2022. That work would form the basis of her recently published photobook If Only You Knew and its accompanying exhibition at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.
Through a call-out on social media, Yüksel connected with the children and grandchildren of first-generation immigrants from Turkey. They all agreed that the stories of their relatives had been rendered invisible in Dutch public consciousness. “Why don’t we know anything about them? Why can’t we find anything about them? I got dozens of reactions,” she says.
Yüksel’s project integrated elements of van Manen’s work in Women as Guests. In February 2022, she reached out to the photographer, explaining how formative her work had been for her. Within hours, van Manen replied, inviting Yüksel to her home in Amsterdam. “It was like seeing an old friend after a long time — as if we knew each other already,” Yüksel says.
Six of the 22 women that Yüksel photographed were also featured in the images van Manen made back in the 70s. “When I visited them and they opened the door, it was like time-travelling,” Yüksel says. “Forty-five years later, I saw the women I had first seen in the pictures.”
Photographed in a makeshift studio in their living rooms, Yüksel’s subjects shared their memories of arriving in the Netherlands, as well as images from their own family albums, capturing their lives both before and after emigration. Several told stories of initial hardships — the language, their homesickness, being ridiculed in the streets for their clothing and appearance.
İclal Sürmeli, whose photograph appears on the book’s cover, told Yüksel about her longing for the mountains of Urfa, a city in south-eastern Turkey, where she was from, and her attempt to catch a glimpse of them by climbing up through the hatch of the attic in her new home in the Netherlands. Necibe Akbulut did not put clothes in her closet for the first 10 years that she lived in the Netherlands, leaving them in her suitcase, believing that she would soon return to Turkey.
Dutch government policy in those initial years did not provide a framework for long-term integration. Children were made to pick subjects at school that would be useful for when they returned to their country of origin and few government facilities existed for women who could not speak Dutch. It was only in the mid-1980s that foreigners were permitted to vote in municipal elections.
“Most women came here with the idea that it was temporary. The idea was to work in the Netherlands for a few years and then go back with the family, build a house with the money they earned or pay for a wedding,” Yüksel says. “But things went differently. The children grew up here. They went to school, got married. Grandchildren came. Sixty years later you look back and you think, ‘I built a new life here.’”
Certain aspects of Yüksel’s research elicited surprising discoveries. She came across the HTKB (Hollanda Türkiye Kadınlar Birliği), the first association of women of Turkish origin in the Netherlands, formed in 1975. As well as teaching literacy courses, sewing lessons, health education and Dutch language, they were involved in protests against anti-abortion laws and nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s.
“As a feminist my whole life, most of the time I heard stories about white icons,” Yüksel says. Learning about the HTKB’s role in the women’s movement was an affirming discovery. “These women are women from Turkey. They look like me, they look like my family and we have a shared history. They fought for the rights of people like my grandmother back in that time.”
Within an increasingly hostile climate for immigrants in Europe, fuelled in the Netherlands by far-right populist figures such as Geert Wilders, Yüksel’s work tells the stories of her subjects on their own terms. The narrative of immigration to the Netherlands, she believes, has often been shaped by people outside immigrant communities and influenced by their own biases.
“I don’t want to believe that that’s our story,” she says. “Archives tell us who we are. I wanted to give these stories and these photos a place, to make sure that this part of who we are is integrated in our Dutch archives.”
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