Inspired by: Josephine Powell

INSPIRED BY | MASTERS & MUSES | CABANA MAGAZINE

Susan Scollay explores the extraordinary life and legacy of her close friend and mentor, Josephine Powell (1919-2007), the renowned photographer, collector and intrepid traveller - who spent her life documenting art, textiles, architecture and ethnographic subjects along the famed Silk Road routes.

BY SUSAN SCOLLAY | MASTERS & MUSES | 11 SEPTEMBER 2024

Josephine Powell, photographed by Jürgen Frank; Courtesy Vehbi Koç Foundation

In 1955 a small American woman with piercing blue eyes arrived in Istanbul from Rome, driving a Land Rover and with her dog and newly acquired Hasselblad camera for company. She had been commissioned to photograph Byzantine mosaics and had to wait a few weeks for her exposed film to be developed.

To fill the time, she decided to drive further east into Anatolia, a journey that then required foreigners to obtain official permission. She became the surprised recipient of the first ever such permit and set off on a journey that would take her all the way to Iran, reset the compass of her life, and lead her to form a significant legacy.

Josephine Powell, the renowned photographer, traveller and collector was born in Manhattan in 1919. An only child, both her parents had died before she graduated with a degree in social work from Columbia University in 1945. Within a year she left the USA to work resettling war refugees and displaced people in Europe until setting herself up in Rome in 1953 as a self-taught photographer.

In a never-before-published photograph, Josephine Powell is pictured at her stunning home in Cihangir, Turkey, with the author's daughter © Susan Scollay

Using her inheritance as backup funding, she travelled extensively in Greece, North Africa, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan photographing art, architecture and ethnographic subjects, sometimes on commission. She was drawn to peope who lived in rural areas and to nomads, finding beauty in their daily activities, handcrafted domestic items, tools and clothing. She began to buy things – carved wooden boxes, glass beads, firelighters, kitchen tools – and, as she would say later with a shrug and a smile, found it very hard to stop buying things she liked.

Photographing and seeking out acquisitions for Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum in Pakistan and Morocco in the mid and late-1960s focussed her interest in artisans, their products and the domestic sphere. She developed a sympathetic eye for women going about their daily work, often capturing them through her lens in those days in black and white and in shadowy light. Her feel for colour became more pronounced after she moved to Istanbul in 1973. Asked to produce a small book on the flatwoven rugs, or kilims, of Anatolia, Josephine found that little was known about the kilims or their makers. And so, she set out to document Turkey’s nomadic weavers and investigate how and why their graphically powerful kilims were made.

The more Josephine photographed Anatolian kilims on location, the more she began to seek them out from dealers in the bazaar. Pictured, a kilim from her personal collection of nearly 200. Image courtesy Vehbi Koç Foundation.

From her initial base in Şişli, and later from her apartment in Cihangir that looked straight over the Bosphorus to the domes and towers of the Topkapi Palace, Josephine set out with a series of interpreters to follow the Saçıkara tribe. Over the years, she travelled with them as they moved with their herds and camels from their winter quarters in south-eastern Turkey up into their summer pastures. Here, the women set up their looms outside their black tents and worked on the large-scale weavings that captivated Josephine both in design and in color.

"They managed so well to conform to my concept of what was interesting and what was beautiful," she told Andrew Finkel in an interview a year before she died. The more she photographed Anatolian kilims on location in tents and in regional mosques where they had been donated over the years, the more she began to seek them out from dealers in the bazaar. Without exception they addressed her as ‘madame’ and looked forward to her visits and amusing stories. Small in stature and modest to a fault, she was not a formidable person, but her reputation was.

Kilims from Josephine Powell's personal collection, on display in Istanbul at an exhibition organised by the Vehbi Koç Foundation.

Instantly recognisable with her weathered face, newly-rolled cigarette in hand and gravelly voice, her status was almost legendary and all doors opened for her. I met her in 1984, seemingly by chance and within hours of arriving in Istanbul on my first ever visit to Turkey. For the next 23 years, she was my friend, mentor and, whenever I was in Istanbul, a generous provider of a bed and shower in the dusty wonderland of her downstairs apartment. Here she stored the overflow of her kilim collection (almost 200), alongside Central Asian ikats, hats, drop spindles, sets of beads, carved chairs, cradles, coffee roasters, and an entire wheel from the ceiling framework of a yurt propped precariously on its side next to the guest bed.

At the time we met she was busily involved with the DOBAG project, the first women’s co-operative in Turkey to produce carpets with traditional designs and natural dyes. Her tiny kitchen overflowed with handfuls of madder roots, chamomile, sage, dyer’s sumac, gall nuts and oak shells as she and the project’s founder, Harald Böhmer, worked to replicate the saturated, natural color of the oldest and most beautiful weavings.

Pictured, an Anatolian kilim from Josephine Powell's personal collection of nearly 200 kilim textiles. Image courtesy Vehbi Koç Foundation.

Josephine died at her desk in January 2007 while working on notes to accompany an exhibition of her kilims scheduled as part of an ICOC conference. After her death, everything she collected in Anatolia and her related field notes and photographs, passed into the care of the Vehbi Koç Foundation. In June this year, they exhibited a group of her kilims and weaving tools in the rooms of a waterside summer house. Curated by the nearby Sadberk Hanim Museum, the significance and bold artistry of her kilim collection, and the importance of the photographs that provide them with context, will be appreciated for generations to come.

Josephine Powell leaves a legacy she could not have foreseen. She ‘chose life’ away from her privileged origins, and in doing so sought the kindness and company of strangers, as well as adventure, interest and beauty, as she headed - always - towards the east capturing a way of living that has all but gone today.