The book Hayal & Hakikat (translated as Dream & Reality) takes the form of two booklets with archival photographs drawn from the photograph albums of Abdulhamid II, the 34th Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, depicting prisoners from the early 20th century.

Abdul Hamid II utilized photography as a tool for documenting the modernization of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th century. A photography studio was built inside the Yıldız Palace and albums were reproduced and sent across the world as a testament to the progress of the Ottoman Empire. Abdul Hamid II himself rarely left Istanbul, but commissioned photographs so he could become acquainted with his own country that would otherwise be invisible to his eyes. Abdul Hamid II was obsessed with crime fiction and 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 had 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.” The photographs in the Hayal (Dream) section of the project show the subjects’ hands for the purpose of classification and possible amnesty. In the Hakikat (Fact) section, we see chained prisoners who are all sentenced to death and having nothing to do with the amnesty in question. Cemre Yeşil Gönenli has cropped out the faces of the subjects so their emotional state is ambiguous

The artist’s choice to leave the heads of the prisoners out of the frame, as if they had been cut off by the guillotine, could be interpreted as a brutal act. But in essence, this intervention is actually a gesture to save them; not to re-record their identities as criminals, discarding their crimes whatever they were, but rather to give them a second chance or even to give them back their freedom, and perhaps to try to forgive them. It is obvious that the “Dream” symbolizes the desire of these prisoners to be forgiven. “Fact,” on the other hand, reveals the actual circumstances of the prisoners. The fate of the individual prisoners, awaiting the judgement or forgiveness, remains unknown as no record of the Sultan’s verdict exists.
These photographs shed a comparable light on the troubling era at hand, where the line between ‘Dream’ and ‘Fact’ is often blurred at an alarming level. In a time of repression and arbitrary detentions, these images are like free speech written through history —a silent protest.