In a 'House of Photos' in Northern Kurdistan, Children Capture Their World on Film

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) - In a dimly lit room glowing with the soft red light of safelamps, eight-year-old Zeynep waits to see the images she has captured. Her photographs, currently trapped as shadows on a delicate strip of negative film, are about to materialize.

"How big is your curiosity?" asks her mentor, Amar Kilic, as he develops the roll in a sink.

"As big as the world," she replies.

Zeynep is one of several local and migrant children participating in Fotohane Darkroom, a two-month analogue photography workshop situated near Türkiye's borders with Syria and Iraq. 

Founded in 2024 by Kilic and Syrian photographer Serbest Salih, the project takes its name, which translates to "house of photo" in Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, and Persian, from a suggestion made by the children themselves.

According to a report by Agence France-Presse (AFP), featuring photography by Yasin Akgul and video journalism by Ionut Iordachescu, the initiative serves as far more than an artistic outlet. 

In Mardin, Northern Kurdistan (southeastern Türkiye) a city where ancient Mesopotamian history intersects with the complex realities of modern migration, the workshop empowers vulnerable youth to document their own lives, rather than having their stories told by outsiders.

"From loading film to developing it and printing their own photographs, they do everything by themselves," Kilic told AFP. "They get to set and write their own rules."

A Refuge in the Magic Room

Mardin's winding streets and honey-colored stone walls draw tourists from around the globe, but the city also hosts low-income families and thousands of refugees who fled the devastating civil war in neighboring Syria.

Among the students wielding small black cameras are children who arrived from Damascus in 2014 and 2015, fleeing the brutal advance of Islamic State jihadists. For these young photographers, the workshop offers a space of stability and creative exploration.

"I'm very excited when I take pictures; it's all very interesting for us," 11-year-old Nihal told AFP as she searched the ancient alleyways for her next frame.

Their teacher, 32-year-old Serbest Salih, intimately understands the trauma of displacement.

Salih fled the Kurdish town of Kobane in Western Kurdistan (northern Syria) when it came under ISIS assault in 2014. Since arriving in Türkiye, he has utilized photography to build bridges of tolerance and integration between refugee and host communities.

Salih prefers to deflect attention from his own struggles, focusing instead on the transformative power of the medium. For him, the choice of analogue over digital photography is deliberate and philosophical.

"Analogue photography is about self-confidence," Salih explained to AFP. "When taking a digital photograph, you might think about deleting it on the spot. But with film, they spend the whole workshop thinking and feeling every one of those 36 frames, and only see them at the end. And their photos are beautiful."

Developing Confidence

The culmination of this patient process occurs in the darkroom, a space the children refer to as the "magic room." Here, under the guidance of Murat Kilic, who instructs them in development and printing, the students watch their perspectives materialize on paper.

"Seeing an image on a completely white sheet of paper, bringing to life with their own hands an image they themselves took, creates a very special feeling for the children," Kilic told AFP. "They say: 'I was able to produce this.'"

The initiative, primarily funded through international support events and donations, has garnered global attention. This summer, the children's photographs are being exhibited in Italy, Belgium, Britain, and Indonesia, offering an international audience a rare, unmediated glimpse into their world.

While the workshop currently operates from a permanent center in Mardin, its founders envision a return to Salih's original 2015 model: a mobile darkroom operating out of a secondhand caravan, reaching vulnerable children in remote villages along the border.

In a region defined by historical endurance and the ongoing challenges of migration, Fotohane is teaching a new generation not just how to look through a lens, but how to see their own potential.