The new Baldwin photo exhibit at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Grand Army Plaza branch is not calling attention to itself, mounted as it is in the busy lobby and on the second floor. You may even miss it altogether. On display is a suite of photos that have not been seen by the general public—which is the obvious draw. But even what is known seems new. A famous photo in the collection shows a seated Baldwin at a typewriter in an enclosed room, cigarette in hand, some light emanating from a window. He is looking at his machine. Everyone in the world is looking at him. Most recognize this author’s photo but do not know its setting or its circumstances: it is an icon, a talisman. Baldwin is the archetypal author in the archetypal room, alone so he can look outward. It was Sedat Pakay, a young Turkish photographer and filmmaker and friend of Baldwin’s, who composed the photograph, and the room, Baldwin’s own in Istanbul, the on-and-off residence he took up from 1961 to 1971, precipitated by a psychic block that made writing arduous.
The text that weighed on him at the time of his arrival to Turkey was his novel “Another Country,” then unfinished. The turbulence of civil-rights America, too. Baldwin is said to have come to the residence of Engin Cezzar, a Turkish actor who played Giovanni in a workshop of a stage production of “Giovanni’s Room” in New York, completely spent. Baldwin in flight. We associate him with two countries. The land of his birth, the United States—in which he, a Black man who loved men—could not be physically or psychically safe. The land of his expatriation, France, where he experienced, first, a relative sexual and racial freedom, and, as he aged, a critical confrontation with his own Americanness. A kind of frustration with Baldwin is his alienation from African intellectuals, as he himself describes in his essay “Princes and Powers,” an analysis of the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held in Paris, in 1956. And so his time in Turkey—in Istanbul, the port city that predated the creation of the “Western World” and the attendant pillaging of the “Dark Continent”—figures in the Baldwin narrative as a liminal space. This is the space explored in the Brooklyn Public Library exhibit, which is titled “Turkey Saved My Life: Baldwin in Istanbul, 1961-1971,” featuring photographs made by Pakay.