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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how migrant photographs mobilized after return shape mnemonic ties, belonging, and differentiation among Turkish return migrants, showing how visual practices becomes a productive site of conflict through which transnational identities are negotiated.

Paper long abstract

The bilateral labor agreement between Turkey and Germany in 1961 initiated the Turkish worker migration to Europe. While many migrants eventually returned to Turkey, still return did not signify an end to the migration. This study argues that return migrants forge mnemonic ties to the hostland through visual practices, specifically vernacular photographs produced in Germany and brought to Turkey. Departing from the concept of "travelling memory," this study examines these photographs not merely as carriers of personal memories, but as visual sites of differentiation and tension shaped by migrants' experiences of place-making.

Drawing on life-story interviews and photo-elicitation with first- and second-generation Turkish returnees, the research explores how photographs reconstruct belonging by simultaneously connecting returnees to Germany and polarizing them from fellow Turkish migrants. These images create a contested space where migrants claim to “be like a German,” narrating cultural and social practices that distance them from the collective "worker migrant" history.

In this context, photographs allow returnees to shape ways of seeing the past that articulate selective forms of belonging across homeland and hostland. By foregrounding the afterlives of migrant photographs in post-return contexts, this study demonstrates how visual practices form transnational identities that are continually reworked in the present. Ultimately, this study argues that photographs allow Turkish returnees to navigate the complexities of transnational subjectivity as they negotiate status, difference, and memory within the Turkish social landscape. This visual approach reveals the multiple and polarized layers of the post-return experience.