I first knew Aslı by her voice. A WhatsApp call, early September, the sound of Istanbul traffic behind her: “My wedding is in a month. But I can’t wait for my wedding day. I need a day for myself.”
This is a kind of request I love. A solo bridal session — what the West calls “bridal portraits” and what we here still lack a proper word for, though it’s increasingly asked: to wear your wedding dress alone, with no one beside you, for a single morning that belongs only to you.
Why alone?
Aslı put it this way: “The wedding day won’t be mine, it will be everyone’s. I love everyone. But on that day you become a guest in your own life, even in the photographs. Here, on top of this valley, I want to see only myself.”
The dress had been sewn in an atelier in Ankara over four months — four metres of tulle, hand-stitched lace, a plain white satin skirt. Aslı had carried it here in a suitcase; when she opened it in the hotel lobby, the receptionist did not hide her tears.
The White Valley, 05:45
Twenty minutes by road from Göreme to the White Valley; another twenty minutes on foot up to the highest platform. Early September; air still, 12°C, high cloud keeping the sun soft.
Aslı changed at the edge of the valley. We waited for a group of seven hikers to pass below, and then climbed to the platform. The four metres of tulle had travelled folded from Ankara; released into the wind, it opened itself.
Everyone talks about a photographer’s light. I think, instead, every bride has her own silence. My job is not to break it.
I made the first thirty frames on the platform. Aslı didn’t pose. She walked, she held the tulle, she paused and breathed. Once she laughed — a strand of hair in her mouth. I kept that frame; it’s the best of the set.
Descent to Çavuşin
From the platform we walked down to Çavuşin’s old churches — not the well-known 5th-century John the Baptist church, but a smaller nameless cave chapel just below it. On the wall: a faint fresco fragment, a female saint, her face worn by time.
Aslı sat under that fresco. We didn’t gather the dress; the hem gathered dust, no matter. This was her day; it would be washed. Light fell through window slits, changing every minute — the two frames I made there might be twenty seconds apart, but the light is completely different in each.
Red Valley, returning
In the afternoon we moved to the Red Valley. Two hours before sunset we reached the western ridge; the sun was turning the chimneys old-gold. I made the last 14 frames there. Aslı was tired by then; 11 kilometres in a wedding dress. But that tiredness reads well on camera — the tension falls away and the woman stays.
I delivered the envelope two weeks before her wedding. Aslı wrote only this: “I’m at ease now. The rest I can celebrate.”
