Istanbul’s Snow White

Nes ran a blog out of Istanbul where she wrote about vegetarian pizzas, professional wrestling, and her deaf goldfish. That combination—specific, random, completely committed to its own internal logic—was what got her named blogger of the year on this journal, at a moment when I was paying close attention to what people were actually doing with the form.

For a photo project with photographer Ilker Sekeroglu, she played Snow White—black wig, red apple, the whole compressed fairy-tale iconography—which suited her in ways that were hard to articulate. Something about the archetype doing its own work, carrying its own weight, so that whoever inhabits it can exist inside it rather than straining to interpret it.

What I liked about Nes was the absence of a coherent theme. Writing from Istanbul about professional wrestling and vegetarian food and a goldfish that couldn’t hear was doing something native to that early blog era: strange, specific, and completely free from the pressure to have a brand or a niche or an angle. She was just interested in what she was interested in. The writing followed.