Tobacco has long shaped the working lives of families in parts of Türkiye. I photographed the subject in Trabzon in 1981 and returned to it in Adıyaman in 2014, where cultivation and small-scale processing remained closely tied to household labour. In Adıyaman, I followed the work from the field to the family home, interested not only in the crop itself but in the hours, skills and shared responsibilities behind it.
One morning, I met İsmail and his wife at four o’clock, while it was still dark, and went with them to their field. The leaves had to be picked before sunrise. As they worked, the sticky sap from the tobacco accumulated on their hands, leaving a dark residue that made the task more difficult. We had breakfast together in the field and returned home at about ten o’clock, carrying the day’s harvest.
At the house, the work continued. Family members gathered beneath the arbor to thread the leaves onto long strings for drying. Using a metal needle attached to the string, they pierced the leaves one after another and arranged them carefully. By noon, that stage of the day’s work was finished. From the early hours in the field to the final rows of hanging leaves, every member of the family had contributed.
The harvest was only one part of the process. After drying, tobacco could be prepared in small workshops, including workshops beneath houses in the city, and packed for sale elsewhere in Türkiye. The people I met worked within an uncertain economic environment, and their hope was straightforward: that the effort they invested would bring a fair return. I wanted the photographs to make that labour visible without separating the product from the lives of those who produced it.
This portfolio received a Humanity Photography Award in China in 2015, in the Production and Commerce category of the awards organised by the China Folklore Photographic Association in cooperation with UNESCO. For me, however, its most enduring meaning lies in the morning spent with İsmail and his family: the darkness before dawn, the tobacco leaves in their hands and the quiet coordination of a household at work.