The political and social changes in Turkey in the last decades reminded me of the same transition in Russia. Nowadays many people are totally surprised, how Putin was able to become a dictator and a war criminal. An important role in this development also played the enormous amount of money and technological support, Putins Russia was able to get by trading oil and gas to European countries like Germany.

Nowadays western democratic governments continuing to deal with Erdogan and he is becoming an important player in global politics, while the country itself is on the way from a republic with an relatively open, secular society to a fundamentalistic autocracy. Many people in Turkey are afraid a transition to an Iran like model of a state.

When the AKP, the Erdogan party, took over more than 20 years ago, the country was on place 99 of 180 in terms of freedom of speech. Now it has been thrown back on 151. After the failed military coup back in 2016, most of the independent and oppositional journalists had to leave the country or go to jail. Many newspapers have been closed. State oppressions and corruption are reaching a new level. Already after the Gezi park protests in 2013 many things have changed. There is almost impossible to demonstrate for your rights. The police and special forces are blocking whole districts for many hours and even photographers with a professional camera are no more safe. Also my personal work on the project seemed to become very difficult. I heard of many colleagues being arrested during these days. For example it is not allowed to take pictures of the police and protests. Still I wanted to show what‘s going on.

My excuse for taking pictures during protests when asked by the police, suddenly became the famous cats and dogs of Istanbul – although on my pictures they are in the foreground out of focus. I‘m also trying to use it as a metaphor of how naive the Western democracies are used to look at authoritarian regimes, as long as the business works well: We prefer to watch a cute cat, instead of looking at what‘s really going on.