---
title: "Turkish woman in Ankara with a surreal twist"
contributor: "@dorukkurtoglu@gmail.com"
tags: #general, #dorukkurtoglugmailcom
---

Ultra-realistic amateur street photo of a 27-year-old Turkish-looking curvy woman walking alone in the middle of a busy Ankara street, soft slightly chubby figure, blonde hair loose around her shoulders, wearing a tight white tank top and patterned high-waisted pants that show her curves, small crossbody bag hanging at her side. She walks toward the camera with a calm, almost bored expression.

Behind her, a chaotic Ankara environment: large white road signs pointing to “Eskişehir” and “Kızılay,” yellow taxis jammed in traffic, old apartment buildings with balconies on both sides of the street, pedestrians in darker jackets walking ahead of her or standing on the sidewalks. It feels like a typical slightly chaotic Turkish traffic scene.

Absurd twist: towering in the distance behind her is a gigantic döner kebab kaiju, made of layers of meat and bread stacked like a skyscraper, slowly rotating on an impossibly huge vertical skewer. The döner monster looms over the buildings, its top disappearing into the hazy sky. Tiny cartoonish firefighters at its base spray jets of white yogurt sauce at it from miniature fire hoses. Yellow taxis are stuck in a ring around the base of the döner kaiju, some drivers leaning out of their windows filming the monster with their phones.

Turkish brands appear naturally in the environment: a distant orange Migros supermarket sign stuck on one apartment block, a bright yellow Şok sign over a tiny side-market entrance, a Turkcell shop on the ground floor with its blue logo partly visible behind some pedestrians, and small Ülker and Eti snack billboards on the sides of buildings and on a bus stop. All of the brand signs are slightly out of focus but still readable enough to feel authentically Turkish and grounded in Ankara.

Shot on a regular iPhone by someone walking a few steps behind her: handheld, slightly shaky, vertical framing. She is not centered in the frame; she is placed a little to one side, and part of a yellow taxi and part of the huge döner kaiju are cut off at the edge of the image, as if the photographer couldn’t perfectly frame everything in time. Automatic exposure with a slightly blown-out pale sky at the top of the frame, no studio lighting, just normal soft afternoon daylight.

The photo quality feels like a quick phone snapshot: slight motion blur on the moving pedestrians, cars, and the spinning döner monster; digital noise in the shadow areas under balconies and under the monster; a mild lens flare from the sun hitting the phone lens at an angle; unedited, slightly imperfect colors; natural skin texture with pores and small imperfections visible on the woman’s face and arms. Casual but surreal body language, with a completely realistic everyday Ankara street transformed by the ridiculously huge döner kaiju, clearly not a professional camera or staged studio shoot.
