ez fraktal

The photobook ez fraktal (lit. I self-similar) delves deeply into themes of self-determination, trauma, and longing. It explores emancipation, representation,  and the abstraction of marginalized bodies and biographies through a combination of self-portraits, photographs of others, and visual observations collected over  the past seven years.

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The autobiographical narrative highlights the tension between belonging and alienation, particularly in the context of transgenerational trauma. Personal quotes from night and daydreams accompany the images, adding a poetic, introspective dimension to the storytelling.
ez fraktal is a book about visibility, heritage, and the fragility of identity. It weaves together individual and collective experiences of a Kurdish-German woman and daughter of refugees—a perspective that has rarely been told in the German photobook landscape.

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I dreamed I saw versions of myself, ones that didn’t yet exist.

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– Cihan Çakmak
(This quote appears on the book’s spine)

Cihan Çakmak was born in 1993 in Osterholz-Scharmbeck, Lower Saxony, and grew up in Worpswede and Bremen.
After studying photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, with a temporary study stay in Lisbon, she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) in 2017.

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