Through Their Eyes: Snapshots of Childhood

For over 10 years, a photographer let his children guide the lens. The images are in his new book, Daddy Take a Picture
by Ayn-Monique Klahre | photography by Mehmet Dimirci

**Playground:** “Swinging like everyone else wasn’t her style… She was a monkey-spirited freedom, climbing on top of the swing and shouting, ‘Daddy, take my picture!’”

For the past decade, Raleigh photojournalist Mehmet Demirci’s children have served as his art directors. Whenever his son or daughter spotted something worth capturing, they’d tell him — and he’d pull out his phone.

“It started with my son asking,Daddy, what’s your job? And always seeing me with a camera. Once he understood, he’d say,Take this picture, take that one,” Mehmet says. “Of course, I can’t carry around the big DSLR cameras when I go out with the kids, so this project started with my iPhone.”
From the start, Mehmet used the Hipstamatic app for these shots. “I was trying to differentiate them from the others on my camera roll, but it also gave me a feeling of the good old days, since I used film when I started as a photographer,” he says.

Today, Mehmet has more than 5,000 of these photos, all directed by his son, Ömer Deniz, 16, who goes by Deniz, and daughter Neva, 9. Together, they narrowed these down to 40 of their favorite photos, which he’s published in a unique book, titled Daddy Take a Picture! “My son and daughter were my collaborators, my editors,” Mehmet says. “I edited down to 900, printed 200 and put them on the wall, then asked the kids about their favorites. They chose different photos than I might have.”

**Goggles: “**Neva: ‘Daddy, take a picture of me!’”

The photos are printed on a card stock with perforated edges so they can be torn out and used as postcards. “I’ve always liked sending postcards, so it seemed like a fun idea,” Mehmet says. Each of them has a short note on the back, a story or a musing about the moment.

Deniz, who helped curate the final selection, took a different approach than his sister. “She’s young, so she just went off what she liked the most — I tried to pick photos that have a deeper meaning, like a story or a photo that could mean something to someone else,” Deniz says. The subjects of the photos range from their pet gecko, whom they lost last year, to a crowd in traditional Ottoman clothes to the sea on a trip to Maine. “I remember playing there, and seeing my father stand on top of a higher rock to get the photo,” says Deniz.

**Shore:** “We burned under the sun on endless shores, chasing tiny crabs between rocks.”

Through this project and his father’s influence, Deniz has become an amateur photographer himself, accompanying his father on fun shoots, like the Kirby Derby and fox hunting, and capturing sports games at school. He points to one photo in the book, of a lone tree on a hilltop, its branches dusted with snow, as one of the first times he remembers really thinking about an image as a photographer. “I told my dad, I need to take a picture of this because it’s so beautiful, and he talked me through it,” says Deniz.
Now, when they travel, the family sets a goal of what they want to capture.

“If we go to Vegas, we want to take pictures of the lights, or in D.C. we were photographing these exotic cars,” Deniz says. “But we always have our eyes and ears open for anything else that passes by. I’m starting to capture more little details.”

**Butterfly:** “Butterflies didn’t always land on our floral shirts. Sometimes, they chose our noses instead!”

“People so easily forget that they used to be kids, too — but working on this makes me remember what that feels like,” Mehmet says. And though he sells the books on his website, the goal isn’t really to make money. “Creating a book — it’s a physical thing, but what we’re really collecting are memories,” he says. “I’m not a rich man, so when I pass this world, I want to leave behind the memories of things I did with my kids.”