Lola... with Serkan T

Another one of the boys shot in Istanbul but not featured in the main magazine issue was Serkan T. He wanted to do both an outdoor street shoot and an indoor nude shoot, but when I met him in person, he just looked too young. I even studied his ID card - he was twenty - but he could have been fifteen. Publishing nudes of someone, no matter his real age but who looked like a kid, didn't sit well with me. I could have still published outdoor clothed pics though, right? But I didn't.

I found Serkan on Hornet. We discussed the shoot and he was up for it. He said his friend would come along to help interpret since he didn't speak good English, and that was fine with me. However, it turned out that it was the friend writing me on Hornet all the time and that Serkan didn't speak English at all. Not one word. So he didn't really understand the concept of Elska at all, which is why I didn't publish any of our shoot.

Indeed I was never sure if he even wanted to shoot. It was his friend who really wanted to shoot, but I couldn't shoot the friend, because the friend was a she. That friend, Lola, a trans woman back home in Istanbul for a few weeks before heading back to Toronto where she now lived, wanted pics for her portfolio. Before the shoot, she asked if I minded taking just a few pics of her just as a gesture of kindness, and I said yes. But on the day she had brought a whole bag of clothes as if she expected me to do a rather more than a few pics.

It was an awkward situation, and in terms of my own work, a wasted evening. But it was one of the most interesting experiences of shooting Elska so far, and for that I feel lucky to have met them.

Elska Boy: Serkan T

Elska Girl: Lola

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Photographer: Liam Campbell

#IstanbulTurkey