Seeing Double

First Edition.

Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Fry.

All Rights Reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

Printed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA.

Preface No matter where you find yourself in the world, you may discover that people will always have things in

common. Many times people have the tendency to notice the aspects of people that turns them into the “Other.” This stereotyping and prejudice is easier than looking deeper to our sameness with an open mind. When focusing on the “Other” or the aspects that make a group of people or a place different from one’s own life, a great truth about humanity is overlooked. We all wake up, roll out of our sleeping space and try our best to survive in whatever environment surrounds

us. We are all human.

After a sea change in my own journey through life, I spontaneously decided to go somewhere where the majority of the population would view me as the “Other” – in a place where our cultures, our norms, our language were all

somehow different. In this I hoped to learn something about humanity that I could never read in a textbook amidst the others living in the ivory towers of the United States. I quit my job, bought a plane ticket, left the city of Philadelphia to fly across the Atlantic and step down on earth in Istanbul, Turkey. For one month I slept on the couches of friends and acquaintances and was continuously surprised by the similarities of our lives overpowering our differences. As a senior photojournalism and visual anthropology student at Temple University, I recognize that cultures are rich in difference

and these differences allot for the incredible collective knowledge that is retained in the human consciousness. No matter how different our food, our language, our religion, our politics, our understanding of hierarchy, we live among

similar objects and practice similar routines. The flags that we hang to symbolize our national pride, the cars that we drive to get us from here to there, our desires for political justice, our hopes for love, the animals that we care for only for their nonjudgmental attention are all representative of the connections between us. This book is a short view

into this reality. Each spread shows an image from Philadelphia and another from Istanbul. Intentionally, the images are not labeled with defining information because this is not an exercise in boxing each other in as the “Other,” this is an exercise in embracing our sameness. From Philadelphia to Istanbul, we are similar in many ways because of our humanness.

We are human.