This spring, Howard Greenberg Gallery presented Sabiha Çimen and Mary Ellen Mark: The Girls, an exhibition of portraits by the legendary American photographer Mary Ellen Mark and the acclaimed Turkish artist Sabiha Çimen.
While the portraits of Mary Ellen Mark are internationally celebrated, the exhibition marked the first U.S. gallery presentation of Sabiha Çimen, a self-taught photographer from Turkey. Both artists explored lives shaped within tightly defined social worlds, and their pairing revealed the universal and timeless experience of girlhood across generations and cultures.
Although the two photographers never met, their stories briefly intersected in 2015, when Çimen was asked by a curator to locate a Turkish girl photographed by Mark in 1965 in Beautiful Emine Posing, Trabzon, Turkey. The curator wondered what had become of the girl in the photograph—whether she had married, had children, and what traces remained of that fleeting moment captured decades earlier. At the time, Çimen was not yet a photographer herself, but after a series of phone calls she succeeded in locating Mark’s former subject.
By then, Emine was an adult woman with children of her own. She remembered the encounter vividly: as a child playing in the street, she had noticed an elegantly dressed foreign woman carrying a camera, spending time among the children, quietly observing and photographing them. Only many years later did she realize the enduring significance of that brief meeting.
Mark’s work, spanning more than five decades and numerous countries, was represented through selections from several of her most iconic series, including Streetwise (1983), documenting the lives of homeless youth in Seattle; Ward 81 (1976), portraying female patients at the Oregon State Mental Hospital; and Prom (2006–2009), her expansive exploration of American prom culture. The exhibition also included images of circus performers in India, beauty pageant contestants, and figures from beach boardwalk communities.
In contrast to Mark’s black-and-white photographs, Çimen’s work was saturated with soft pastel color. Her images from Hafiz (2021), the award-winning series devoted to girls attending Qur’an schools in Turkey, depicted an environment shaped by discipline and routine yet unexpectedly filled with playfulness and imagination. Blending documentary observation with poetic surrealism, Çimen’s photographs revealed the friendships, rituals, dreams, and emotional inner lives of young Muslim girls.
“Across different generations and geographies, Mary Ellen Mark and I shared a curiosity about the inner lives of girls,” Çimen noted. “The delicate threshold of girlhood exists in a suspended moment between innocence and self-discovery. While our photographs were made in different worlds, Mary Ellen and I met in a shared attention to the emotional terrain of growing up—the inner worlds of girls where vulnerability, imagination, and resilience quietly unfold.”

About the Authors

Sabiha Çimen (b. 1986, Istanbul) is a self-taught photographer whose work focuses on women, Islamic culture, portraiture, and still life. She studied international trade and finance at Istanbul Bilgi University before completing a master’s degree in cultural studies. Through an intimate and poetic visual language, Çimen explores themes of identity, spirituality, memory, and the emotional landscapes of everyday life.
Her work has received widespread international recognition. In 2021, she was awarded the Light Work Artist Residency and received the Paris Photo–Aperture First PhotoBook Award for her debut monograph Hafiz (2021). In 2020, she became a recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Fund, was awarded the Canon Female Photojournalist Grant, and received second prize in the Long-Term Projects category at the World Press Photo Awards. Earlier, in 2018, she won third prize in the PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant.
Çimen joined Magnum Photos in 2020, became an associate member in 2022, and a full member in 2024. She lives and works between Istanbul and New York, and is available for commissions and assignments.