Abstract
This paper deals with the development of the “visual public sphere” in the Republic of Turkey, by focusing on the Gezi Park Protests in 2013, in which people with a variety of ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation have engaged in political and cultural communication through visual images in public. In the visual public sphere, people communicate with each other based on a common sense regarding the needs of safety, recognition, and dignity in social life. This paper argues that the visual public sphere in Turkey developed from around 2008. From that time, people in Turkey began to use a lot of visual images as a means of communication in the public sphere in order to prevent intervention by the government and opposition groups. This paper aims to analyze the way in which visual images have played an important role in the Gezi Park Protests and show how the visual public sphere in Turkey took a new turn of development thereafter.
