About

I am an Istanbul-based photographer working across street and documentary photography, exploring the relationship between people, place and the traces that history leaves behind.

Istanbul was where I first learned to look. Its density, contradictions and constant negotiation between past and present shaped the way I photograph: less interested in describing a place than in noticing the moments that reveal something beneath its surface. A solitary figure within a vast urban landscape, an unexpected gesture, an abandoned structure, a fragment of humour or an uneasy stillness can become as significant to me as the larger event unfolding around it.

Over time, that way of looking has taken me far beyond Istanbul. My projects have developed across very different geographies, from the everyday life of Cuba and the immense landscapes of Mongolia to religious communities in Ethiopia and the remnants of the Soviet world. Although the subjects change, the underlying questions remain remarkably consistent: how people inhabit their surroundings, how places carry memory, and how individual lives persist within forces much larger than themselves.

I work in both colour and black and white, choosing each according to the character of the project rather than treating either as a signature. I am drawn to photographs that retain a degree of ambiguity — images that do not explain themselves completely, but allow humour, loneliness, tenderness, contradiction or unease to coexist within the same frame.

For me, photography is ultimately an act of observation rather than conclusion. I am less interested in telling viewers what a place means than in creating photographs that make them look again, notice what might otherwise have been overlooked, and perhaps construct their own narrative from what remains inside the frame.