Whirling Istanbul

Usually photographs become entities by what is left out; the scene you picture is an isolated individual presence of what you see. Yet, we were intending to document Istanbul as a whole with its unending vibrant life and not the individual components that constitute this whole. This is the reason why we chose 360-degree panoramic photography as a medium of expression. Istanbul is a city that forces you to live its own way; you can never ignore its rules. Regular panoramic photographs equal all objects included, but this is not what Istanbul forced us to do. It made us change the order of things and we ended up with an optically distorted horizon line. Horizon line here is not the regular linear spine of the scene; rather, it comes further from where it was taken as granted and becomes an object itself. The resulting visual conglomerate depicts the richness of daily life “all around” Istanbul and can be seen as a “natural” collage.

These photographs were taken as separate images with a compact digital camera and then stiched digitally on the computer environment. The distorted perception obtained after the stitching process is purely an optical effect and there is no “Photoshop manipulation” at all.

This was a collaborative work, created with Murat Germen.

Exhibited at:
Gallery Marmara-Manhattan, 301 East 94th Street NYC, February-March 2003
Atakule Vakıfbank Sanat Galerisi, Ankara, 27th January-15th February 2004
Diyarbakır Sanat Merkezi, Diyarbakır, 20th February-11th March 2004

International Photography Awards 2004 Professional Photograpy Mention in Architecture / Cityscape category