SEN, Murat Yusuf - Islak Kent / Wet City. Limited Edition

Background information

“The artist photographs Istanbul as a city in progress, an enormous construction site in building growth, presenting the image of a city in which the past has vanished before a permanent present and future.  Black and white images on plates with apparent processing marks (the path of the fluids is visible on many spots), perhaps in an attempt to make them look like material culture objects - carriers of memory, found during an excavation or in an old archive, are the final outcome of almost all of his works.  At the same time, through the antithesis between image and material (quick construction development/slow photographic procedure), there is projected a gloomy, depressive reality, but also a city that has already started to sink.” (© Theodore Markoglou / Curater of Thessaloniki Photobiennale)

Review and content

"'Islak Kent' is Murat SEN's contribution to urban development in the Turkish capital. In an artistically way he contrasts this rapid change with the slow process of development in early analog photography (the mid-nineteenth-century collodion wet process). The result, which gives the finished publication also something particularly objectively, is a dark effect in the pictures. In addition to the images, there is also text material in Turkish as well as in English." (© Richard G. Sporleder)

About the Turkish photographer, Yusuf Murat ŞEN (b.1968)

Photo books by Yusuf Murat ŞEN