FAMILY

FAMILY (2012) is a portrait series shaped through visits to the homes of my friends who live with their animals. Rather than reducing the concept of family to a single definition, the work opens it up to reflection through the relational forms produced by cohabitation, everyday closeness, and the bonds we build. People, animals, and personal objects appear side by side, because “family” often becomes visible not through bloodlines, but through shared space and the rhythm of a life lived together. In this sense, FAMILY looks at shifting narratives of family and the ways the idea of the “nuclear family” expands and transforms.

I made these portraits with a medium-format camera, visiting my friends in their homes. While borrowing the gravity and representational language of historical studio family portraits, I aimed to rewrite their normative core from within: the language of the family pose is rebuilt inside the home; instead of fixed roles that stabilize “family,” chosen intimacies and the lived order of everyday cohabitation become decisive.

The home is not a backdrop here, but a space where relationships take form. The portraits make everyday closeness visible; animals are not an “addition,” but part of the family and equal inhabitants of the home. Family is thus reread not as a set of stable roles, but through chosen forms of family and a shared life.

These works do not propose an ideal; they try to see what is already there. FAMILY is a visual narrative that reminds us that family is not a finished definition, but a field continuously remade through time, space, and relationships. It keeps the story open, inviting viewers to reconsider where their own idea of “family” begins and ends.

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An Apartment in Şişli

An Apartment in Şişli is a photographic series I produced in Şişli, in the center of Istanbul (adjacent to Taksim; a corridor where different faiths and cultures have lived side by side for centuries). The title is taken from the opening of the 1933 operetta Lüküs Hayat. For me this reference is not nostalgia; it is a point of departure for questioning how the promise of early modernity persists today—and for whom it is constructed. The series moves through the distance between the polished image of Şişli celebrated in the song and the Şişli of the present, keeping one question alive: Who lives in Şişli now, who is displaced, and who gets to stay?

In Dreams, We Unite

The title In Dreams, We Unite is taken from Zeki Müren’s song of the same name. As an iconic performer who challenged gender norms and carried early traces of queer aesthetics onto the Turkish stage, Müren holds a special place in the emotional memory of this project. In Dreams, We Unite is a visual narrative that traces the intersections of personal and collective memory, and the imprints of loss, intimacy, and healing. Emerging from an archive of nearly 45,000 photographs taken between 2007 and 2023, the project carries the echoes of two distinct periods: the free and exuberant public life of the pre-Gezi years, and the quiet, introspective fragility of the years that followed.

Cereyan

“Cereyan” comes from Persian and means flow, occurrence, coming into being; its root cer refers to a cycle and continuous movement. This series makes visible the currents of the dark periods that have recurred within me for years—my losses and my search for healing. Comprising around 120 photographs and still ongoing, it examines how memory is formed, how forgetting becomes possible, and where and how remembering begins.
Projects
Günce