It was to study at university that I first came to İstanbul. I was
very excited that I was going to discover the strangeness, chaos, and
anarchy of Istanbul, which doesn’t fit into any classification or
discipline. Wandering around the historical peninsula, the place that
most reflects the melancholic spirit of the city stuck between the
West and the East, caught between the past and the present was my
greatest pleasure. I used to leave myself among the huge crowds and
drag along from one place to another. I used to roam around the
labyrinth-like narrow streets, watch people in the courtyards of
historical mosques, look at the shop windows full of all kinds of
bizarrenesses, and enter the musty and damp-smelling passages and
bazaars with curiosity. Each corner of the city was making me feel
like I was beyond time.
Now, years later, I am working on my long-term project about Istanbul.
With my camera in my hands, I am walking in this hustle and bustle
again step by step like a flaneur. I try to tell stories gathered from
the embracing moments of Istanbul. Just like years ago, children are
running after pigeons, the mannequins in front of the shops are
looking into my eyes as if they are asking me for help, and the giant
posters on the walls of the buildings are still watching me like Big
Brother, For an instant, I lose my sense of time: Am I in the present
or am I still that young man who came to Istanbul for the first time?
Then, as the sound of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingles
with the cacophony of the city, the verses of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a
Turkish author, silently passes through my mind: “ I am / not within
time / Nor entirely beyond; But in the flux / Of an all-embracing,
complete, indivisible moment.”
Murat Harmanlikli
Born in Izmit, Turkey. He graduated from Marmara University, Department of Economics. He met with photography in 1996. After a hiatus for a while due to his master's degree and working life, he started to develop and print his own black and white films in the darkroom in 2007. Since 2016, he has been taking photos with digital cameras.
As a lover of literature, he thinks that the visual world of novels, the perspectives of the novel characters are at least as effective as seeing photographs, perhaps even more effective in creating photographic images and reflecting one's own world. In this sense, he believes that getting lost among the crowds like a flaneur on the streets provides endless opportunities for him in terms of photographic production.
muratharmanlikli.com
@murat.harmanlikli
