İnci Batuk – The Visual Urban Memory of Galata

25 May – 24 June 2017

Photography Editor: Özcan Yurdalan

It is not enough just to look in order to tell the story of a neighborhood, one has to listen as well. In photographing Galata, İnci Batuk did exactly that -she listened to this neighborhood. And what she heard was not only the bangs of hammers, the humming of machines, the irregular clash of waves on the shore, or the undeterred shrieks of mad seagulls. She also heard the voices of people, and listened to what the street corners, walls, window-sills, Genoese city walls and Byzantine foundations, and secluded Ottoman buildings had to say.

“The Visual Urban Memory of Galata” specifically focuses on the vulgarities the neighborhood has faced from past to present, and along with their stories, presents to us the exhausted inhabitants of the neighbourhood. The photographer tries to feel the main vein that connects the past of the city to its present.

As she listens to the experience of this neighborhood she has been interested in for many years, clearly, the photographer’s true concern is to render this neighborhood visible. In doing this, she knows well that each sound finds significance as part of a flow, and that images, too, like sounds, gain meaning as they begin to flow, and she seeks to render images fluid like sounds. Thanks to this fundamental concern, the photographs in the exhibition become much more than formal exercises, and the narrative capacity of the images expands.

Özcan Yurdalan
5 April 2017/Viñales