Word photography in downtown Istanbul

At the Barbaros Square near the Beşiktaş ferry station, a neighborhood in central Istanbul, you should definitely go and see the world photographs exhibited in containers.

The name of the exhibition is “Cities and Stories.” It will be open until Nov. 18.

With a system such as this, many artistic activities can be held. The local municipality can easily use Barbaros Square for similar activities.

In the foreword of the catalog prepared for the exhibition, Beşiktaş Mayor Murat Hazinedar wrote they have organized this exhibition on the occasion of the 175th year of photography.

Festival Coordinator Utku Kaynar explained the content of Fotoistanbul 2014 to us. Art Director of Fotoistanbul 1st International Photography Festival, Gültekin Çizgen, while writing the features of the festival, also answered the question as to why it was named “Cities and Stories.”

“Actually, photography was born together with the city where modern industrialization was born. When this historic period is reviewed, we can say photography and sociology are brothers and sisters. Thus, photography, since its birth, has been fed by the city; it has witnessed all the pains, contradictions and changes of the modern bourgeois city and society.” 

The reason why the main theme of the festival is “Cities and Stories” wrote Çizgen, was that the above mentioned issues and dynamics have been visually presented by photographers, conveying that the problems encountered in different cities of the world were actually all of our joint problems. Çizgen also wrote, “Nobody should have any doubt that they will find in the exhibitions their own stories in the exclusion, gentrification, tension, estrangement, architectural distortions...