Hello my dear GRIT friends;
I would like to tell you a little bit about my photography adventure. As you see on my CV, photography has become my second profession and even a perspective on life. Since 2003, when I started taking photographs, my view of photography has changed a lot. My adventure started with uploading photos to online photo sharing sites in the early 2000s, which many of us are familiar with. My portfolio included landscape and macro shots respectively. Then, stories with people attracted me more. After my son was born in 2008, I opened my first photography exhibition titled “Children of Anatolia” in Gaziantep, which I planned based on the portraits of children I took during my shooting trips around the country. I participated as an invited photographer in the symposium titled “International Children’s Rights and Crimes” of a private university and held my exhibition at Gaziantep Zeugma Museum. Then, I developed the content of this exhibition and opened it first in Zonguldak, then in Izmir and again in Zonguldak with new frames added to the exhibition. After the interest I saw, my dedication to photography increased even more. In 2010, we started to continue our work under the roof of a non-governmental organization with the Zonguldak Photography Association, which we established with our friends. In this process, I started to give basic photography training courses at ZFD. Then one day, one of the participants in the last lesson of one of our trainings, who was a friend of mine from the board of directors, asked me a question. The question was, “Who are you, and with what competence are you giving us lessons?” he said. This question was so good for all of us that, almost all of the board of directors enrolled in the AÖF photography and videography department. We completed the courses at the school with outstanding success in 2 years and graduated. We were trained photographers now. Later, in 2012, I was entitled to receive the AFIAP title by meeting the requirements of FIAP, the international photography federation headquartered in France. At the end of 2014, I started working as an assistant coordinator at Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University Press, Publications and Public Relations unit, continuing my classes part-time and working as the photo editor of our magazine called Kampüsün Sesi in the afternoons. During this time, between the increasing number of shooting trips and trips abroad, we interviewed the oldest residents and dignitaries of Zonguldak in order to collect the archival photographs in the book “Zonguldak, a city in the light of the lantern”, which was our first serious project, and prepared an album that would shed light on the past of the city from the photographs we collected from them.
Following this project, I prepared a photo documentary where I experimented with documentary photography and went to Bosnia-Herzegovina 3 times and photographed what happened in the event called “March Mira – Peace March”, interviewed important people of the period and prepared a photo documentary. You can watch this documentary on my YouTube channel.
Our third project was the book “Living Human Treasures in Zonguldak Region”, which unfortunately coincided with the pandemic and did not receive the necessary attention, but was my most important work. In this book, I interviewed 40 craftsmen in Zonguldak who have reached the end of their professions and do not even have apprentices to train, and photographed them in their working environments. All these photographs were taken in black and white and took their place in the book. They are now waiting to be exhibited.
Finally, we have completed our project called “Zonguldak in Expatriation”, which took almost two years. The exhibition of this project has been printed and will meet you soon. In our project, there are photographs of the lives of expatriates from Zonguldak living in Germany and France. I hope that this time I can present our project properly and leave a happy smile on the faces of the viewers and leave them with memories that will make them think about what our expatriates go through.
Hope to see you at the exhibitions as soon as possible. My Instagram account : https://www.instagram.com/ikozturk
About The Author
