Altered Neighbourhoods

The city of Istanbul is currently undergoing a great transformation. Due to a long period of economic growth and a desire to modernize, the city‘s borders are continually being pushed outwards and redefined. Entire city sections are now subject to tremendous upward revaluation pressures. To make way for new structures, old buildings in districts labeled as „renewal areas“ are being torn down and their residents are being resettled. At the same time on the periphery of Istanbul a great number of standardized, synthetically designed social aparment projects are being constructed. Like at the same time civilizing and technical grapplers, gated communities and social housing complexes snatch into the almost untouched nature and form futuristic islands in the unspoiled Landscape. Photography as the medium of 'registration' takes places as a temporarily fixer of the transitoric space and captures one stadium of an everlasting process. The landscapes put on record and with that being archived will have totally changed their image in less than a decade and will resemble their sight just transient. In this process of work it is not a matter of the simple documentation of a place, it is more about the surreal reformation visible in the postmodern time. Photographed with a Large Format Camera these photographies renew the picture of the classical landscape with the partly dystopian operating intervention of civilization.