Renowned photographer Timurtaş Onan, who has documented Istanbul’s changing face for more than four decades, presents his latest project Transforming City at Barın Han. Running from September 18 to October 26, 2025, the exhibition coincides with the 18th Istanbul Biennial as a parallel event and will be accompanied by a special limited-edition book.
Istanbul in Flux
Since the 1980s, Istanbul has been a city in constant motion, reshaped by migration, economic shifts, and relentless construction. Onan’s lens captures both the soaring skyline of glass and steel and the quieter erosion of social and cultural bonds. His photographs translate these contradictions into a poetic visual archive, revealing a metropolis that rebuilds itself daily while carrying the weight of centuries.
A Visual Language of Impermanence
Shot with a Diana F+ and 35 mm analog cameras, using expired diapositives and Lomography film, Onan’s images embrace chance, distortion, and decay. Through cross-processing, colors bleed and lines dissolve, creating dreamlike fragments that reflect the city’s chaos, irony, and beauty.
Echoes of Urban Life
Themes of solitude, nostalgia, environmental loss, and estrangement run through the series. Silence within the crowds, the disappearance of familiar spaces, and the encroachment of concrete over nature resonate throughout, rendered with both anthropological precision and poetic intuition.
Confronting the City’s Scars
Transforming City serves as both a chronicle and a confrontation, an invitation to look directly at Istanbul’s flaws and wounds. For Onan, the truth of the city is not only in its triumphs, but in its fractures, ruins, and unresolved stories.
About Timurtaş Onan
Born and raised in Istanbul, Timurtaş Onan has been active in photography since the 1980s, participating in and organizing numerous exhibitions at home and abroad. His work has been featured in national and international collections, and he has served on juries for major competitions. Alongside his documentary projects on social issues, Onan is especially known for his distinctive visual explorations of Istanbul. Today, he continues to teach, curate, and expand his Istanbul Anthology—a five-volume body of work dedicated to the city’s many facets.
Keep up to date via the Instagram accounts for Timurtaş Onan and Barın Han.
Binbirdirek Mah. Boyacı Ahmet Sok. No:4, Çemberlitaş
