Burak Bulut Yıldırım

Statement

My practice begins where the body stops being only a subject and becomes a medium. For over two decades I have photographed the nude through light, optics, time, and physical materials. In my photographs the body is always in the process of becoming something else.

Again and again, my work returns to the moment a body begins to dissolve into what surrounds it. In Niche, a figure left alone in a room folds into its corners until the colours of the room become the colours of the skin. In Ecotone, the body returns to nature as one living thing among others, on land that is grazed, walked, and worked, until the line between skin and landscape fades. Only You Are Close, When Everything Is Far Away was made at the water's edge during the pandemic, when distance from other people brought back a closeness to nature that modern life had made easy to forget. In Motus, dancers and moving models spread a gesture across a long exposure until movement and time take on the qualities of space, and the body disappears into the trace of its own motion. In Lucida, fluorescent pigment under ultraviolet light turns the body into the source of the light that shows it. In Antemortem, the body is held close to the signs of its own ending, still present and already leaving.

The body is also where inner states become visible. Melancholia reads melancholy as a weight with no single cause: a slowed body turned inward, holding on to something it cannot name, in light that seems to arrive reluctantly. Crave turns to appetite and pleasure: heat, touch, taste, desire sharpened by smoke and fogged glass, and a gaze that looks back. Elsewhere places an unclothed body in narrow streets, on bridges and balconies, and in front of the city's silhouette, and asks what it means simply to exist in a space shared with others. In Chimera, bent mirror sheets multiply and fold the figure; the body stays whole while perception breaks. In Dysmorphia, the mirror turns toward the models' own gaze: they face their warped reflections, and the gap that social pressure can open between the body they feel and the body they see. UnNude strips everything back to black and white, hard light, and scale, until skin reads as line, a fold reads as volume, and the question of who this is gives way to how a surface holds light.

I work primarily in-camera. The distortions in Chimera come from bent mirror sheets, the blur in Motus from long exposure and camera movement, the glow in Lucida from pigment responding to ultraviolet light. No image is generated or extended with AI; I use Photoshop and Lightroom only for tonal control, cleanup, colour correction and print preparation. These choices are about presence more than purity. The image has to happen in the room, the street, or the field, with the person in front of the lens, while the shutter is open.

The people I photograph are participants, never raw material. Several of my series are made with dancers, performers, and body artists. For In Haste, ballerinas danced without warning in the metro, on the ferries and in the streets of Istanbul, and I photographed the people around them: those who stopped to watch, and those who walked on as if nothing were happening. For Stills, made with art director Meryem Aydın, five dancers came to the studio on different days and answered the same thirteen photographs of everyday objects with the first image each object stirred in them, without ever seeing one another's responses. Consent is the condition of every photograph. Curating Nudes of Istanbul extended this position beyond my own work: alongside fourteen photographers, three models wrote for the book as authors, because the person photographed should have a voice in how the body is seen.

I let the figure set the terms of its own visibility. Sometimes the face turns away or dissolves into silhouette; sometimes, as in Crave, the image looks straight back. In both cases the body belongs to the person inside the frame. The work comes from attention, not provocation: a sustained looking that treats the body as the place where seeing begins, and leaves the person photographed intact.