Stills

A Motus Sub-Series

The object speaks first. The body answers.

Stills is a collaborative project between photographer Burak Bulut Yıldırım and art director Meryem Aydın, developed as part of the Motus series exploring body and movement.

The methodology is simple but precise. Aydın selected and photographed a collection of everyday objects: a hand mirror, a suspended fish, a sponge, a crumpled ball of paper, pink roses, a peeled lemon, an old book, a dark red apple. Each object was then shown to one of five contemporary dancers, who responded through improvised movement—not mimicry but translation, not imitation but resonance.

The dancers were not asked to look like the object. They were asked to feel like it. A fish hanging by its tail might evoke suspension, surrender, the body caught between gravity and lift. A crumpled paper might summon collapse, compression, the memory of something smoothed. The camera captured the moment where internal impulse became visible gesture.

The resulting works are presented as diptychs: Aydın’s object photographs—stark, black-background, almost forensic—paired with Yıldırım’s dancer photographs in soft grey studio light. The contrast is deliberate: the object exists in isolation, definite, nameable; the body exists in relation, contingent, interpretive. Between them, a silent conversation.

Stills inverts the usual logic of movement photography. Rather than capturing motion in progress, it captures the stillness that movement leaves behind—the pose that crystallises from improvisation, the form that emerges when feeling finds its shape.