Curatorial Project — Upcoming Exhibition & Publication
The Nudes of Istanbul
Fourteen Years of Istanbul Studio Sessions
A sustained collective practice in nude art photography, made in Istanbul and brought into public view in Berlin.
At a time when synthetic and AI-generated body imagery has become increasingly normalised, The Nudes of Istanbul insists on the physical event of photography: a real body, real light, real material, and a room held through consent.
Built across fourteen years of curator-led studio sessions in Istanbul, the project brings together fourteen photographers from a sustained working environment shaped by lighting design, set construction, model direction, and the discipline of photographing the body in shared physical space.
The exhibition does not present a national survey of nude photography in Turkey. It focuses on one specific lineage: a collective practice formed through repeated studio encounters, where the concept, lighting, and staging were established by the curator, while framing, timing, distance, and the decisive image remained with each photographer.
Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women. Within a field whose recorded exhibition history has been shaped largely by male authorship, this presence matters not as a statistic alone, but as a shift in who participates in deciding how the body is seen, framed, withheld, and released into public view.
The accompanying publication structures the work through six contemporary registers of the photographed body: surface, matter, opacity, rooms, duration, and self-possession. These are not stylistic labels or fixed genres. Each register identifies the dominant condition through which a photograph asks to be read: form, material contact, interrupted visibility, interior space, physical duration, or the body’s self-held presence.
Selected Works from the Exhibition
A preview of works by the fourteen participating photographers.
Exhibition
Krossener Str. 34, 10245 Berlin, Germany
Participating Photographers
Fourteen photographers selected from a sustained community of curator-led studio sessions in Istanbul. All works in the exhibition were made in Istanbul across a working environment shaped by concept, lighting design, model direction, set construction, and repeated encounters with the photographed body. Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women — a significant presence in a field whose documented exhibition record has historically underrepresented women’s authorship. The works are organised through six contemporary registers: surface, matter, opacity, rooms, duration, and self-possession.
Model Contributors to the Publication
Two models who have worked within the Istanbul studio sessions contribute to the publication as commissioned authors. Their essays sit alongside the photographs as a structural component of the book — not supplementary commentary, but voices that the project is built on. The decision to include them as authors follows from the curatorial position that nude photography is not only an image of a body, but a relationship between the person photographed, the person photographing, and the light that holds the room.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language hardcover photobook planned with ISBN registration. The book is designed to function as an autonomous record of the project, independent of the exhibition. Each of the fourteen participating photographers is represented through a dedicated selection.
The publication includes a long curatorial introduction by Burak Bulut Yıldırım, a historical framing of nude photography in Turkey drawing on Modiano (2004) and Özdal (2011), the six-register taxonomy used to organise the work, and two commissioned essays by Zeynep Renda and Su Yeşil. The structure is designed to position the project not as a workshop archive, but as a sustained collective practice shaped by shared conditions and distinct photographic authorship.
The book is intended for art book circulation, direct distribution, institutional outreach, and selected library acquisition proposals. Pre-order and institutional purchase information will be announced before the exhibition opening.
For pre-order, library distribution, or institutional purchase enquiries: info@burakbulut.info.
A Note on the Curatorial Position
Burak Bulut Yıldırım is the sole curator of The Nudes of Istanbul and does not exhibit his own photographic work within the selection. His contribution to the publication takes the form of the curatorial introduction: a long essay that frames the project historically, theoretically, and in relation to fourteen years of curated studio sessions in Istanbul.
At the same time — and this is said for the record rather than to qualify the exhibition — the studio sessions in which these photographs were made were designed and directed by the curator. Concept, lighting, set, model direction, and the artistic premise of each session were his. The exhibited photographs were taken inside that structure and shaped, in their final form, by the eye, timing, distance, and decision of each photographer. The exhibition holds those two layers together: a shared curatorial environment and distinct photographic authorship.
Curatorial Essay
The argument of The Nudes of Istanbul begins with a contradiction many viewers may not expect. Istanbul — often perceived from outside through the language of religious conservatism and cultural restraint — has produced, over the past two decades, a sustained and technically accomplished body of nude photography. Yet this work has rarely reached European audiences at scale. The reasons are structural rather than artistic: a thin publication record, limited dedicated platforms, intermittent exhibition visibility, and a historical record shaped largely by individual male authorship.
The exhibition addresses that absence through one specific community of practice. Fourteen photographers, selected from years of curated studio sessions in Istanbul, are presented together for the first time as a coherent collective formation on an international platform. Five of the fourteen are women. This matters not as a simple numerical correction, but as a shift in who participates in deciding how the body is seen, framed, withheld, and released into public view.
The theoretical reading sits with three thinkers. Jean Baudrillard, for the recognition that the image has detached from the body it claims to depict — a question sharpened today by synthetic and AI-generated body imagery. Laura Mulvey, for the foundational critique of the gaze — not as a thesis to be mechanically applied to each work, but as the field within which every nude photograph in 2026 is made. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for the phenomenological understanding of the body as the ground of perception, not simply an object viewed from outside.
The exhibition also sits inside a wider Turkish discourse on body politics. Artists such as İpek Duben and Nilbar Güreş have, across different media and registers, examined gender, intimacy, the body, and self-representation in Turkish visual culture. The Nudes of Istanbul does not claim direct continuity with those practices. It sits alongside them as part of the same broader question: how is the body allowed to be seen, by whom, and under what conditions?
That question remains structurally charged. In Turkey, public exhibition of nude photography has often operated under institutional reluctance, informal pressure, and limited opportunity. This pattern is not specific to one country. In November 2024, İnci Eviner’s video Harem (2009) was withdrawn from the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art exhibition Seeing Is Believing shortly before opening, a case widely reported as censorship. Read together, these examples remind us that the politics of representing the body remain active, contemporary, and unevenly distributed across cultural contexts.
What the exhibition finally argues is this: the photograph of the nude — made in-camera, with physical intervention, in a studio where the body is actually present — remains a serious artistic act at a time when synthetic body imagery has become increasingly normalised. In these photographs the body is not a motif. It is the working material of the image and, at the same time, a person who has consented, posed, and held the room. The light is real light. The surface is real glass, real fabric, real pigment. The exhibition takes that physical and ethical ground as its starting point.
Curatorial Taxonomy
The works are organised across six registers of the photographed body. Rather than treating the nude as a fixed genre, the sequence follows the dominant condition through which each photograph asks to be read: as surface, as matter, as withheld image, as a figure inside rooms, as duration, or as a self-possessed presence.
A photograph is placed according to its primary visual force, not simply according to what appears inside the frame. A veil does not automatically make an image Opacity; a chair does not automatically make it Rooms; a visible face does not automatically make it Self-Possession. The question is always curatorial: what is the photograph fundamentally doing to the body?
1. Surface
The body as contour, terrain, and image surface
A work belongs to Surface when the body is read before identity: as contour, volume, light, shadow, line, and terrain. Close framing, reduced context, low-key light, or a neutral ground can turn skin into image surface. These photographs do not primarily ask who the body is, where it is, or what material touches it. They ask how light makes form visible.
A face may appear, but it should not dominate the reading. If the person’s gaze, psychological presence, or self-held posture becomes the central force, the work moves toward Self-Possession. If pigment, liquid, fabric, metal, or coloured light actively changes the skin, it moves toward Matter.
2. Matter
Pigment, liquid, fabric, metal, and light acting on skin
A work belongs to Matter when the body’s surface is altered by physical or optical contact. Pigment, powder, paint, glitter, water, oil, fabric, metal, reflective material, projected light, or coloured light may stain, cover, mark, reflect, or reshape the skin. The body is not simply shown; it receives and records contact.
The distinction from Opacity is important. If a material changes the surface of the body, the image belongs here. If a material primarily interrupts the viewer’s access to the body — by veiling, obscuring, blurring, or withholding visibility — the image moves toward Opacity. Matter touches the body; opacity stands between the body and the viewer.
3. Opacity
The refusal of full visibility
A work belongs to Opacity when the viewer’s access to the body is interrupted. Fabric, water, haze, shadow, reflection, glass, translucent surfaces, veils, nets, or atmospheric light may make the figure present but not fully available. The image does not offer the body as transparent information; it delays, filters, or destabilises looking.
Opacity is not simply atmosphere. Darkness alone is not enough. If darkness draws the body as form, the work may belong to Surface. If a veil or shadow becomes a barrier to vision, it belongs here. If the person’s direct look or self-contained posture becomes stronger than the obstruction, the work may move toward Self-Possession.
4. Rooms
Private interiors, public pressure
A work belongs to Rooms when interior space becomes a determining element of the photograph. Beds, chairs, sofas, curtains, carpets, walls, windows, doors, corners, bathrooms, and temporary studio interiors can all act as more than setting. They place the body inside a social and psychological field: privacy, permission, exposure, domesticity, and pressure.
The presence of furniture alone is not enough. The room must affect how the body is read. If the body remains isolated as form, the work may belong to Surface. If a curtain or shadow mainly blocks visibility, it may belong to Opacity. If the figure’s inwardness or gaze is the strongest force, the work may belong to Self-Possession.
5. Duration
Movement, suspension, gravity, and time
A work belongs to Duration when the body is read as an event in time. Movement, suspension, balance, blur, long exposure, dance, acrobatics, falling, holding, stretching, or resisting gravity replace the fixed pose with a sense of physical duration. The photograph records not only a body, but the time it takes to hold, move, fall, or remain suspended.
Duration does not require visible blur. A still image may belong here if the body carries strong physical tension: muscle strain, balance, suspension, or resistance. If the pose is static and the body is primarily a formal shape, the image may belong to Surface. If the movement is secondary to a room, a veil, or a material intervention, another register may be stronger.
6. Self-Possession
The body held by the person within the image
A work belongs to Self-Possession when the body is not surrendered to the viewer but held by the person within the image. This may happen through direct gaze, refusal, stillness, inwardness, a closed posture, a self-protective gesture, or a quiet insistence on presence. The category is not about vulnerability. It is about the body as belonging to someone.
A visible face is a strong signal, but not a requirement. A turned back, a folded body, or a withdrawn posture may also produce self-possession if the figure remains legible as a person setting the terms of visibility. If the body becomes anonymous form, the work may belong to Surface. If material, opacity, room, or movement dominates the reading, the work should be placed elsewhere.
Beyond the Berlin Presentation
The Berlin exhibition functions as the public opening chapter of a longer publication and research project.
After the Berlin presentation, the publication is intended to continue as an autonomous record through art book circulation, institutional outreach, and selected library acquisition proposals. Advance reading copies or digital previews may be made available to curators, editors, and academic researchers by arrangement.
Future presentations of the project — including possible exhibitions in other European cities, public conversations, and academic programming around the publication — are in development. Institutions interested in hosting the exhibition or organising a programme around the book are welcome to enquire.
How the Taxonomy Is Used
The six registers are not rigid genres. They are editorial tools for reading the dominant force of each photograph.
Many works could be approached through more than one register. A veiled portrait may sit between Opacity and Self-Possession; a body in a room may also carry the psychological force of a portrait; coloured light may operate as atmosphere in one image and as matter in another. The final placement depends on what the photograph most strongly does to the body.
The sequence therefore follows a curatorial principle rather than a purely descriptive one. Surface names form; Matter names contact; Opacity names interrupted visibility; Rooms names interior pressure; Duration names time and physical tension; Self-Possession names the body as held by the person within the image.
Curatorial Methodology
The fourteen photographers in The Nudes of Istanbul were not selected through an open call. They were invited from a community formed across fourteen years of curated studio sessions in Istanbul — small-group working environments designed and led by the curator, usually organised around a shared model, a constructed lighting situation, and a defined visual premise.
Selection was based on sustained authorial development rather than isolated strong images. The criteria included continuity of participation, technical and visual coherence, distinctness of photographic decision-making, and the ability of each photographer’s work to contribute to a collective body without dissolving into it.
The aim was not to assemble a representative survey of nude photography in Turkey. It was to identify a coherent collective practice that emerged from one specific working environment in Istanbul. That working environment is part of the project’s identity: the curator’s concept, lighting, model direction, and staging on one side; the photographer’s framing, timing, distance, and interpretive decision on the other.
The decision to present the work in Berlin reflects a structural condition of the field. Turkey’s documented exhibition history of nude photography, traced in Işık Özdal’s 2011 academic survey for Süleyman Demirel University, begins with Çerkes Karadağ’s Nüans and continues through a limited sequence of mostly single-author exhibitions. The record is important, but intermittent. What has been missing is a sustained collective platform.
The Berlin presentation is therefore not a relocation of the work away from Istanbul. It is the first international public platform for a body of photographs made in Istanbul and held, for years, within limited channels of circulation. In this sense, the exhibition treats Berlin not as an escape from the project’s origin, but as the first site where that origin can be read from outside.
Photographic Lineage
The project is not presented as an isolated local phenomenon. Its six registers are read in relation to international photographic histories of the nude, the body, studio construction, duration, and self-representation.
Surface
Bill Brandt · Edward Weston · Ruth Bernhard
This register belongs to the lineage of the body read as form, contour, and image surface. Brandt, Weston, and Bernhard remain essential reference points for the discipline of reducing the nude to volume, geometry, and light without emptying it of physical presence.
Matter
Prue Stent & Honey Long · Sarah Charlesworth · Burak Bulut Yıldırım
Matter names the moment when pigment, fabric, liquid, reflection, or projected light becomes an active agent in the image. The register connects contemporary body-based experimentation with the curator’s own long-term use of UV pigments, reflective surfaces, broken mirrors, and constructed studio interventions.
Opacity
Francesca Woodman · Deborah Turbeville · Marianna Rothen
The body is half-given, half-withheld. Woodman’s blurred interiors, Turbeville’s atmosphere of withheld visibility, and Rothen’s cinematic reconstruction of feminine space provide useful coordinates for reading images where the body resists full legibility.
Rooms
Lee Friedlander · Lucas Samaras · Juno Calypso
Rooms brings the nude into the pressure of interiors: furniture, corners, beds, curtains, domestic surfaces, and constructed private space. Friedlander, Samaras, and Calypso mark different ways in which the room becomes more than setting — a psychological, social, and optical frame.
Duration
Eadweard Muybridge · Étienne-Jules Marey · Viviane Sassen
Duration reads the body as an event in time. Muybridge and Marey established movement and sequential analysis as central photographic questions; contemporary choreographic and shadow-based practices extend that question into gesture, suspension, balance, blur, and bodily tension.
Self-Possession
Nan Goldin · Elinor Carucci · Paul Mpagi Sepuya
The most intimate register of the exhibition. Goldin, Carucci, and Sepuya offer three different reference points for bodies held by the people within the image rather than surrendered to the viewer: autobiographical presence, close-quarter intimacy, and the studio as a site of self-aware looking.
Cross-Register Anchors
Two figures sit across the taxonomy rather than inside a single register. Robert Mapplethorpe is relevant for the formal discipline that runs between Surface, Matter, and Rooms. Zanele Muholi is relevant for the political and self-possessed reading of the body that resonates most strongly with Self-Possession, while also touching the staged presence of Rooms.
The Turkish Genealogy
A Turkish genealogy of nude photography exists, but it has been intermittent rather than cumulative. Işık Özdal’s 2011 academic survey, Türk Fotoğrafında Nü Sergilerin Analizi, traces a record beginning with Çerkes Karadağ’s Nüans — shown in Cologne in 1988 and Istanbul in 1989 — followed by a limited sequence of later exhibitions by photographers including Mehmet Koştumoğlu, Levent Öget, İbrahim Göğer, Orhan Alptürk, Saygun Dura, Cem Boyner, and Niko Guido.
Özdal’s survey identifies a field shaped by discontinuity. The practice has largely appeared through individual exhibitions rather than sustained collective structures. The published record remains thin, with Alberto Modiano’s Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak standing as one of the few substantial book-length treatments of the subject. The historical record also shows a pronounced imbalance in authorship, with women photographers largely absent from the early exhibition history documented in the survey.
In the broader field of Turkish visual culture, the body has entered public discourse through other media and institutional contexts: İpek Duben’s long-term engagement with the body, identity, gender, and self-representation; the historical framing of the nude in modern Turkish painting through Ahu Antmen’s curatorial work at Pera Museum; and Nilbar Güreş’s sustained practice around gender, social codes, and embodied identity. These practices do not form a direct lineage for The Nudes of Istanbul, but they define a wider cultural field in which the visibility of the body remains contested.
The Nudes of Istanbul is positioned in relation to these conditions. The accompanying publication appears as one of the rare book-length projects dedicated to nude photography from Turkey after Modiano’s 2004 volume. It presents a sustained collective practice rather than a single author. Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women. And it organises the work explicitly through six contemporary registers — surface, matter, opacity, rooms, duration, self-possession — that connect the Istanbul studio practice to current frameworks in art photography.
The exhibition does not claim to close the historical gap. It claims to mark the point at which a different conversation becomes possible.
Theoretical References
The curatorial framework draws on the following primary references.
- Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
- Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, 1972.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge, 2012 (1945).
- Modiano, Alberto (ed.). Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak. Bileşim Yayınevi, Istanbul, 2004.
- Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16:3, 1975.
- Özdal, Işık. “Türk Fotoğrafında Nü Sergilerin Analizi.” SDÜ ART-E, 2011.
- Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
The full bibliography — including primary sources for the Turkish exhibition history and post-2011 body-politics references discussed above — appears in the publication.
Press & Institutional Enquiries
Press materials — selected high-resolution images, curatorial statement in English, German, and Turkish, photographer biographies, and a factual press release — are available on request. The exhibition is open to journalist previews, interview requests, and academic visits during the exhibition period by arrangement.
Curators, art critics, editors, and academic researchers working in contemporary photography, nude art, Turkish visual culture, gender, image politics, or body-based practice are particularly welcomed. Advance reading copies or digital previews of the publication may be provided before the opening where appropriate.
Curatorial statement
Photographer biographies
Press release
Publication preview