Curatorial Project — Upcoming Exhibition & Publication
The Nudes of Istanbul
A rare collective fine-art nude photography publication and exhibition from Turkey
Fourteen photographers. Three model-authors. Fourteen years of body-based photographic production in Istanbul. An English-language hardcover publication and Berlin exhibition bringing a sustained collective practice into international circulation.
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The Nudes of Istanbul is a collective fine-art nude photography project formed across fourteen years of curator-directed photographic practice in Istanbul. It brings together fourteen photographers whose works were made within shared physical conditions: real bodies, real light, constructed sets, material interventions, model presence, and the discipline of photographing the body in a room held through consent.
The project is not a national survey of nude photography in Turkey, nor a personal exhibition by the curator. It focuses on one specific lineage: a long-term collective practice shaped by repeated photographic productions in Istanbul, where the curatorial framework, lighting environment, casting decisions, and material conditions were developed by Burak Bulut Yıldırım, while the final image belonged to each photographer's frame, distance, timing, attention, and decision.
The Berlin exhibition is the opening chapter of the project's public circulation. The accompanying publication is conceived as an autonomous book-length record, independent of any single venue, and intended for art book circulation, institutional outreach, academic use, and selected library acquisition proposals. After Berlin, London is being developed as a priority next context for UK-facing press outreach, institutional conversations, book presentation possibilities, and future exhibition enquiries.
At a moment when synthetic and AI-generated body imagery has become increasingly normalised, The Nudes of Istanbul insists on the physical event of photography. The body in these images is not generated, simulated, or abstracted into data. It is present. It has consented. It has occupied the room. The light is real light; the surface is real skin, fabric, glass, pigment, water, shadow, and breath.
"For fourteen years, we worked in Istanbul with Turkish models, Turkish photographers, and explicit consent. I did not want this project to treat the model as silent subject matter. Their voices had to be part of the book. With fourteen photographers from Istanbul, five women participants, and texts by three model-authors, The Nudes of Istanbul brings into public view a sustained collective practice from a field that has remained only thinly visible in Turkey."
— Burak Bulut Yıldırım, Curator
The Fourteen Participating Photographers
Fourteen photographers are presented in The Nudes of Istanbul. They were selected from a sustained collective practice formed across fourteen years of curator-directed photographic production in Istanbul.
Selection was based on 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. Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women. This presence is not presented as a quota or corrective gesture, but as part of the project's authorship structure: the body is seen, framed, withheld, and released into public view through different positions of looking, distance, restraint, and self-possession.
Three Model-Authors of the Publication
Three models who have been central to the Istanbul practice 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 conditions of trust, visibility, and presence inside the room. Zeynep Renda and Su Yeşil write under their own names. Marmelat writes under a chosen pseudonym, in line with her preferred level of public visibility, while adding a rarely documented perspective: nude modelling within the Turkish fine arts academy.
Exhibition
Krossener Str. 34, 10245 Berlin, Germany
The Curatorial Ground
Burak Bulut Yıldırım is the sole curator of The Nudes of Istanbul and does not exhibit his own photographic work within the selection.
The project rests on his twenty-year practice in fine-art nude, portraiture, body-based photography, advanced lighting, and constructed studio image-making. Since opening his first studio in Istanbul in 2005, Yıldırım has worked across commercial photography, fine-art body-based projects, photographer education, and curator-led production environments. For close to twenty years he has photographed hundreds of models in hundreds of thousands of fine-art nude frames; exhibited this work across several European cities; and, in Istanbul, transmitted this experience for fourteen years through nude art workshops in different conceptual formats to hundreds of photographers. His long-term use of controlled light, physical material, model direction, UV-reactive pigments, reflective surfaces, long exposure, optical distortion, and studio-built visual premises forms the conceptual and technical ground from which this project developed.
The Nudes of Istanbul is his second curatorial project after LandsNude, presented at Artcore Gallery in Thessaloniki in 2015. In both projects, the body is approached not as a decorative motif but as a site where light, space, material, authorship, and cultural visibility meet.
His role in The Nudes of Istanbul is not to replace the authorship of the participating photographers. It is to define the curatorial field in which their authorship becomes readable: the premise, the environment, the ethical conditions, the selection, the taxonomy, and the publication framework.
Publication
The publication is not an exhibition catalogue. It is conceived as an autonomous book-length record of a rare collective fine-art nude photography practice from Turkey.
The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language hardcover photobook planned with ISBN registration. The book is designed to function independently of the exhibition, with each of the fourteen participating photographers represented through a dedicated selection.
The publication includes a foreword and an extended curatorial essay by Burak Bulut Yıldırım, a historical framing of nude photography in Turkey drawing on Alberto Modiano's edited volume Türk Fotoğrafında Çıplak (2004) and Işık Özdal's 2011 academic survey Türk Fotoğrafında Nü Sergilerin Analizi, the six-register taxonomy used to organise the work, and three commissioned essays by Zeynep Renda, Su Yeşil, and Marmelat.
The structure positions the project as a sustained collective practice shaped by shared conditions and distinct photographic authorship. It also recognises the models not as silent subject matter but as witnesses, collaborators, and authors of the book's intellectual and ethical structure.
The book is intended for art book circulation, direct distribution, institutional outreach, academic reference, and selected library acquisition proposals. Pre-order, publisher, library distribution, and institutional purchase information will be announced before the exhibition opening.
For pre-order, library distribution, publisher, or institutional purchase enquiries: [email protected].
Selected Works from the Exhibition
A preview of works by the fourteen participating photographers.
The photographs are organised through six contemporary registers of the photographed body: Surface, Matter, Opacity, Rooms, Duration, and Self-Possession.
Duration – Matter – Opacity – Rooms – Self-Possession – Surface
Why This Project Matters
A rare collective record from Turkey
The public record of fine-art nude photography from Turkey has remained limited and intermittent — shaped by single-author exhibitions, a thin publication record, and a small number of documented reference points. The Nudes of Istanbul appears within that narrow field as a rare collective book-length project dedicated to fine-art nude photography from Turkey.
A sustained practice, not a workshop archive
The project was formed through fourteen years of repeated, curator-directed photographic productions in Istanbul. Each production created a demanding photographic situation: a body, a visual premise, a lighting environment, a set of material conditions, and a shared ethical space. The selected works are not exercises; they are individual photographs made within a sustained collective field.
Shared conditions, distinct authorship
The exhibition holds two layers together: the curatorial field developed by Burak Bulut Yıldırım across fourteen years — concept, lighting, casting, set construction, material direction, publication framework — and the photographic authorship of each participating photographer in their frame, distance, timing, restraint, tonal sensitivity, and moment of release. Shared conditions are not treated as a weakness but as the structure through which differences in seeing become visible.
Models as authors, not only subjects
The publication includes commissioned essays by three model-authors central to the Istanbul practice: Zeynep Renda, Su Yeşil, and Marmelat. Renda and Yeşil write under their own names; Marmelat writes under a chosen pseudonym, addressing nude modelling within the Turkish fine arts academy from three years of experience as a nude model at a fine arts faculty. Their texts are structural components of the book, not supplementary commentary. The decision to include model voices 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.
Berlin as the opening chapter
The Berlin exhibition does not relocate the work away from Istanbul. It opens a public and international chapter for a body of photographs made in Istanbul and held for years within limited channels of circulation.
Curatorial Essay
The argument of The Nudes of Istanbul begins from a structural contradiction. Istanbul has produced a sustained and technically accomplished field of fine-art nude and body-based photography, yet this work has rarely entered international circulation through books, institutions, dedicated platforms, or collective exhibitions. The reasons are structural rather than artistic: a thin publication record, limited dedicated venues, intermittent exhibition visibility, and a historical record shaped largely by individual male authorship.
The exhibition addresses that absence through one specific collective practice. Fourteen photographers, selected from a fourteen-year curator-directed practice in Istanbul, are presented together as a coherent collective formation on an international platform. Five of the fourteen participating photographers are women. This matters not as a numerical correction, but as part of the project's structure of authorship: different positions of looking participate in deciding how the body is seen, framed, withheld, and released into public view.
The theoretical reading sits with three central questions. Jean Baudrillard is useful for recognising how the image can detach from the body it claims to depict — a question sharpened today by synthetic and AI-generated body imagery. Laura Mulvey remains unavoidable for any serious discussion of the gaze, not as a thesis to be mechanically applied to every nude photograph, but as the field within which images of the body continue to be made and read. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a phenomenological understanding of the body as the ground of perception, not simply an object viewed from outside.
The project also sits inside a wider Turkish discourse on body politics and representation. Artists such as İpek Duben and Nilbar Güreş have, across different media and registers, examined gender, intimacy, social codes, the body, and self-representation in Turkish visual culture. Ahu Antmen's writing on body, identity, gender, and art provides an important art-historical framework for understanding how the represented body has been shaped by modernity, cultural codes, and identity politics in Turkey. The Nudes of Istanbul does not claim direct continuity with these practices. It sits alongside them as part of the same broader question: how is the body allowed to be seen, by whom, under what conditions, and through which forms of public record?
That question remains structurally charged. The public exhibition of nude photography from Turkey has often moved through limited channels: private studios, small circles, intermittent exhibitions, and a relatively thin publication record. 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 discussed as censorship. Read together, such 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 room 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, waited, moved, resisted, and held the room. The light is real light. The surface is real glass, real fabric, real pigment, real water, real shadow, real skin.
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. 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; if the gaze or self-held posture becomes the central force, the work moves toward Self-Possession, and if pigment, liquid, fabric, or coloured light actively changes the skin, 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. If a material changes the surface of the body, the image belongs here; if it primarily interrupts the viewer's access to the body — by veiling, obscuring, 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 or darkness; if darkness draws the body as form, the work may belong to Surface, and 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 the figure's inwardness or gaze is the strongest force, 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, remain suspended, or resist collapse. 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.
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.
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 (2004) 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.
The period after 2011 has not produced a continuous, widely visible institutional record of fine-art nude photography from Turkey. Body politics, however, remained central to Turkish visual culture. In the broader field of art history and contemporary practice, Ahu Antmen's writing on body, identity, gender, and representation; İpek Duben's long-term engagement with the body, identity, gender, and self-representation; the historical framing of the nude in modern Turkish painting; and Nilbar Güreş's sustained practice around gender, social codes, and embodied identity define a wider cultural field in which the visibility of the body remains contested.
These practices do not form a direct lineage for The Nudes of Istanbul. The project is photographic, collective, and rooted in one long-term Istanbul working environment. But they help define the broader question to which the project belongs: how does the body become visible in Turkish visual culture, who is allowed to frame it, and through which structures can it enter public record?
The Nudes of Istanbul is positioned in relation to these conditions. The accompanying publication appears as a rare book-length collective project dedicated to fine-art 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. It includes commissioned essays by three model-authors. And it organises the work explicitly through six contemporary registers — Surface, Matter, Opacity, Rooms, Duration, and Self-Possession — that connect the Istanbul 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.
Beyond Berlin: International Circulation
Berlin is the opening chapter of the project's public circulation, not its final destination.
After the Berlin presentation, London is being developed as a priority next context for the project's international circulation, including UK-facing press outreach, institutional conversations, book presentation possibilities, and future exhibition enquiries.
The Nudes of Istanbul is also intended to continue through book presentations, exhibitions, public conversations, institutional collaborations, and academic programming in Turkey and selected European cities. Future presentations in Istanbul, Turkey, and other European contexts are being explored.
The publication is designed to circulate independently of any single venue through art book distribution, direct distribution, institutional outreach, and selected library acquisition proposals. Advance reading copies or digital previews may be made available to curators, editors, publishers, critics, and academic researchers by arrangement.
Institutions interested in hosting the exhibition, organising a public conversation, building academic programming around the publication, discussing book distribution, or acquiring the book for a library or archive are welcome to enquire.
Press, Publishers & Institutional Enquiries
Press materials are available on request: selected high-resolution images, curatorial statement in English, German, and Turkish, photographer biographies, factual press release, publication preview, advance reading copy by arrangement, interview availability, exhibition details, and image credit and consent information.
The exhibition is open to journalist previews, interview requests, academic visits, publisher conversations, institutional hosting enquiries, and curatorial meetings during the exhibition period by arrangement.
Curators, art critics, editors, publishers, library acquisition teams, and academic researchers working in contemporary photography, nude art, Turkish visual culture, gender, image politics, body-based practice, publication histories, or collective authorship are particularly welcomed.
Theoretical References
The curatorial framework draws on the following primary references.
- Antmen, Ahu. Kimlikli Bedenler: Sanat, Kimlik, Cinsiyet. Sel Yayıncılık, Istanbul, 2014.
- 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.