Manuel Çıtak: An Island of One's Own

Anteprima: scritta prima dell'apertura della mostra

The photograph on the museum's page is Kilyos Beach (2000): one wide black-and-white frame of hundreds of bathers wading into the Black Sea surf, women in headscarves and boys in trunks along the water's edge. Çıtak photographed that beach from the 1990s to the mid-2000s, and those coastal pictures are what he is known for.

This is the first show of his whole career, from the 1980s, when he took up photography, to his death in 2023. Beyond the beaches come colour and monochrome cityscapes, panoramas uncommon for their time, portraits, and pictures from across Anatolia and neighbouring countries. He travelled to Kars with Orhan Pamuk, and his photographs went on international covers of Snow, so check the credit on your own copy.

His wife, the novelist Şebnem İşigüzel, calls his work a world "built in voluntary solitude", his own island, hence the title. It is in the Photography Gallery, included in the 1,000 TL museum ticket, and Fridays run to 20:00.