Istanbul: To the city A photography project by Pierre Belhassen

“Looking at these pictures is an unsettling play of mirrors. The more I look at them, the more they look at me. They don’t testify, they have nothing to tell, but they still leave their mark.

By taking these pictures I do not mean to photograph life but to breathe life and light into images. Istanbul is much more than a city to me, it’s the home of memories.

A place with multiple borders where my childhood rests. This work is a confrontation, a pictorial quest for lost treasures where I build a bridge into the past to reveal a secret present; in them, time does not exist.

The photographic act offers me the possibility to hold back minute fragments of eternity. Here and now, I stop time to see further and harder.

In an ultimate revelation of the soul, I photograph in the manner that poems are written, trying reveal something within us.” – Pierre Belhassen