Yıldız Moran: A Mountain Tale

In the exhibition "Yıldız Moran: A Mountain Tale", Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery presented the works of Yıldız Moran (1932-1995), Turkey’s first academically trained woman photographer. Moran, who was active in the 1950s, is one of the most important photographers to have emerged from Turkey. The artist dedicated 12 years of her life to photography, from 1950 to 1962, and greatly contributed to the photographic approach of generations that followed her.

In her photographs of Anatolia in particular, Yıldız Moran carved a unique area for herself by interweaving love of humanity, artistic sensitivity, and photographic intuition. This impressionistic aesthetic laced with lyricism is the most important feature of Moran’s photographs, in which she careful merged the people she photographed with the land they inhabited. Encompassing not only the approach to photography of her period but also the new artistic views of our age, the artist anticipated the photographic perception of our time years before it took shape. Today, her photographs attract the attention not just of the photography experts but also of art enthusiasts in Turkey and worldwide.

"Yıldız Moran: A Mountain Tale" brought together 86 black and white photographs taken by the artist on a variety of subjects, including nature, abstraction, portraits, everyday life, Anatolia, Istanbul, and places abroad. Some of these photographs are seeing the light of day for the first time.

Curator: Merih Akoğul