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 have their shadow.
By taking these pictures I do not mean to photograph life but to bring them to life, to look for their own light.
Istanbul represents much more than a city to me, it is the home of memories.
A place of multiple borders where my childhood rests.
This work is a confrontation, a pictorial quest for lost treasures.
In them, I build a vision, a bridge spanning the past to reveal a secret to the 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 burst of the soul, I take a picture the way poems are written, the way words shed light on us, the way photographs reveal something within us.
—Pierre Belhassen
