SEFA
YAMAK

I picked up a camera in 2000. Istanbul was the obvious starting point — the Karaköy fish market before sunrise, the Bosphorus ferries at rush hour, the Grand Bazaar at closing time. But what the city was teaching me had nothing to do with Istanbul specifically. It was teaching me what photography actually requires: the ability to be completely present without making your presence felt. That took years to learn. Eventually I understood what a portrait is. Not something you take from a person. Something that forms between two people who have agreed, for one moment, to stop performing.

Untitled Portraits began in 2016 without a plan — no brief, no client, no exhibition schedule. I was in Varanasi at four in the morning on the first trip to India, and I didn't fully understand what I was seeing. I went back twice: Rajasthan in the May heat, Pushkar during the camel fair when the dust was thick enough to taste. In January 2017 I was in Kars, eastern Anatolia, at minus twenty-two degrees with three metres of snow on the ground, knocking on gates in villages that didn't appear on any map I had. Eleven women let me photograph them. Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia — the locations changed. The question never did: what does a face look like when it stops deciding how to be seen.

The series has been exhibited multiple times in Istanbul. The first showing was in collaboration with Bioderma Turkey. Since then it has appeared in several other contexts across the city. People ask what the photographs are about. The honest answer is that they are about the moment just before someone decides how they want to look — and the rare moment when they forget to decide at all. That moment is what I have been looking for since 2016, and it is the same thing I was looking for in 2000 when I picked up the camera.

In 2019, at Brand Week Istanbul, Trevor Johnson — Instagram's Director of Market Operations globally — presented my account as one of the most effective photographer and influencer profiles in Turkey. My following stands close to one million. I didn't build the audience by thinking about the audience. The photographs came first. Everything else followed from there.

Beyond the lens: I also run PAM Istanbul, the production studio I founded in 2014. It handles commercial photography and video for brands, and it is the infrastructure that prints, frames and ships every Untitled Portraits edition.

Commercial commissions and brand productions are handled through PAM Istanbul, not through this site. If you are here for a print or a portrait, write to me directly. If you are here for a campaign, that is the door: pamistanbul.com.