Istanbul, Turkey, 2023
From the series City Diaries
April 3, 2023
Peter Bialobrzeski studied Politics and Sociology before he dedicated himself to photography, starting as a photographer for a local paper in his native city of Wolfsburg, Germany. His images offer evidence of his educational background, operating as a visually lush form of sociopolitical study.
Bialobrzeski seeks out the contrasts in urban environments that reveal systems of ideology, power, and wealth. Behind the trees lining this street in Istanbul, we see the minarets and dome of a newly constructed mosque, built in the style of the Classical Ottoman architecture of the 16th century. Tayyip Erdoğan has been Turkey’s president for 20 years and he has encouraged a flurry of new mosque construction that has eroded the secular legacy of his predecessor in office.
Rising in the further distance we can see one of the towers that make up the rapidly developing skyline in Levent, Istanbul’s central business district. Levent is known for its glass banking towers and they serve as a reminder of the way that Turkey’s government and banking sector have deepened social inequalities—and household debt—with policies of economic liberalization. The central presence of the classical mosque in the composition creates a compressed view of time, where past and present empires are connected.
