109 108 One branch of my family has been based in Istanbul for generations. Apart from the first four years of my life, when I lived in Ankara because of my father’s military service and work, I have spent my entire life in Istanbul. Yet as the project progressed, I realized that I did not truly know the city at all. I must admit, with embarrassment, that Çemberlitaş meant little more to me than a place we visited a few times in my childhood to eat pickles. Prompted by this sense of embarrassment, I began an intensive study of Istanbul’s history and started assembling a broad collection of nineteenthcentury photographs of the city. At the same time, I attempted to capture present-day views of iconic landmarks such as Hagia Sophia, Anatolian Fortress, Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, and the Ortaköy Mosque from the same vantage points, comparing them with images taken 150 years ago. As I became more aware of what had vanished, what had changed, and what had endured in defiance of time, I felt my connection to the city deepen. It was as though Istanbul were struggling against an invisible force intent on erasing its past. Having withstood dozens of earthquakes, fires, and invasions over the centuries, this magnificent city now seemed to be fighting for survival against the reckless development, overcrowding, and disorder of recent years. It felt as though the historic monuments still standing from the serene, harmonious, and remarkably beautiful city seen in nineteenth-century photographs were posing one last time before they vanished. The city walls in particular, which had protected Istanbul for centuries, now appeared either to be succumbing to nature or losing their character amid reconstruction. Over the course of nearly five years, we raced against time. We set up a mobile darkroom at seventy-two different locations and inscribed Istanbul onto immortal glass plates. From 751 glass negatives and ambrotypes, we created more than 1,000 photographs using a range of historical techniques. For the sake of visual coherence, this book presents a selection composed exclusively of ambrotypes. Today, digital technologies have reached astonishing levels, with artificial intelligence generating images that seem to eliminate the need to take photographs at all. In this context, striving to produce photographs using labor-intensive, hazardous, slow, On April 14, 2021, we went to Ulus Park to make the first exposure of an as-yet-unnamed venture. I had no real sense of the project’s scope or conceptual framework. I had simply decided to follow my curiosities: what Istanbul — where I have spent nearly my entire life — would look like when photographed using the wet collodion process I had been working with for years; and how, and under what conditions, nineteenth-century photographers such as James Robertson, Pascal Sébah, Polycarpe Joaillier, and Guillaume Berggren produced the Istanbul photographs I have long admired (Figure 1).1 Although I began the project with the confidence that comes from years of practicing both wet collodion and albumen printing, the first few sessions ended in disappointment. Up to that point, I had always worked in the studio. Once I stepped outside, the balance of my comfort zone shifted. The chemicals behaved differently, and my exposure calculations no longer held. A range of variables such as temperature, wind, rain, the position of the sun had to be taken into account. Even when the negatives appeared promising at the moment of exposure, the prints we made from them were discouraging. Over time, by gleaning clues from historical sources and experimenting with different methods, we were able to produce usable negatives and ambrotypes.2 In this way, a long journey into the history of both Istanbul and photography gradually began. 1 The wet collodion process, developed in 1851 by the English sculptor Frederick Scott Archer (1814–57), was the most widely used and practical photographic technique of the nineteenth century. Photographers working with this method coated glass plates with a self-prepared chemical mixture to create light-sensitive surfaces, capturing the image as a negative directly on the plate. They would then produce prints in their studios by contact-printing these glass negatives onto paper coated with egg white (albumen), allowing the photographs to be reproduced. A significant proportion of the nineteenth-century photographs that have survived to the present day were produced in this way. 2 Frederick Scott Archer developed the wet collodion process as a means of reproducing photographs by taking negative images on glass and contact-printing them on paper. In later years, he also discovered that by coating one side of the negative with a black material, or by using black glass instead of clear glass, it was possible to produce a unique positive image known as a collodion positive. The practice of creating positive images on glass, one that Archer did not patent, was patented in the United States in 1854 by James Anson Cutting. He named the process the “ambrotype,” deriving the term from the Greek word ambrotos, meaning “immortal,” and also changed his middle name from Anson to Ambrose. WHEN KERİM SUNER Figure 1 Guillaume Berggren Place de Séraskiérat (Beyazıt Square) 21 x 27.5 cm Albumen print Lebriz Collection
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