unpredictable, and ostensibly obsolete techniques may appear pointless. The roots of this endeavor lie in my childhood. Thanks to my father’s work, I was introduced to computers in the early 1970s, when I was only five or six years old. The first computer game I played was a simple golf game in which the letters “u” (the hole) and “o” (the ball) appeared on a printer and had to be brought together. By the time I was in high school, I was fluent in four programming languages and was producing graphic animations with what was then very rudimentary technology. In the late 1980s, I prepared the user manual for one of the first inkjet printers to arrive in Turkey. From floppy-disk-recording cameras onward, I worked extensively with digital cameras and used major photoprocessing software since their earliest versions. Although digital photography initially excited me, over time I began to feel that the human contribution, both in process and in outcome, was gradually diminishing. As technology advanced, results became more perfect, yet somehow also more ordinary.3 This realization led me back to analog photography. I began with the camera I had used in high school, which still works, and gradually moved further back to the techniques used in the earliest years of photography. It is difficult to describe the satisfaction I derive from being present, through my own manual labor, at every stage of a process that begins with preparing chemicals from scratch to sensitize an ordinary glass plate and ends with an image formed from noble metals such as silver, gold, and platinum. Reviving pieces photographic equipment that have become inert, reduced to shelf objects fading to oblivion, and using them to create new images gives me an extraordinary sense of pleasure, together with a feeling of gratitude toward their makers and a sense of reverence for their previous owners. Prompted by habits from my former profession, I occasionally test the level that artificial intelligence systems have reached in image generation. The other day, I entered a few prompts into one of them and asked it to generate a variation of the Hagia Sophia ambrotype on page 80. The resulting image was both highly convincing and, at the same time, unsettling (Figure 2). The two men in my photograph, who appear as if they had come straight from the nineteenth century, were in fact German chimney sweeps (Schornsteinfeger) who happened to be there entirely by chance during the shoot. After we met them and talked for half an hour, they posed for us. I learned that, as part of their cultural tradition, they travel to various European cities wearing their traditional outfits. In many of our shoots, we had similar unique encounters that left us with lasting memories. Images very similar to the photographs we produced over five years could, in theory, be generated within a few hours at a computer using artificial intelligence. Had I chosen that path, however, I would not have experienced any of the difficulties, frustrations, 3 Today, if we want to make prints from digital photographs, we have very few options beyond output from an inkjet printer. Although terms such as “archival pigment print,” “giclée,” and “piezography” may sound sophisticated, they all are ultimately inkjet prints. In contrast, the nineteenth century offered more than fifty photographic printing processes, each with its own distinct aesthetic. 111 110 disappointments, moments of excitement, joy, exhilaration, or friendships that accompanied the process. I would not have met the German chimney sweeps, nor undertaken a remarkable journey of discovery into the histories of photography and of Istanbul filled with true memories. Instead, I would have simply sat at a computer, eating pizza and drinking coke; and viewers, in turn, would not have had the chance to experience these handcrafted photographs as physical objects; they would have merely glanced at pixels flickering on a screen for a few seconds. Until quite recently, we believed that machines would have little to no role in creative fields. Today, however, we consume “creative” content generated by artificial intelligence in the visual arts, literature, and music almost without even noticing. Meanwhile, again without even noticing it, we are being pushed across all domains into the position of consumers rather than producers, rapidly approaching the kind of world order depicted in dystopian narratives. Through my own work, I try to raise awareness of the value of lived experience through the creative process. When I look at the photographs we produced over five years as a whole, I see a mixture of Istanbul’s struggle for survival and my own resistance against an impending technological dystopia. Perhaps one day, the comet4 that unexpectedly appears in the photograph on pages 106–107 will truly fall upon us, bringing our struggle to an end and taking us back once again to the caves. But when? 4 The wet collodion process requires exceptionally clean glass. However, when working outdoors, a single dust particle can fall onto the glass as the collodion solution is poured and adhere to its surface. When the glass plate enters the silver bath, this particle can produce a meteor-like deformation around itself, known as a “comet.” If we are fortunate, as in our example, such an imperfection can add an unexpected layer of meaning to the photograph. Figure 2 Two men in 19th-century attire in front of Hagia Sophia, 2026 AI-assisted digital image
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