The city is not a destination, but a set of possible encounters, a psychological landscape of need and desire, of destruction, of fleeting bliss. Or at least that’s what these pictures suggest. Anyway, let’s not think of the “city” as being one place (one city), but a maze of overlapping territories, when the night comes especially; these other cities are the dark mirror drawing us out, looking to fulfil whatever it is that drives us to risk the narrow zone, the borderland portrayed here, a city of whispering shadows, of temptation and repulsion, underscored by violence, by lust. The series entitled Back Street by Serkan Taycan, a Turkish photographer, visually describes the experience of negotiating an obscure corner of Istanbul where night life congregates in a permanent after-hours gloom. It is formally quite unlike most of his other work, but still consistent with the intention of exploring social complexities in modern Turkey. You can see the rest of it on his site here (be sure to have look at some of the other projects, Homeland in particular).
