The gentlemen of Kuştepe

This picture series is included in the design book The Violation of the Privacy and Exposure in Istanbul: A History Under Tension and 41 Photographs. Uğur Tanyeli wrote the text and Engin Gerçek took the photographs. 

The photographs which inspired this book visualize the homes of a group of residents in Kuştepe, an area in Istanbul. These Istanbulites are people whose homes rarely get photographed because they are not in the interest of home decor magazines. When photographing them, Engin Gerçek makes visible a group of urban dwellers whose lives are less-known and rarely seen, and portrays neighborhoods that are under the threat of transformation and gentrification.

In his text, Uğur Tanyeli touches upon the history of private housing in Istanbul. Stretching from the 15th century to the present, this is the history of how and for which reasons urban dwellers define their private living spaces. It illustrates the extensive changes that private housing has undergone during the last 500 years. It is possible to sketch out an architectural-social adventure starting with the single-room houses in the 15th and 16th centuries to contemporary Istanbul’s gated communities. This is the story of the city’s urban dwellers, not of courtiers. It is the daily adventure of the man on the street.