From the BJP archives – current Prix Levallois nominee Cemre Yesil

Having recently settled back in Istanbul after many years in London, Cemre Yesil now divides her time between both cities – and it’s working for her. Last year, the 27-year-old was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award, and exhibited work at Nyheter Landskrona Fotofestival in Sweden and Obscura Festival in Malaysia. In between, she found time for lecturing, publishing her work and studying for a PhD in photography at London College of Communication.
“Cemre demonstrates a wonderful playfulness in her very intimate work and understands the medium of her craft beautifully,” Fiona Rogers, global business development manager at Magnum Photos, says of her nomination for BJP’s Ones to Watch in 2015. “She creates objets d’art as a vehicle for her photography – from intricate installations to thoughtful photobooks. There is a poetic ‘sing-song’ quality to her work; photography weaves seamlessly between words, historic content and performance art to create almost fictional, dream-like stories,” she says.
From the series Birds’ Sake © Maria Sturm and Cemre Yesil
Rogers, who is the founder of Firecracker, a platform supporting European women photographers, featured images from For Birds’ Sake on the site in August; it’s a collaborative project about Istanbul’s aviculture which Yesil is currently working on with her friend Maria Sturm. “Many diverse social platforms exist in Istanbul devoted to the keeping and breeding of birds,” explains Yesil.
“The project focuses on the shrouded relationship between the bird and the birdman that is full of the contradictions of love, possession and pleasure. It is a deeper look at birds without seeing actual birds – imagery stuffed with representations of birds.”
Yesil and Sturm are now editing the work, which they hope to exhibit and publish as a book. “I enjoy trying to understand the relationships between people, things, nature and life forms,” says Yesil, who studied photography and video at Istanbul Bilgi University and has an MA in visual arts from Sabanci University.
“I see photography as a tool to interact with my surroundings. Photographs as objects have a great power to create pathways to rethink the connections we share with the natural world.”
Outside of her own work, Yesil has plans for a photography-focused bookshop and venue in Karakoy, Istanbul. Due to open this spring, FiLBooks will be “dedicated to photobooks, artist talks and workshops, and will hopefully turn into a collaborative project space for photography”, says Yesil. “Even though I have always been interested in artist books and photobooks, I don’t know how to run a bookshop, so learning this will be one of my next goals.”
www.cemreyesil.com www.mariasturm.com The Prix Levallois winner will be announced at Les Rencontres d’Arles on 05 July. https://prix-levallois.com www.rencontres-arles.com This article originally appeared in BJP’s February 2015 Ones to Watch issue, which is available via www.thebjpshop.com
From the series For Birds’ Sake © Maria Sturm and Cemre Yesil
From the series Birds’ Sake © Maria Sturm and Cemre Yesil
From the series For Birds’ Sake © Maria Sturm and Cemre Yesil
From the series For Birds’ Sake © Maria Sturm and Cemre Yesil
Diane Smyth

Diane Smyth is the editor of BJP, returning for a second stint on staff in 2023 - after 15 years on the team until 2019. As a freelancer, she has written for The Guardian, FT Weekend Magazine, Creative Review, Aperture, FOAM, Aesthetica and Apollo. She has also curated exhibitions for institutions such as The Photographers Gallery and Lianzhou Foto Festival. You can follow her on instagram @dismy