Yıldız Moran was the first female photographer in Türkiye to receive academic training. Moran took up photography with encouragement from her maternal uncle Mazhar Şevket İpşiroğlu. Between 1950 and 1952, she studied photography in London. She later became the assistant of John Vickers at the Old Vic Theatre, a period during which she held five exhibitions that received considerable attention in the UK. After returning to Türkiye, the artist opened a studio on the upper floor of the Maya Gallery with the support of Adalet Cimcoz. At the same time, she traveled across Anatolia taking pictures. Moran, who used the medium as a means to convey conceptual content, once said “Anything that is poetic can be the subject of photography”. During her career of only twelve years, the artist made more than eight thousand photographs.
In her photographs of Anatolia in particular, Yıldız Moran carved a unique area for herself by interweaving love of humanity, artistic sensitivity, and photographic intuition. She avoided the orientalist approach, giving precedence to content and emotions over formal features. This impressionistic aesthetic laced with lyricism is the most important feature of Moran’s photographs, in which she careful merged the people she photographed with the land they inhabited.
Work on Paper
Archival pigment print
60 x 60 cm
Istanbul Museum of Modern Art Photography Collection
Olgun Arun Donation