SEN, Murat Yusuf - Islak Kent / Wet City

The self-published photo volume Wet City / Islak Kent is Murat Yusuf Sen’s contribution to the visual reflection on urban change in Istanbul.

He contrasts rapid construction development with the slow collodion wet-plate process from the early history of photography.

Published in Istanbul in 2018 by the artist, the book brings together black-and-white photographs printed as silver prints. It is accompanied by a stapled booklet with texts by Ezgi Bakçay, I. Begüm Kösemen, İnsel İnal and Fırat Arapoğlu, a 16-page hand-sewn fanzine bound with red thread, and a loose folded insert with black-and-white photographs. The publication contains texts in English and Turkish and was published in a first edition of 500 copies.

Sen photographs Istanbul as a city in transformation: an expanding construction site shaped by growth, demolition and permanent change. The city appears as a place where the past recedes behind a continuous present and an anticipated future. The visible traces of the photographic process, including marks, stains and fluid movements, make the images appear less as conventional city views than as material objects: carriers of memory, as if recovered from an archive, an excavation or a city already beginning to sink.