Method of this project: […] montage.
I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations.

But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project

With the desire to write my own poetic history of the city of Istanbul, I began my work by wandering through the city, searching for methods to trace the secret index between past and present that Walter Benjamin describes. But where to begin in a city of 20 million inhabitants, and how to diverge from familiar paths?

I found the answer on the carts of Istanbul’s street vendors and in Benjamin himself: the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible to come into their own: by making use of them. 

Since 2006, I have been working with discarded photographic material in my project TOMIKO Archive: an archive of other people’s family photographs, which I take seriously as the trash of history, working with individual collections in various approaches and collaborations.

In Istanbul, I encountered these images on the carts of street vendors, the rag pickers. The fact that we could only meet through chance encounters in the city formed the foundation of the entire project:

Wanderings through the city—guided by addresses and indications on the backs of the photographs.

In total, over 2,000 photographs from 13 collections picked up on the streets led me on 45 city wanderings across 15 districts of Istanbul, documenting the city’s transformations—undertaken between 2015 and 2021, covering more than 500 kilometers on foot.