It was wonderful to return again this spring to jury the fourth annual Young Photographers Award. Each year we look forward to this process that takes us away from our museum jobs for a day and gives us the opportunity to look closely at a cross-section of work by Turkish photography students. As we have said in the past, it is a real rarity to be able to judge a group of photographs on the basis of actual prints, rather than images on a computer screen, and by doing so we can often learn much more about the individual artists and their projects. We also understand the challenges that this entails for each of the students who are chosen to participate – the printing, shipping, and translating of personal statements during the busy school year – and we applaud them for it.

This year, 18 artists from 10 different universities submitted photographic prints that are of very high quality. Although the work is as thematically wide-ranging as ever, it is interesting to note some of the trends that we began to see among these artists’ projects. One of the threads that runs through much of the work is an underlying feeling of melancholy and loss in the face of the rapid modernization and change taking place in Turkey today. A number of pieces also examine the photographers’ deeply felt connection to place, whether to an entire region, a neighborhood, or a single street. Several artists, including this year’s three prize winners, focus on documenting the lives of children as well, often pointing to larger cultural issues in the process of recording these young peoples’ experiences. Finally, there were a surprising number of black-and-white prints sent in this year, which was noteworthy and would have been very unusual to find among their American counterparts, who more and more often work in color.

This year's Young Photographers Award winner Osman Demir's images are digital color portraits of young gypsies who have settled on the edge of the city with their families and are trying to carve out a life there against great odds.

Honorable mention Cagin Coskunirmak's series of dramatic black-and-white street photographs sets out to document the children growing up in Balbey, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Antalya, in the southwest of Anatolia.

Second honorable mention Melih Cevdet Teksen submitted memorable photographs of deserted schools. His starkly beautiful images of empty classrooms bear witness to the mass migration of rural people to major cities like Istanbul from areas such as the Kastamonu province in the western Black Sea region.

Read more about the winner's and honorable mentions' photos here.

Participating Universities

We congratulate Osman Demir, Cagin Coskunirmak, Melih Cevdet Teksen, and all other participants and wish them continued success in their future endeavors. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank the teaching staff of the following departments for nominating candidates from their respective institutions: