Not Paris

With the photographer “non paris,” in a land she had never known and whose language she did not speak, she tried to open the door to an introspective gaze, sometimes fragile, sometimes precarious, yet perhaps for the first time in a long while courageous—a voice she expected to hear as her own, or her own objections.

Images, in their inherent uncertainty, when not forced into contrived encounters, can represent a forgotten voice for a photographer, a face never seen, or an unexpected meeting. They can also reveal a previously unknown emotion stemming from a tiny detail at the edge of a scene on a street walked for the first time—an emotion that might have been escaped, overlooked, even denied, and perhaps unaddressed for years.

Laleper Aytek, after graduating from Boğaziçi University’s Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, pursued her master's studies in Social Economy at the University of Oslo, where she increasingly focused on photography. Due to her growing interest in photography, which began during her university years, she returned to Turkey in the early 1990s and opened her own studio, specializing in advertising photography. In 1998, she served as the photography and advertising director in the establishment of Turkey’s first comprehensive digital photography studio. Since 2009, she has been teaching photography at Koç University, Department of Media and Visual Arts (MAVA).

Since 2000, her photographic writings have focused on "modes of seeing" and "the history of photography" within the scope of subjectivity. She elaborated and developed this fundamental approach in her master's thesis titled "Rethinking the Canon of Photography History: A Study on Subjectivity." Her published works include Kendine Ait Bir Fotoğraf (2005), which compiles her writings on photographic thought, as well as the photo albums Palimpsest Istanbul (2010) and Issız (2013). Aytek has held 13 solo exhibitions and participated in 22 group exhibitions since 1991.