No Place, No City
Alice in Istanbul - After the Epiphany
Last year,
I saw Alice.
Only once.
She appeared…
then vanished.
No trace.
No sign.
No road.
As if light
had passed through her shape
and disappeared.
I followed her.
From Haydarpaşa
to the highest hill in Kadıköy.
I climbed after her.
I descended after her.
But I found no path.
Only an echo repeating:
"It is the light, Alice…
What is light?"
I followed her.
From Haydarpaşa
to the highest hill in Kadıköy.
I climbed after her.
I descended after her.
But I found no path.
Only an echo repeating:
"It is the light, Alice…
What is light?"
I followed the voice.
But the voice,
like light,
left its trace
and disappeared.
I came away from the pursuit
with a single certainty:
Alice is not among us.
She passes through us.
She passes
like a luminous event.
A brief pulse
on a dark surface.
And since then,
whenever I try to remember the place,
I remember the road.
And whenever I try to remember the road,
I remember Alice.
In Yeldeğirmeni,
they say there is a tunnel
running beneath the neighborhood.
No one knows where it begins.
No one knows where it ends.
And that is why it remains alive.
For everything
that becomes completely known dies.
The mysterious, however,
continues its presence.
Like Alice.
Like light.
Like memory.
Perhaps that is why
I love photography.
Light,
unlike us,
always knows
how to return.
And Alice
was never
a complete absence.
In some way.
That is why, this year,
I will photograph
with expired film.
Not out of nostalgia.
For nostalgia
is a belated reading of the past.
Just as language
is a belated reading of the other.
As though everything we do
is a delayed attempt
to understand what has passed through us.
I want to see time
when it fails
to hide its traces.
When it becomes exposed,
like a photograph
not yet fully formed
in the developing tray.
And when it leaves behind
questions that belong
neither to the past
nor to the present.
Only there
does the more important question begin.
Not a question about time,
but a question about me.
A man in the neighborhood asked me:
"Where are you from?"
As though cities
give birth to their owners.
Or as though a person
could be measured by addresses
the way minutes
are measured by the hands of a clock.
I did not answer.
For no city
possesses the power
to prove me.
I am a story
printed on paper.
And paper
returns to no place.
Returns to no city.
That alone
was enough
to invent printing.
Not to preserve facts.
But to grant
what we believe in
one more life.
And if I truly knew my city,
no one would ever have met me
on the road.
After years of pursuit
This year I begin with a single working hypothesis.
The White Rabbit was carrying the wrong tool.
A clock is not a way of finding time,
but a way of measuring what is lost from it.
A camera, however, is not a device for recording the present.
It is a witness to what has already passed without being seen.
New Hypothesis 2026
Perhaps Alice does not disappear.
Perhaps it is only the light that arrives late.
Some waves of light need an entire year
to reach the camera.
