The Golden Horn

The golden colours of the Golden Horn in Istanbul at dusk have been immortalised in paintings such as this one by Aivazovksy, from 1845. If you look closely at the painting you'll see white sails at the lower left of the setting sun, close to the shore. That's roughly from where I made all three photos in this post. 

Over the course of almost thirty years I must have walked and photographed on the same shores many hundreds of times. Saturdays, my feet took me there almost automatically. It's a place with a certain magnetism.

The earliest photo at the top is from 1996. Looking at the clothing, it must've been late fall or early winter. I was still a young man and had started my first job in October that same year. Here, on a Saturday afternoon I was taking in the bustle on the piers of the Golden Horn, my camera loaded with Fuji Sensia slide film. Back in those days fishermen would sell their daily catch right at the shore.

The second photo is about 20 years later. In the mean time I have married, have had a child, have been fully shooting B&W film and have become a decent darkroom printer. The afternoon light over the Golden Horn is still glorious at times. At the back is the Suleymaniye Mosque. The boat at the far right is named "Golden Boy".

Life went on, it got harder by the day, and Istanbul also kept evolving and growing (massively). Towards the end of the pandemic I started to increasingly use an old digital SLR, but with my much older manual lenses. Still, I kept being drawn to the same place. Like here, on the 11th December 2023 at 13:43 (thank you EXIF file). See the funny rainbowy spot on the back of the bench? Somehow the lens (a Nikkor 28mm f2.8 AIS) managed to  produce this little trick.

The tremendous change in technology from the earliest to the latest picture goes without saying. But I keep thinking about a more subtle change that has happened in parallel. Here's an anecdote. Sometime around 1998 or 1999 I rose very early and went to the Suleymaniye Mosque (have a look at the B&W pic again) to photograph the Golden Horn from up there. The mosque has a garden facing the waters and I was taking pictures from the garden. It was a cold day and the place was completely deserted, until a man approached me. It was the imam of the mosque. He asked what I was doing. I explained. I asked whether I could make a portrait of him. He accepted. Then he asked me whether I'd like to come up and enjoy the view from the domes of the mosque! Of course I did. And so we went up some narrow stairwells to the top of the mosque, climbed out from a door  into open air and began skipping from dome to dome. He was very accommodating and I made pictures from up there towards the Golden Horn...with a tripod! But the light was too harsh, or more likely I wasn't good enough: the pictures turned out to be unremarkable. Anyway, the reason for this anecdote is, I believe this would never happen today. Obviously, increased security is one reason. But also, with the rise of the smartphone and mass tourism, that garden has been packed with phone yielding crowds ever since. Today, I think the imam would rather sit in his office, either for his peace of mind or maybe to doomscroll on his social media feed, only popping out from prayer to prayer. And that thought keeps nagging me ever so slightly.