Orhan Pamuk

The dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood—from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction.

But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision.

Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.

In the winter of 2011 Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk took 8,500 color photographs from his balcony with its panoramic view of Istanbul, the entrance of the Bosphorus, the old town, the Asian and European sides of the city, the surrounding hills and the distant islands and mountains. Sometimes he would leave his writing desk and follow the movements of the boats as they passed in front of his apartment and sailed away.

Pamuk has been taking photographs for more than 50 years, but as he obsessively created these images he felt his desire to do so was related to a strange particular mood he was experiencing. He photographed further and began to think about what was happening to himself: why was he taking these photos? How are seeing and photography related? What is the affinity between writing and seeing? Balkon presents almost 500 of these photos selected by Pamuk, who has also codesigned the book and written its introduction.

Born in Istanbul in 1952, Orhan Pamuk intended until the age of 22 to be a painter. In the 1960s and ’70s, as he describes in his book of autobiographical essays Istanbul (2003), he photographed the streets of Istanbul to use in his paintings; his early desire to take photos is explored in the introduction to the illustrated version of Istanbul (2017). Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006; among his best-known novels are My Name Is Red (1998), Snow (2004) and The Red-Haired Woman (2016). His 2008 novel, The Museum of Innocence, became an actual museum, which he opened in Istanbul in 2012 to exhibit the objects, pictures, papers and photographs described in the story. The Museum of Innocence received the European Museum of the Year Award in 2014.