IST28Y
In 1996, shortly after graduating from the Willem de Kooning Art Academy in Rotterdam, I walked from Topkapi Gate to Topkapi Palace with a Nikon F-501 and a hundred frames of film. In 2024, invited by the Yunus Emre Institute in Cologne, I walked the same route again. This time with 1,500 digital exposures and twenty-eight years of looking behind me.
At twelve locations along the route, I photographed from almost exactly the same position as in 1996. The same corner, the same framing, the same direction of light. What I found was not the transformation I expected, though the city had changed, but something stranger: the spirit of the earlier image still present in the later one, as if the street remembered being photographed by me.
IST28Y is the result of layering those pairs, 1996 over 2024, analog over digital, the city I arrived in over the city I returned to. Parts of both images show. Parts of both hide. The result is neither then nor now but the membrane between them: the particular feeling of standing somewhere you stood before, and finding it changed, and finding yourself changed, and finding that the place holds both versions simultaneously.
Detail from Istanbul28Y01 Darüşşifa Sk.
The series
IST28Y is a series of 12 works, each a layered photograph merging images taken from the same location in 1996 and 2024, 28 years apart. The series was created in collaboration with the Yunus Emre Institute, Cologne, and documents twelve specific locations along the route from Topkapi Gate to Topkapi Palace. Each work is a single image in which two moments in time exist simultaneously.
Istanbul28Y
Editions & Pricing
Collector Edition
The definitive edition for serious collectors.
Limited edition of 10 per image — price rises as the edition fills.
| Edition numbers | Price |
|---|---|
| 1 – 3 | €650 |
| 4 – 6 | €800 |
| 7 – 10 | €1,000 |
- Signed and numbered
- Certificate of Authenticity
- Printed on Fuji Professional Pearl,
- 50 × 75 cm / 20 × 30 inch*
Early editions are the best value — and once they’re gone, they’re gone..
Fine Art Edition €249
An accessible entry point into the series.
- Open edition fine art print
- Premium fine art paper, 285gsm
- 60 × 90 cm / 24 × 36 inch
- Ships worldwide
Select an image below to see its current edition status and order.
About IST28Y and the Virtual Journeys series
IST28Y sits alongside the Virtual Journeys project, which includes the original Istanbul Topkapi Gate to Palace series made in 1996. It operates differently. Where the Virtual Journeys series processes a single walk into graphic novel pages, IST28Y layers two walks across two generations into a single image. The technique is unique to this series: not reduction, but superimposition. Not one moment translated into feeling, but two moments merged into one. Istanbul, then and now, occupying the same frame.