Beyond the Photograph: A Way of Looking

Some photographs do not simply show a place; they make us feel what once happened there. In the surface of a wall, the texture of a stone, a figure waiting by the shore, or an object left within an empty space, there is something beyond the image itself. Photography here does not merely record what is visible; it follows the trace of what remains unseen.

Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice occupies precisely this threshold. At first glance, her work may appear to be an observation of place, people and everyday life. Yet, on closer examination, its central concern is less representation than tracing. Rather than explaining memory, lived experience, belonging and time directly, Kaplan transforms the traces these experiences leave upon places and bodies into a photographic language.

Kaplan’s BA in Sociology from Anadolu University is significant to this way of seeing. Yet it would be limiting to understand her practice solely through a sociological approach to photography. Her work combines documentary observation with a poetic and intuitive visual language. Relationships between people, society and place are not explained; they are suggested within the image.

This is consistent with Kaplan’s own artist statement, which describes photography as a way of investigating the emotional, social and psychological layers embedded in landscapes, architecture and everyday environments. Her practice moves between observation and interpretation, allowing ambiguity and multiple readings rather than fixed meanings.

For this reason, the first question to ask when looking at Kaplan’s photographs is perhaps not “What does this photograph show?” but rather, “What trace does this photograph carry?”

Hands Blending into Blue, 2011 — Photography

The Memory of Place

One of the most distinctive aspects of Kaplan’s practice is the transformation of place from passive background into an active carrier of experience. Landscape, architecture and everyday environments become vessels of lived experience.

This approach becomes particularly visible in The Stone Remember I and The Stone Remember II. Stone and architectural surfaces are not simply fragments of physical reality. They are surfaces marked by time, touched by people and carrying traces of the past.

“Can stone remember?” may initially seem like a poetic question, but within Kaplan’s practice it carries something more. Memory is no longer understood as belonging solely to the human mind. The traces left by lived experience in places, the transformation of spaces over time, and what people leave behind become fragments of a collective memory.

At this point, Kaplan’s photography can be read as a kind of archaeology of memory. The artist does not reconstruct the past; she searches for the traces of the past that remain in the present.

Perhaps this is where the central concern of Kaplan’s photography emerges: not finding ways to show the past, but finding ways to make visible the trace that the past leaves upon the present.

The Stone Remember I, 2013 — Photography

Where Does the Human Begin, and Where Does Place End?

Kaplan’s approach to the human figure is inseparable from this understanding of place. In her photographs, the human figure rarely appears as an isolated subject. The body is read together with its surroundings. At times it appears beneath a burden, at times waiting, and at times as a small figure within a larger environment.

The Stone Remember I makes this relationship especially visible. The seated figure is almost absorbed by the architecture. Rather than becoming the dominant subject, the person is held within a structure whose scale, material and history exceed the individual.

Traces of Burden is particularly striking in another respect. The “burden” is not simply a physical object being carried. A tension emerges between the weight carried by the body and the weight imposed upon it by lived experience.

The Waiting I creates another temporal condition. Waiting is not simply a short interval before an event; it becomes a state of existence in its own right. The viewer does not know what the figure is waiting for. We are not given its past, its future, or its complete story.

This absence matters. By withholding the figure’s biography, Kaplan creates space for the viewer to place their own experience within the image. When the figure’s story remains incomplete, the viewer’s story can begin.

Yet a critical tension also emerges here: the withdrawal of context gives the photograph a universal openness, while at the same time risking the obscuring of the specific social and geographical reality from which the image emerges. Kaplan’s poetic language is strong; its most important test, however, is whether it can remain poetic without allowing poetry to replace context.

Shutter, 2018 — Photography

The Human Within the Everyday

Shutter offers a different register of Kaplan’s relationship to the human figure. The two children are not presented as symbols detached from ordinary life; they remain within the texture of an everyday urban setting. The photograph’s directness creates a productive contrast with Kaplan’s more contemplative images.

This contrast is important because it prevents the practice from being reduced to a single aesthetic of silence. Kaplan’s attention to human presence can move from stillness and distance toward gesture, encounter and everyday activity, while retaining an interest in how people are shaped by the spaces they occupy.

Traces of Burden, 2018 — Photography

The Aesthetics of Silence

A significant number of Kaplan’s photographs are not loud images. Rather than dramatic events, they carry a sense of silence, waiting, distance and emptiness. This is one of the central characteristics of her photographic approach.

Kaplan does not explain the image so much as invite the viewer to remain with it. Its meaning is not completed at first glance. A structure becomes more than a structure; it can evoke abandonment, time or loss. A body becomes more than a body; it can carry waiting, solitude or transition.

The empty spaces within Kaplan’s photographs are particularly important. Emptiness is not simply unused space within the composition. It becomes a space into which the viewer can place their own thoughts.

Silence, therefore, is not an absence in Kaplan’s photographs; it is a method of narration.

Yet another question emerges here: “Does an image say more when it says less?” Kaplan’s practice does not offer a definitive answer. In some works, ambiguity strengthens the poetic power of the image, while in others there is a sense that greater contextual grounding might deepen the reading. This tension is one of the elements that makes the practice compelling.

Untitled (2022), 2022 — Photography

Architecture, Social Space and the Trace of Presence

The 2022 Untitled photograph extends Kaplan’s investigation of place into a more explicitly architectural field. The worn façade, barred windows and small human figure create a layered relationship between interior and exterior, visibility and separation.

Here, architecture is not merely scenery. Its damaged surfaces and openings suggest accumulated time, while the figure’s position makes the building feel inhabited yet distant. The photograph can therefore be read as an inquiry into how social experience becomes embedded in material space.

This work also complicates the idea of emptiness. The façade is full of signs—windows, bars, cracks, surfaces and traces—yet the scene remains psychologically quiet. What is absent becomes as important as what is visible.

Echoes of the Shore I, 2023 — Photography

The Shore Is Not a Landscape, but a Threshold

With Echoes of the Shore I and Echoes of the Shore II, the shore becomes an important visual and conceptual space within Kaplan’s practice.

A shore exists between two things: land and water, staying and leaving, the familiar and the unknown, the past and the future. For this reason, Kaplan’s images of the shore cannot be understood simply as landscape photography. The relationship between horizon, water and human figure transforms the image into a psychological space.

The human figure is not presented as an agent who dominates the environment. The figure is positioned as a small presence within it. This difference in scale makes the relationship between the individual and the world visible.

The shore therefore carries one of the central concepts in Kaplan’s practice: the idea of the threshold. The feelings of waiting, transition and uncertainty that recur throughout her photographs converge here within a single spatial image.

The Waiting I, 2024 — Photography

Waiting as a State of Existence

The Waiting I brings the threshold into the body. The seated figure is isolated against a strong field of darkness, while the surrounding landscape remains only partially legible. The image refuses narrative certainty.

What matters is not what the figure is waiting for, but how waiting changes the experience of time. The body becomes a marker of duration. The viewer is asked to remain with a moment whose beginning and ending are deliberately withheld.

In this sense, Kaplan’s use of silence becomes temporal as well as spatial. The photograph does not merely show a place of waiting; it makes waiting itself into the subject.

Untitled (2025), 2025 — Photography

From 2011 to 2025: The Transformation of the Same Questions

A chronological reading of Kaplan’s portfolio shows that her practice is not tied to a single subject, although certain questions return in different forms over the years. Beginning with Hands Blending into Blue and Ancient Traces in 2011, the selection moves through The Stone Remember I–II, Shutter, Traces of Burden, the 2022 Untitled, Echoes of the Shore I, The Waiting I, and the 2025 works.

Although these works differ formally, there is a clear conceptual continuity. Where does the human being stand? How much past can a place carry? How independent can a body be from its environment? Can an image preserve the past?

The 2025 Untitled work is particularly useful when considering this development. The small figures moving across an unfinished structure place human labour against a broad, almost empty field. The image shifts the question of memory toward construction, change and the provisional nature of place.

Seen alongside Echoes of the Shore II, also from 2025, the work suggests that Kaplan’s recurring interest in transition is not limited to one landscape or one narrative. It can appear in architecture under construction as readily as it can appear at the edge of water.

The value of Kaplan’s practice lies partly in its refusal to provide definitive answers. She returns to the same questions from different points in time. For this reason, it is more meaningful to understand her development not simply as technical progression, but as a deepening of her gaze.

Echoes of the Shore II, 2025 — Photography

Kaplan’s Position Within Photography

To describe Kaplan’s practice simply as “poetic photography” would leave out an important part of her relationship with the medium. The issue is not merely the production of aesthetically compelling images.

Kaplan works at the boundary between the documentary nature of photography and personal interpretation. She begins with a real place, a real encounter or a real body, but rather than leaving the image as it appears, she moves it into a field of emotion and association.

This approach returns us to one of photography’s fundamental questions: “Does photography record reality, or does it reconstruct it?” Kaplan’s work leans towards the second possibility.

A photograph may record a real moment, but the artist’s framing, distance, selection and use of empty space reorganise that reality. Photography, for Kaplan, is therefore not simply a means of freezing reality, but a tool for investigating the invisible relationships within it.

A New Threshold: International Contexts and London

Kaplan’s recent exhibition activity marks an expanding international dimension within her practice. Her work has moved beyond national exhibition contexts into a number of international group exhibitions, placing her photographic language before different audiences and within different artistic contexts.

In 2026, her exhibition activity includes Parallel Traces at Espacio Gallery and Into the Fold at The Holy Art Gallery in London, as well as Eye of the Universe at Design Festa Gallery in Tokyo. She has also participated in major Turkish art-fair contexts, including the VIII IAAF Bodrum Art Fair, Antalya Contemporary Art Fair and III. İzmir Art Fair.

This trajectory is significant not simply because of the number of exhibitions, but because it creates a new context in which Kaplan’s long-term photographic inquiry can be encountered outside its original geographical setting. The questions of place, memory and belonging therefore acquire an additional dimension: how does a visual language rooted in particular places travel between cultures?

Now & Beyond, the international group exhibition taking place at Espacio Gallery in London from 14–17 August 2026, represents another current point in this trajectory. It is important to distinguish this forthcoming exhibition from Kaplan’s completed exhibitions: at the time of writing, it remains an upcoming event.

A further threshold follows immediately afterwards. Kaplan is preparing for her first solo exhibition in London at Gallery Marquess, taking place from 25 September to 1 October 2026. This transition is not simply a move into a new exhibition space. It means that works produced across different periods will be reconsidered within a more cohesive context.

Works encountered individually in group exhibitions will face another question within a solo exhibition: “How do these photographs form a whole when placed together?” This question is particularly important for Kaplan’s practice. The recurring concepts across her work—memory, place, body, waiting, trace and transition—may become a more clearly articulated visual inquiry within the context of a solo exhibition.

In other words, the London solo exhibition represents a new threshold through which Kaplan’s practice to date can be read again.

What Remains After the Image?

It is easy to describe Gunes Kaplan’s photographic practice through terms such as “memory,” “place” or “the human.” Yet the deeper strength of her work emerges not from these concepts individually, but from the relationships between them.

Stone carries the past. The body carries lived experience. Place carries the trace of the human. The shore carries transition.

In Kaplan’s photographs, the boundary between the visible and the invisible never fully closes. The artist allows the viewer to complete the image. Perhaps this is why her photography is better approached not as a document, but as a trace.

A photograph freezes a moment, but Kaplan also attempts to make visible the time surrounding that moment. In a world where images are consumed with increasing speed, this approach becomes especially significant. The value of a photograph lies not only in how striking it is, but also in how long it can remain in the viewer’s mind.

Kaplan’s work resists that speed. It slows looking down. It asks us to look again at the surface of a stone, the weight carried by a body, an empty space, an unfinished structure, or a distant shore.

And eventually, it takes us beyond the photograph and returns us to ourselves. Because in Kaplan’s photographs, the central question is not only what exists within the image, but what remains after the image.

Perhaps this is why Kaplan’s first solo exhibition in London is more than simply a new exhibition. It represents a new stage in which a visual inquiry developed since 2011 is brought together, the relationship between memory and place is reconsidered, and the possibility of transforming individual images into a larger narrative is tested.

Kaplan’s photography does not simply ask us to look at a place. It asks us to consider the trace we leave within it.

For this reason, the silence in her images is not emptiness. It is where remembering begins.

The Stone Remember II , 2014 Photography

Written by Gamze Kartal

Artwork images: Gunes Kaplan’s artist portfolio