Pera Museum is presenting “Cumhuriyetin Kamera Arkası” (Behind the Camera of the Republic), an exhibition organised for the 20th anniversary of the Istanbul Research Institute (IAE). Curated by İdil Çetin and Ahmet Ersoy, it offers an unusual view of Istanbul from the 1920s to the early 1950s.
The selection is drawn from the Press Photographs Archive, more than 90,000 negatives held in the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Photography Collection. Published photographs are shown beside other frames recording the moments just before and after, while interventions on the negatives such as cut-outs, scratching and masking reveal each image’s editorial journey to the newspaper page.
Alongside neighbourhood streets, crowded avenues, sports grounds, entertainment venues and scenes of working life, the exhibition also features accidents, fires and courthouse corridors. The curators describe the collection as a “waste archive”, the product of photojournalist Selahattin Giz’s passion for keeping everything, regardless of whether a photograph was good or bad.
Designed by Pattu, the exhibition draws on the archive’s first group of 12,586 glass and 8,097 acetate negatives, a large part of which is thought to be the work of Namık Görgüç, who set up Cumhuriyet newspaper’s photo service with Benli Kemal in 1924. A comprehensive catalogue with contributions from a range of authors accompanies the show.
Dates and venue
- 29 September 2026 – 28 March 2027, Pera Museum
Pera Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday 10:00–19:00 and Sundays 12:00–18:00. Admission is free for all visitors on Fridays 18:00–22:00 (“Long Friday”) and for all students on Wednesdays (“Young Wednesday”).
