A childhood love of science fiction gave photographer Aydın Büyüktaş a new lens through which to view the Turkish city

The surreal, digitally altered photographs of Aydın Büyüktaş defy time and space, presenting his home city of Istanbul as though viewed through a wormhole.

His images are the culmination of his reading during his childhood and adolescence in Ankara – science fiction by writers such as Isaac Asimov and HG Wells, as well as scientific and technical journals. “These books made me question the issues of wormholes, blackholes, parallel universes, gravitation and bending of space and time,” he said by email from Istanbul.



While reading the theoretical physicist Michio Kaku’s work Hyperspace in 2006, Büyüktaş became “obsessed” by the idea of a blackhole on Earth – “how it would bend the space, time and place”. That in turn led him to Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a satirical work of science fiction by the English schoolteacher Edwin Abbott Abbott, originally published in 1884.

“The idea of bending space in images, and that I could see Istanbul with this logic, met up at that time,” he said. But it wasn’t until 10 years later that he was able to picture it.

Shot in 2015 and exhibited in 2016, his photographic series, also titled Flatland, presented a “multidimensional, romantic point of view” of bazaars, mosques, stadiums and scenes within the city where he has lived since 2000.

Each image is a digital collage of at least 17 stills: planned with a computer-generated 3D replica of the city over a period of months, taken with a drone, then laboriously combined in post-production to create a smooth curve. “In Photoshop it takes many days to create an image how I want to,” Büyüktaş said, who has exhibited solo in Istanbul and Toronto.

Continued last year with Flatland II, shot in the US, the series gives the impression of the earth sliding out from under your feet.

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