Illumination: The Black-and-White Moments of Bülent Özgören

Bülent Özgören’s exhibition Illumination presents a narrative that explores the abstract and material layers of time through photography. The artist’s black-and-white photographs, printed in the darkroom, offer a poetic inquiry into the transformation of nature and human perception.

While mists spread through forests and blur the outlines of trees, in other frames, mountains rising from coastlines appear as timeless presences. The cyclical rhythm of branches drying and turning green again, the contrast between the fluidity of water and the rigidity of ice all evoke, in Özgören’s imagery, both the fragility of the moment and the endless cycles of nature. As Roland Barthes states in Camera Lucida, the punctum of a photograph is the sudden sensory and mental awakening it provokes in the viewer; just like in Özgören’s frames, these images become moments that transform the traces of time into profound layers of meaning.

Each frame in this exhibition sheds light on different faces of time while surrendering to its uncertainty. The ebb and flow of the sea, vast landscapes, and nature's sculpted forms create a visual space for reflecting on the existential position of the human in relation to nature. Oscillating between meaning and ambiguity, these photographs remind us, echoing Susan Sontag’s words of the dual nature of photography: documenting loss while resisting it. In Özgören’s black-and-white universe, nature emerges not merely as a motif but as a narrator, recording the passage of time.

Illumination is thus not only a visual experience but an intellectual space that reveals the fragility of time and perception.

Exhibition text by Eren Aksu