New English Paperback. Small 4to. (26 x 22 cm). In English and Turkish. 328 p., color and b/w photos. Foto Galatasaray: Studio practice by Maryam Sahinyan. Foto Galatasaray project is based on the re-visualization of the complete professional archive of Maryam Sahinyan (Sivas, 1911 ¿ Istanbul, 1996), who worked as a photographer at her modest studio in Galatasaray, Beyoglu uninterruptedly from 1935 until 1985. The archive is a unique inventory of the demographic transformations occurring on the socio-cultural map of Istanbul after the declaration of the Republic and the historical period it witnessed; it is also a chronological record of a female Istanbulite studio photographer¿s professional career. Armed with the wooden bellows camera her father originally took over from a family that immigrated from the Balkans in the aftermath of the First World War and the black-and-white sheet film she continued to use until 1985, Sahinyan, in a sense, arrested time ¿ both against the technological advancements photography was experiencing and contemporary trends. In the end, she created an unparalleled visual coherence without compromising her technical and aesthetic principles. Consisting entirely of black-and-white and glass negatives, the physical archive of Foto Galatasaray is a rare surviving example of the classical photography studios of Istanbul¿s recent past. Changing hands after Sahinyan left the studio in 1985, the archive was transferred to a storehouse belonging to Yetvart Tomasyan, owner of Aras Publishing. Twenty-five years later, approximately 200,000 negatives in the archive were, over the course of two years, sorted, cleaned, digitized, digitally restored, categorized and protected by a team under the direction of artist/researcher Tayfun Serttas. Foto Galatasaray was never as visible as some of the elite photography studios, famous since the 19th century, like Phebus, Andriomenos or Sabah. Nonetheless, it played an important role in representing the middle and lower classes that ensured the continuity of the studio. Sahinyan was a devout Armenian woman, and her identity created a closely-knit circle that.
