7 Gün

© Francesco Gioia

This series was photographed over the course of a week in Istanbul, seven days of drifting through Moda, Balat, Beyoğlu. The title, 7 Gün, is borrowed from a 1930s Turkish magazine, evoking a slower form of storytelling, one rooted in observation, fragments, and proximity.

The photographs focus mostly on men’s hands, adorned with pendants, rings, small charms. But the gaze extends beyond: to quiet everyday moments that often go unnoticed; city façades, gardens, objects, gestures suspended in pause. Some faces appear too, closely framed, momentary. These images trace a kind of peripheral beauty, where life gathers in silence and detail. But the attention remains on what escapes the surface, the tension in a wrist, the worn texture of skin, the weight of an object held without purpose.

While I was in Istanbul, protests erupted in response to the arrest and detention of Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. There was unrest, heightened surveillance, and a sense of underlying unease that pulsed through the streets. Rather than documenting the demonstrations directly, I chose to remain slightly aside, photographing the city just before or just after, in the quiet tension that surrounds public moments.

What I was drawn to, instead, were the in-between gestures: the way someone adjusted a necklace at a street corner, the stillness of a hand resting on a knee in the moments after a crowd had moved on, the intimate, almost ceremonial weight of small objects that hang close to the body. These images don’t aim to explain the city or decode its politics. They register atmosphere, how political tension filters into daily rituals and silent interactions.

I thought of these images as a way of capturing a silent humanity in an unstable context of reading the city through its smallest details, those that slip past media noise.

7 Gün doesn’t offer commentary. It listens. It lingers.

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