Istanbul New Stories

Paola De Pietri was born in 1960 in Reggio Emilia, where she still lives. In 2009 she won the triennial Albert Renger-Patzsch Prize. De Pietri has exhibited in many solo and group shows, including at the Venice Biennale (1997), the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (2001), Fotomusem Winterthur (2005), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2006), the Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo, Milan (2007), the Fondazione Fotografia, Modena (2010), Le Bal, Paris (2011), the MAXXI, Rome (2012), the Triennale, Milan (2013), the Leopold Museum, Vienna, and the Mart, Rovereto (2014). Steidl published her To Face in 2012.

Over the last fifteen years, Istanbul has emerged as one of the principal megacities at the outset of the twenty-first century. The picturesque has given way to an unexpected boom of new, profit-driven urban development including high-rise, sterile gated communities and satellite cities to house a vastly expanding population - all at the expense of long-time residents and under the mantle of a self-confident and arbitrary government.Shot in 2012 and 2013, Paola De Pietri's serene and understated photographs of individuals against the backdrops of dusty construction sites and newly finished buildings focus on the impact of the changing urban landscape of Istanbul on the minds of its people. The newly created housing situations in anonymous apartment towers and detached homes interrupt human relations, shifting people's social refuge from family and neighbors to imposed individualization and private solitude. The postures and body language reflect the precarious, unstable state of mind of a new and very mixed social stratum of domestic migrants coming to terms with unfamiliar models of life and environments, in which stray dogs linger like ghosts from the past.