Yasmin Kaya

Yasmin Kaya is an Istanbul-based photographer working in portraiture and interiors, almost always on available light. The rule isn't an aesthetic pose — it started as a limitation from shooting in working kitchens and market stalls where a strobe kit would have gotten in the way, and stayed because the resulting pictures hold a room's actual atmosphere instead of a lit version of it.

Practice

Commissions split between two kinds of subject: interiors that need to read as lived-in rather than staged, and portraits of people in their own workspace rather than a studio. Both start with an hour of just watching how light moves through the space before a camera comes out. A hybrid workflow runs medium-format film for personal and long-form work alongside digital for faster editorial turnarounds, with all archival prints run in-house rather than sent to a lab.

Commissions

Recent work includes a commissioned interior series documenting a Karaköy hotel renovation, an editorial portrait series profiling craftspeople in Kadıköy's market district for a regional culture magazine, and an ongoing personal archive of the Bosphorus commuter ferries now three years deep, partially published as a limited-run zine.