Ozan Sağdıç’s “Zarifane Alay” (Elegant Mockery) at Dirimart, Istanbul: Seventy Years of Turkey, Caught Smiling

A sculpture that seems to have sat down among the people on a park bench. A handcart trundling past, almost under the wing of an aeroplane. These are the kinds of pictures that fill Ozan Sağdıç’s “Zarifane Alay” at Dirimart Pera in Istanbul, a photography exhibition running from 12 November to 13 December 2026. The title translates as “Elegant Mockery”, and it is the photographer’s own phrase for the soft, knowing humour that runs through seven decades of his work.

The man who photographed modern Turkey

Sağdıç was born in 1934 in Balıkesir and lives in Ankara. As a schoolboy in Buca he studied drawing under the painter Âbidin Elderoğlu, before finishing at Kabataş High School in Istanbul. In 1956 he became one of the first two staff photojournalists at Hayat, the illustrated weekly that shaped how a generation of Turks saw their country — the other, as Cumhuriyet has noted, was Ara Güler. In 1960 Sağdıç moved to run the magazine’s new Ankara bureau.

From there his career branched in many directions. He photographed productions for the Turkish State Theatres, designed posters and book covers, and taught photography in the founding years of Ankara University’s Faculty of Communication and Hacettepe University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. He was named State Artist in 1998, and Istanbul Modern gave him a major retrospective, “The Photographer’s Testimony”, with 127 photographs, in 2024.

From testimony to wit

That museum show stressed Sağdıç the witness: politicians, artists, street life and social change recorded across Istanbul, Ankara and Anatolia since the 1950s. The Dirimart exhibition shifts the emphasis. Here the subject is everyday life — crowds, streets, workplaces, places of leisure — and the moments when people, animals, objects and places line up in a brief, improbable order. Sometimes the arrangement is staged, sometimes it happens by chance; the photographer’s gift is to be there with the shutter open.

The gallery’s text describes a double way of seeing. From a distance a crowd becomes a pattern; move closer and it dissolves into individual faces and gestures. A small break in routine — someone looking the wrong way, an animal wandering into frame — carries as much weight as the repeated movement around it. Clothing, workplaces, transport and public space quietly date each picture, so that the humour always sits inside a portrait of a society in transition.

Pleasure, thought and a smile

According to the press release, Sağdıç believes a photograph should do three things: give pleasure, make you think and make you smile. It is a disarmingly modest creed for a photojournalist who lived through coups, migrations and the explosive growth of Turkish cities. But the irony he favours is never cruel. “Zarifane” — elegant, refined — is the key word. The mockery is affectionate, directed at the absurd choreography of daily life rather than at the people caught up in it.

Readers who know the great European humanist photographers — the street humour of Robert Doisneau, the timing of Henri Cartier-Bresson — will recognise the family resemblance. What makes Sağdıç distinct is the setting: the Turkey of the 1950s to the present, with its minibuses, bazaars and new airports, seen by someone who belonged to it.

A family-curated first show at Dirimart

“Zarifane Alay” is Sağdıç’s first solo exhibition with Dirimart since the gallery took on his representation, and it is curated by Ruhi Oğuz Sağdıç, the photographer’s son. Dirimart, founded in Istanbul and now one of Turkey’s leading commercial galleries, is better known for contemporary painting and international names; bringing a documentary photographer in his nineties into its programme is a statement about the place of photography — and of photojournalism — in the Turkish art market.

The Pera space on Meşrutiyet Caddesi sits in the heart of Istanbul’s museum quarter, a few minutes’ walk from the Pera Museum and the galleries of İstiklal Caddesi. It is a fitting address: many of the street scenes Sağdıç made in Istanbul were taken within reach of these same streets.

Why collectors should pay attention

Vintage and estate photography by Turkish masters is still an under-explored field compared with painting. Sağdıç’s museum retrospective, his State Artist title and now gallery representation together make this a significant moment for his market. For younger photographers, the show is a reminder that documentary rigour and humour are not opposites — timing, patience and an eye for the absurd can tell you as much about a society as any headline image.

Visiting information

Dirimart Pera, Meşrutiyet Caddesi No: 99, Beyoğlu, Istanbul. 12 November – 13 December 2026; opening Thursday 12 November at 18:00. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10:00–19:00 and Sunday 12:00–19:00; Mondays closed or by appointment — check with the gallery. Phone +90 212 232 66 66, email [email protected]. See our Zarifane Alay listing and the official exhibition page, and find more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.