Photos: Francesco D’Alonzo
Between Europe and Asia, between the West and the East, between its cumbersome history and the violent bursting of modernity. This is İstanbul, a city with a thousand faces where Genoese, Venetians, Ottomans and Greeks met and merged into a huge melting pot of 16 million people. It is the city of churches transformed into mosques, Roman and Byzantine remains, drapes and spices, but also the city of traffic, the local shops and labels and the smell of fried fish. It takes 3 or 4 days to capture the essence of İstanbul. Who for the first time arrives in this city, is overwhelmed by a unique reality of its kind, made of lights, colors, flavors and odors unrepeatable. Autumn, like spring, is the best time to live it to the fullest. There is no hot summer heat or the harsh winter temperatures. The air is fresh and dry and there is no overcrowding in the summer months. Istanbul is the urban face of Turkey and is its flagship to show that the country is growing, which is increasingly strong economically; If at the infrastructural level the changes are happening in a sudden way the same can not be affirmed for the standard of living and for the socio-cultural changes. Istanbul is changing at great speed, it wants to prove to be a lively and more westernized city, but it risks to forget itself, its millennial history that makes it unique in the world and here, that the focus of my work is focused on people of Istanbul, on the symbolic and aggregating places, the Mosques, the crowded streets of the city center as opposed to the narrow streets, bad roads in the most genuine part of the city, Fatih, Balat; genuine, authentic neighborhoods where you can breathe the true atmosphere of the old Byzantium, crossroads of millennial civilizations and populations.
Francesco D’Alonzo – born in Pescara on 20 September 1981. He began to photograph at the beginning of the second half of the 2000s, mainly landscapes inspired by love for nature and biodiversity. He attended an advanced Reportage course in Rome winning a photo contest “Roma in a click”. The human factor, investigating urban spaces, geometries, and forms of life within them are fundamental and fundamental themes of photographic evolution. This research brings him to participate in several international exhibitions publications on several international street and black & white photograher magazines entering 2017 within the “Exhibit Around” with exhibitions around Europe. To date, his photographic research concerns the study of urban spaces and its inhabitants, ranging from street to social reportage.
www.francescodalonzo.it – Instagram: francesco_photography81
