Photography in Days of Pandemic
Ahmet Sel, 1956 Melih Ziya Sezer. Portrait, February 2020
36 x 36 cm
Archival pigment print

Time spent at home during the days of corona for a photographer is a time to shuffle through and organize archives, and to get lost in photographs both old and new. On the other hand, it is the conversations that focus on patient graphics, intensive care, quarantine, masks, social distancing, washing hands, drugs and vaccine that has been occupying our lives, lives that will never be the same again...

The words, drugs and vaccine must have left their mark on my subconscious that my archives have decided to respond to this by putting forward a recent portrait that I had taken. Melih Ziya Sezer, the owner of Yeni Moda Pharmacy, the oldest pharmacy in Istanbul; third generation pharmacist, writer, poet and good person.