“PicSpill” is a visual sketchbook, a series of photographs created outside the boundaries of any predetermined project. I am exploring and experimenting with the creation of book spreads that emphasize a binding between pictures made months apart and yet randomly connected on the same page. My collection starts in 2017 and ends in 2025, the span of seven years and two iPhones. As I began cataloging my photographs by date and location, subtle patterns of time, change, and repetition began to emerge —an ongoing visual diary of pandemic years, isolated days, political protests, my yearly trips to my home in Turkey, and the myriad everyday moments in between. Organized chronologically the collection links images in serendipitous ways to evoke narratives that transcend the individual image, creating a cohesion that goes beyond the sum of its parts. 

 

The pictures in “PicSpill” were shot with the iPhone camera and stored in my digital photo album. With its sophisticated software innovation and exceptional lens capacity, the iPhone camera has become a ubiquitous tool in photography. We use it to capture personal family snapshots, and travel pictures, to document and share mundane activities, or purely for informational pictures as note-taking, and even for the copying of office documents. Here I am especially interested in the way it has freed my photography from my traditional medium format professional camera by being always available and fairly invisible in public space. With an iPhone camera, I am more easily able to take on different genres of photography, portraiture, architectural, fashion, documentary, still-life, street photography, fantasy, narrative and many others. The iPhone with its highly saturated colors and sophisticated triple lens focuses the process of making a picture to compositional and conceptual choices. 

 

“PicSpill” parallels the social media “photo dump” posts. The book’s design mimics a curated collection of images of daily life that also stands in for an individual’s identity. Photographs that were meant to be on the web are here collected in a book bound with a wire-o type coil that makes it look like a notebook, or possibly a sketchbook. “PicSpill” is a meditation and note-taking on the chaos of everyday life. 

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