Time passes fast. We miss many moments without realizing them. We are living it, and they are gone... There are moments that we don't even realize that we breathe.

Maybe it is this city life that made us like this or maybe we chose to be like this with the help of globalization. Looking for its answer is effecting our lives as challenging as trying to get our of chicken and egg dilemma.

And in this non-stop cycle, life steals a lot from us. We can remain unresponsive to many incidents, to the things we lived and to the life itself. Looking from this perspective, photography is an element that is connecting us with time.

Especially when the subject matter is city and photography, we don't even need professional analog or digital cameras. We clench our efforts to live maybe a moment, maybe the traces of past times, maybe - who knows- the stories that we have difficulty in believing their reality from our perspectives and to touch the city by means of smart phones, which settled in our daily lives more, and the cameras inside them.

When we are touching the city, photography -especially when it is looked from the sight of lenses- make us live different feelings on "looking", "seeing" and "timelessness".

Young Photographers Exhibition From Fındıklı To Tophane 

Being one of the most vital spots of the city both from visually and historically, Fındıklı is hosting once more to Young Photographer's Competition that is organized the fourth time this year. The works of winners and the one, which pass the pre-selection can be seen in Mimar Sinan Photography Gallery between 25 December 2014 - 8 January 2015 and these photographs do, in fact, combine both very different and also very young perspectives from the point of photography and city.

During the visit of exhibition, while you are realizing the architectural changes that our country has gone through, the destroyed history and the infrastructure that is about to get lost, the abandoned industrial areas, you can also watch how they transform graffiti artists -in other words street artists-, who are known as the representatives of the chaos on the street and coming usually out at night, and the miners into a social medium by taking their photographs in their unique way. 

For instance, the winner of this year was Sara Yazal from Kocaeli University with a black and white photograph series that she has taken in the land of SEKA paper factory, which was closed by the government in 2005 and abandoned.since.

The first place in honourable mention was given to Büşra Savlı from Bahçeşehir University due to her personal and feminine point of view, while the second place is given to Berna Küpeli from Yıldız Technical University who presented her work titled "İşgal Altında (Under Invasion) Istanbul's architecture in a plain way with digital visuals. 

Hu, Tophane! Mixer and 'Non-Place' 

The "non-place" exhibition curated by Mehmet Kahraman on the other side of the road in Mixer Arts is attracting attention to the relationship in between individuals and spaces. When the city and photography from the lenses of young talents are just making us think about historical heritage, architectural cycles, and changes, spacelessness and timelessness, this exhibition runs to our help and presents the concepts of today's world urbanization, transformation and globalisation by blending it with the concept of "non-place" that is introduced by French anthropologist Marc Augé and defined as the new space typology of contemporary capitalist system.

You can see the works of  Aslı Narin, Egemen Tuncer and Hasan Deniz in this group exhibition on 20 December  2014 – 1 February 2015  You can observe both the city and its spaces, their evolution, the inconstancy of their new forms after this metamorphosis from the eyes of three different lenses as a different route in the historical social infrastructure and architecture that Mixer is situated in. 

As a result, the city and photography from the sight of lenses keep surprising and make us realize new things in these last days of this year. The history may be repeating itself, but catching different point of views, question the spaces and our memories on how much moment did we manage to hold and how much we missed, is in our hands. [G1] Pushing us to question in every moment, the art of photography is maybe working as the translator of the city and it starts to underline important questions through becoming a universal language, in which technology combines with feeling and being something rather than gently paling spring leaves or a landscape photography that is taken in the first lights of the day.