The Face of Europe and The Other: Ali Haydar Yesilyurt’s Monumental Visual Reckoning With a Continent’s Hidden Self

Born in Ordu, living in London, trained in Cardiff, exhibited internationally, and published this April by Istanbul’s Espas Sanat Kuram: Ali Haydar Yesilyurt has spent years photographing Europe not as a tourist, not as an outsider, and not as an admirer — but as someone who understands, from the inside, what it means to stand at the border between belonging and exclusion. His new book is one of the most significant works of documentary photography to emerge from the British-Turkish creative community in a generation.

There is a photograph that almost every documentary photographer takes of Europe, and it is always the same photograph: a market square, a cathedral, a cafe terrace, old stone and soft afternoon light. Europe as aesthetic object. Europe as destination. Europe as the thing that is looked at. Ali Haydar Yesilyurt has spent years refusing to take that photograph — or rather, has spent years understanding why that refusal is the beginning of a genuine practice rather than the end of one. The Face of Europe and The Other, published this April by Espas Sanat Kuram Yayinlari in Istanbul, is the fullest statement yet of what that practice has produced: a book-length visual argument that Europe, seen honestly, is not a landscape but a set of relationships — and that the relationships that matter most are the ones the official image of the continent has always struggled to show.

Yesilyurt was born in Ordu, on Turkey’s Black Sea coast, and lives in London. He completed a master’s degree in the film industry at Cardiff Metropolitan University. His photographs have appeared in Magnum Photos, Reuters, and National Geographic. A project book published by the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts in 2016 documented an earlier phase of this European project. He has worked photographically in India, Africa, the Americas, and Cuba. In 2024, his projects in Cuba and the United Kingdom were reviewed within the Leica editorial evaluation process in collaboration with LFT Gallery, and were designated by Leica as outstanding examples of their kind. The portrait of Yesilyurt that accompanies this publication was taken by Coskun Aral — a detail that is not incidental, since Aral is one of the defining figures of Turkish documentary photography, and placing his image at the threshold of Yesilyurt’s book is a quiet statement of lineage.

None of this biographical information fully prepares you for the specific quality of attention that The Face of Europe and The Other brings to its subject. The book is not a collection of beautiful photographs of European cities, although it contains many beautiful photographs of European cities. It is not a polemical document, although it contains arguments. It is, in the most precise sense, a visual memory space: an attempt to construct, through images, a record of Europe’s social reality that the continent’s own self-presentation systematically excludes.

The Manifesto: What Europe Looks Like From the Border

The book opens with a manifesto — a relatively rare formal choice in contemporary photography publishing, and a revealing one. Manifestos declare intentions. They ask to be held accountable. Yesilyurt’s manifesto positions him explicitly on what he calls the border line: as an Anatolian-origin Briton, he is neither the European who looks out at the world from a position of assumed centrality, nor the ‘other’ who is looked at from that position. He is something more uncomfortable — the person who understands both sides of the gaze because he has been on both sides of it.

The manifesto’s central intellectual move is to shift the analytical frame from culture to class. Yesilyurt is not primarily interested in the cultural differences between European societies, or between Europe and its various ‘others.’ He is interested in the production relations, labour regimes, and structural inequalities that determine how human lives are actually lived across the continent — regardless of national culture, language, or heritage. This is a deliberately unfashionable position in an era when identity and culture have become the dominant frameworks for understanding difference. It is also, for that reason, a particularly valuable one.

“The aim is not to build a bridge. The aim is to show how artificial and permeable the division always was. Class does not stop at borders. Labour does not stop at borders. Inequality does not stop at borders.”

The manifesto also confronts the history of Western photography’s relationship to the ‘other’ — the long tradition of exotic, distancing, aestheticising images of non-Western subjects that has shaped documentary photography’s conventions and its unconscious assumptions. Yesilyurt’s response to this tradition is not to abandon it but to turn it inside out: to apply to Europe itself the same quality of searching, unsettling attention that Western photographers have historically directed at the rest of the world. The effect is disorienting in productive ways. Europe, seen through this lens, is not the stable, prosperous, self-evidently desirable object it appears in its own promotional imagery. It is a place of labour and exclusion, of visible wealth and invisible suffering, of official memory and unofficial forgetting.

Orhan Cem Cetin: The Editor’s Vision

The editorial essay by Orhan Cem Cetin — faculty member at Koc University and member of Istanbul Modern’s Photography Advisory Board — frames Yesilyurt’s work through the concept of world citizenship and the metaphor of the family album. These are not, on their face, the most obvious frames for a project rooted in class analysis and the critique of Western representation. But Cetin’s reading is both illuminating and generous: he argues that what Yesilyurt has produced is not a document in the journalistic sense — informational, provisional, overtaken by subsequent events — but something closer to a personal and poetic memory: images that work on the viewer as memories work, through association, atmosphere, and the accumulation of detail rather than through argument.

This distinction — between documentary as information and documentary as memory — is central to understanding what makes The Face of Europe and The Other unusual. Yesilyurt is not a photojournalist, although his images have appeared in photojournalist contexts. He is not a fine art photographer, although his images have the visual sophistication of fine art. He operates in the space between these categories, in the interstitial zone that the book’s title designates as the domain of ‘the other’ — the space that is defined by its relationship to the established categories rather than by membership in them.

Ataol Behramoglu: Memory, Exile, and the Contradictions of the West

The epilogue by poet and literary scholar Professor Ataol Behramoglu adds a different register to the book’s intellectual architecture. Behramoglu, approaching Yesilyurt’s images through the lens of exile and historical consciousness — drawing on his own experience of the 1980s Turkish political diaspora — reads the photographs as something more than documentation of a place. They are, for him, evidence of a historical awareness: a recognition that Europe’s contradictions are not recent failures but long-standing structural features of a civilisation that has always sustained its prosperity partly through the suppression of other stories.

Behramoglu’s insistence that art must use technology but must also be capable of exceeding it is a pointed comment on the current cultural moment, in which AI image generation is raising fundamental questions about what photographic practice means and what documentary photography’s claims to truth and witness can sustain. Yesilyurt’s work, he suggests, is an answer to this challenge — not through argument but through the irreducible specificity of images made by a particular person in a particular place at a particular time, carrying the weight of a particular history.

The Visual Argument: What the Photographs Do

It is, of course, impossible to review a photography book without seeing the photographs. The colophon and publication details available to TBMag do not include image reproductions, and we are conscious that any description of photographs is necessarily a translation that loses what matters most. What we can say, on the basis of Yesilyurt’s practice as documented in other contexts — his Magnum and Reuters work, his Leica-recognised projects, the Warsaw Academy publication — is that his images consistently do something unusual: they produce intimacy without sentimentality, and critical distance without coldness.

The Magnum Photos tradition — in which Yesilyurt’s work has appeared — is one of the most demanding contexts for documentary photography. Magnum’s standards require not just technical mastery and journalistic accuracy but a quality of human presence in the image: a sense that the photographer has been genuinely admitted to the situation being photographed, rather than merely recording it from outside. This quality of admitted presence is what distinguishes documentary photography from surveillance, and it is what makes Yesilyurt’s European project something more than a sophisticated critique. It is, in the deepest sense, a work of witness.

London, Istanbul, and the Book’s Context

The Face of Europe and The Other is published by Espas Sanat Kuram Yayinlari, an Istanbul publisher specialising in art theory. Its editor is Orhan Cem Cetin, its design by Serla Tekin, its English copy-editing by Paul Sparkes. The book’s first edition appears in April 2026 — a moment when the question of what Europe is, and who belongs to it, is being asked with unusual urgency on both sides of the Channel. The UK, navigating its post-Brexit relationship with the continent. Turkey, hosting COP31 and seeking its own complex relationship with European institutions and European identity. The British-Turkish community, living in both of these conversations simultaneously.

For TBMag’s readership, The Face of Europe and The Other is not simply a work of art to be admired at a respectful distance. It is a work that speaks directly to the condition of living between — between nations, between identities, between the Europe that presents itself and the Europe that exists. Ali Haydar Yesilyurt has spent years making the photographs that this condition demands. The book is the result.

It deserves to be seen widely, debated seriously, and placed on the shelf alongside the most significant works of British-Turkish cultural production of the past decade. We recommend it without reservation.

BOOK DETAILS

• Title:  The Face of Europe and The Other
• Author / Photographer:  Ali Haydar Yesilyurt
• Publisher:  Espas Sanat Kuram Yayinlari  ·  Istanbul  ·  2026
• Editor:  Orhan Cem Cetin  (Koc University  ·  Istanbul Modern Photography Advisory Board)
• Epilogue:  Prof. Ataol Behramoglu  (Istanbul University Faculty of Literature)
• Design:  Serla Tekin  ·  English copy-editing: Paul Sparkes
• Printer:  Bilnet Matbaacilik ve Yayincilik A.S.  ·  Umraniye, Istanbul
• ISBN:  978-605-4363-66-7  ·  First edition: April 2026
• About the artist:  Born Ordu  ·  Based London  ·  MA Film Industry, Cardiff Metropolitan University
• Published work:  Magnum Photos  ·  Reuters  ·  National Geographic  ·  Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (2016)
• Recognition:  Leica editorial evaluation 2024 (with LFT Gallery) — designated outstanding example
• Portrait:  by Coskun Aral
• Contact:  info@espaskitap.com  ·  www.espaskitap.com