Ahmet Ertuğ Turkish, b. 1949

Ahmet Ertuğ (b. 1949) is a Turkish photographer and publisher who has spent five decades making monumental large-format photographs of the interiors of civilization’s most exemplary buildings, from Hagia Sophia and St Peter’s Basilica to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and the great libraries and opera houses of Europe. A trained architect, he seeks structures that answer the three principles of Vitruvius, durability, utility and beauty. Ertuğ photographs them with large-format cameras and long exposures, gaining access to spaces, rarely granted. What is new, he has said, is not the subject but the individual viewer’s relationship to it.

Born in Istanbul in 1949, Ertuğ studied at the Architectural Association in London from 1969 to 1974 and credits his aesthetic vision to his mentor and collaborator Sedad Hakkı Eldem, a pioneer of modern architecture in Turkey. He began photographing in London in 1972 and practiced architecture in England, Iran and Turkey. He was photographing Persian monuments and indigenous settlements while working in Iran from 1974 to 1976.

An exhibition of those Iranian photographs in Ankara, large-scale black and white images of Iranian architecture, caught the eye of the Japanese filmmaker and photographer Banri Namikawa, who became a friend and recommended him for a Japan Foundation fellowship in 1978. A year spent travelling through Japan, photographing temples, Zen gardens, and festivals, together with the influence of photographer and publisher Yukio Futagawa’s folio books, set the course of his life with the large-format camera and the printed page.

Returning to Istanbul, Ertuğ advised the Ministry of Culture and Tourism on the historical city and turned his camera on the Byzantine, Ottoman and Roman monuments around him, from Sinan’s mosques to Topkapı Palace. He founded Bosphorus Books, publishing Istanbul, Gateway to Splendour in 1986 with architectural drawings by Eldem, and later established Ertuğ & Kocabıyık with Ahmet Kocabıyık, producing some thirty limited-edition volumes printed and bound by hand in Italy and Switzerland in folio and larger formats.

The books and the exhibitions travelled together. Spiritual Journey at the Musée Guimet in 2004 produced a volume Le Monde named the most beautiful book of the year; thirty-five Ephesos photographs entered the permanent collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2008; and thirty historical libraries photographed in 2009 were shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France with the volume Temples of Knowledge. Palaces of Music followed in 2010, twenty-two European opera houses from Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico to Oslo, and Gods of Nemrud in 2012. The director of the State Hermitage Museum invited him to photograph that building for its 250th anniversary, and permanent displays hang in the upper gallery of Hagia Sophia and at the Ephesos Museum.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presented Ahmet Ertuğ: Photographs, 1978–2020, his first solo gallery exhibition in the United States, in 2020, followed by Edifice as Artifact in 2022 and Summer Glow in 2024. Journey into Stones and Light was shown at La Conciergerie, Paris, in 2024.