Ozan Sağdıç

Ozan Sağdıç (b. 1934, Balıkesir, Turkey) is an artist based in Ankara who works in photography. His subjects are the crowds, streets, workplaces and places of leisure of everyday life. Clothing, transport and public spaces tie each moment to a changing social landscape. His practice spans photojournalism, documentary work and stage photography for the State Theatres. He also designed posters and book covers. He grades pictures as good, beautiful or masterful, and calls his irony zarifane alay. For him a photograph should give pleasure, make people smile and set them thinking.

As a boarding pupil at Buca Secondary School in Izmir, he studied under the painter Âbidin Elderoğlu. He then attended Kabataş High School, Istanbul (1954). In 1956 Hayat magazine took him on as one of its first two photojournalists, with Ara Güler. In 1960 he moved to Ankara to set up the magazine's Ankara bureau. One picture shows a sculpture that seems to join people on a bench; another, a handcart passing an aeroplane. In 1968 The British Journal of Photography published one of his pictures as Photograph of the Year. He taught photography in the founding years of faculties at Ankara University and Hacettepe University.

He has held about 50 solo exhibitions in Turkey and abroad, including Fotoğrafın Ozanı at the Istanbul Photography Museum (2013). In 2024 Istanbul Modern showed The Photographer's Testimony, 127 photographs curated by Merih Akoğul and Demet Yıldız Dinçer. He received the Art Institution Award (1985), the title of State Artist (1998) and the Aydın Doğan Award for photography (2014). Later honours include the ÇAĞSAV Honorary Award (2023) and the Altın Deklanşör Award (2024). His work is in the Istanbul Modern Collection. He is represented by Dirimart, where his son Ruhi Oğuz Sağdıç curates Elegant Mockery (2026), his first solo show there.