The Photography Studio of An Adventurous Architect: Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu 1893-1982

The Photography Studio of An Adventurous Architect: Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu 1893-1982 runs at the Istanbul Research Institute in Tepebaşı, Beyoğlu, from 19 June 2025 to 31 January 2027. The solo show presents photographs by Arif Hikmet Koyunoğlu, an architect of the late Ottoman and early Republican years, most of them taken in the 1920s and 1930s. The images come from glass negatives, acetates and prints that his family gave to the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation. Framed prints share the rooms with large backlit enlargements, display cases and wall texts in Turkish and English.

The selection follows Koyunoğlu from his years as an architecture student to the First World War, when he served on the Eastern Front around Erzurum. One picture shows soldiers on skis on a snowy slope at Sarıkamış. Other photographs record family outings in Bursa and sitters at the Underground Photography House, the basement studio he opened on Bâbıâli Street in 1920. Views of Ankara, Istanbul, Bursa, Nevşehir and Kırşehir sit beside studies of Seljuk and Ottoman monuments. A group of images documents the Turkish Hearths building in Ankara, which he designed.

Koyunoğlu was born in Istanbul in 1893 and acquired his first camera at about the age of ten. He entered the Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi, the Imperial School of Fine Arts, in 1910 to train as an architect, and volunteered for the Balkan War in 1912. In Ankara from 1925 he built the Ethnography Museum and the Turkish Hearths headquarters, two landmarks of the First National Architecture movement. Over 89 years he also worked as a soldier, gallery owner, photojournalist, transport contractor and insurance assessor, 31 trades in all. In 1980 he became the first architect to receive the title of State Artist, and he died in Istanbul in 1982.

The photographs show how an architect's eye shaped a personal record of the years in which the Ottoman Empire gave way to the Republic. After the opening, further donations brought the collection to 718 items, and it can be searched online through the Institute's library catalogue. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 7pm, and entry is free.