Mehmet Günyeli Fotoğraf Sergisi

Nurol Sanat Galerisi in Ankara presents a solo exhibition of photographs by Mehmet Günyeli from 22 October to 14 November 2026, under the title Mehmet Günyeli Fotoğraf Sergisi. The gallery announces the show with one of his colour pictures. An older man in a straw hat and white shirt, cigar in mouth, sits on a ledge before a blue shuttered window and a worn yellow wall.

Günyeli was born in Istanbul and went to school at Saint Joseph Lycée, where photography first took hold of him. He made it his career in the 1980s while remaining a partner in family businesses. For some twenty years he worked on a project called Yeryüzünün Renkleri, or Colours of the Earth. Its aim was to record societies that hold on to their own culture as the world grows more uniform. Two books came from it, Viva Cuba Libre and India. A 2008 newspaper profile noted his taste for strong reds, pinks and yellows set against grey or white surroundings, and his preference for people over buildings and landscape.

Around 2004 he moved away from colour towards conceptual series in black and white. Angels and dervishes came first, and by 2009 he was at work on a series about mythological gods drawn from statues. He gave the dervish project the name İnancın Dansı. Pictures from it appeared at an art fair in Miami in December 2008, and the series had its first solo showing at C.A.M. Galeri in Nişantaşı, Istanbul, in March 2009. In 2015 his works Dervishes-Beliefs Dancing and Angels-Street of Dreams hung in A Selection of Turkish Art. The Qatar Photographic Society staged that group exhibition at Katara Cultural Village in Doha.

Günyeli tends to photograph people without asking first, often from a distance with a telephoto lens, and he travels alone when working. Beyond his own pictures he collects historical photographs, postcards and stamps, and he was one of the founders of the Ephemera Society in Turkey.