Photobooks are fascinating weapons. A critical review with Barış Uçar
Updated: 2 days ago
Written by Nigel Ip Photobooks are fascinating weapons in a photographer’s arsenal, revealing insights into their curated approach to their own images. One might compare it to a carefully crafted anthology of poems by a single author that seeks to offer a glimpse into the mind of its creator.
Never Let You Go (2026) was created by Turkish-born photographer Barış Uçar as a reflection on his past three years in London. Intended to evoke the feeling of a diary, the 104-page publication consists of everything from street scenes and fragments to portraits of strangers and close friends. Like a series of flashbacks, one jumps from industrial landscapes to close-ups of nature to figures awkwardly posed. There is no narrative structure to follow: ‘I didn't want a specific story, but I wanted to get a feeling out of them.’ One of the final shots features a haunting figure donning an elderly mask on a spring rider in a playground.
This sense of aimless wandering through the city at night almost seems a bit spooky, like a descent into madness after a drunken evening. Indeed, Uçar cites the films of David Lynch as major inspirations for how he wanted his photographs to feel, one that is centred around dark, dreamy urbanity with a sense of unease and disorientation. Even the portraits of his friends were intended to mimic an encounter with a stranger. All the images were shot in black and white, except for the blood red cover with the title written in Uçar’s own handwriting.
Another important source of inspiration is Daido Moriyama, one of the most assiduous street photographers of the late 20th century who captured moments of encounters in the cities of Japan and the United States. Uçar has a similar approach to seeking out images. Reflecting on the title of his photobook, he feels a calling to collect and preserve every texture, feeling, face, and moment encountered in the city, to literally never let an image go. Every photographer has the same nightmare, of missing the perfect shot, or losing a shot completely.
The photobook has some unusual technical quirks, however. With images taken on seven different cameras ranging from a medium format Bronica to an instant print camera, Uçar digitally photographed the film negatives and post-processed them. They were then printed, subjected to various treatments to give them a worn, layered appearance, and re-photographed. Occasionally, the re-photographed images were further manipulated digitally until a desired effect was achieved. As a result, there is not a single raw, unprocessed image in the book, not even the instant print camera images.
Uçar finds sharp digital images boring, preferring the aesthetic qualities of grain, texture, high contrast, and warmth of black-and-white analogue photographs, qualities he admires in the work of Moriyama. He also finds joy in their material nature, which has led him to experiment with collages in future projects.
Overall, Uçar is a filmmaker trapped in a photographer’s body. His core creative drive is to create a specific emotional atmosphere with his work for the viewer to inhabit and immerse themselves. Perhaps one might even consider him the equivalent of a composer of soundtracks, where sweeping crescendos and delicate leitmotifs direct the audience’s emotions at will. Whatever analogy we can compare him to, Uçar’s vision for photography is an honest one, one that also happens to be unexpectedly experimental in his sensitivity to the mediumistic specificity.
