Mustafa Seven is a photographer and visual storyteller whose practice is rooted in photojournalism and spans more than three decades of documentary and street photography. At the heart of his work lies the relationship between people, the city, and everyday life. He approaches photography not merely as a means of recording reality, but as a way of investigating human presence in the world, social relations, and the traces people leave behind.

Seven’s work engages with the layered themes of urban life, collective memory, belonging, and identity. Within the shifting structures of metropolitan environments, he focuses on moments that often go unnoticed in everyday life, transient relationships between people, and the reciprocal connection between individuals and the environments they inhabit.

Rooted in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s tradition of the “decisive moment,” Seven’s photographic language has gradually expanded through the narrative and conceptual possibilities of documentary cinema. This approach moves his practice beyond observation and testimony, transforming it into a visual inquiry into the human condition within the urban environment.

His published works include Istanbul, Street Photography, City for One (2016), 10 Years 10 Cities 10 Stories (2017), and If I Want (2019). His most recent book, La Latinité de Constantinople, published in 2025, was accepted into the collection of the Vatican Apostolic Library. Seven has held more than fifteen solo exhibitions, with his work presented in cities including Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya, Munich, and Paris. His project Memento: Latin Istanbul Carved in Marble was exhibited as part of 212 Photography Istanbul.

Alongside his photographic practice, Seven also works with moving image. In 2025, he completed his first feature-length documentary, Thank You Go for My Spoiler. Focusing on the Latin Catholic community living in Türkiye, the film explores questions of minority identity, belonging, and cultural memory, and continues its journey through international film festivals.

Mustafa Seven lectures at universities and independent art platforms and continues to mentor a new generation of photographers through Street Photography Club, which he founded. He is a member of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the Photojournalists Association of Türkiye (TFMD), the Journalists’ Union of Türkiye (TGS), and FOTON Association, and is an honorary member of Street Photography France. Bringing together photography, documentary filmmaking, and education, Seven continues to explore the relationship between people and their environments and the traces these experiences leave behind.

Photography, for me, is a way of bearing witness to the time I live in, to everyday life, and to the ordinary existence of people. My relationship with the street, the city, and those who inhabit it has always been grounded in a humanist perspective. Rather than dramatic events, I am drawn to the quiet encounters that emerge naturally within daily life: a passing glance, a moment of waiting, strangers standing side by side, or fleeting instances of intimacy that briefly appear within the crowd.

What distinguishes Istanbul from other metropolitan cities, in my experience, is the enduring presence of people in shaping the city itself. While architecture, order, and systems often dominate many global cities, Istanbul continues to be defined by human presence. Its streets, squares, ferries, arcades, and waterfronts are not simply urban spaces; they are living environments continuously recreated through everyday life. The city does not conceal the traces of those who inhabit it—it is transformed by them.

I use the word Nasip not in its deterministic sense of fate, but as a state of openness to encounter. Nothing in street photography can be entirely planned. Light, time, people, and the city come together for a brief moment within the same frame. My role as a photographer is not to control these moments, but to recognise them—to witness them without interrupting the natural flow of life.

NASİP brings together these encounters gathered over many years on the streets of Istanbul. For me, these photographs are not simply images of a city; they are traces of the relationships that people establish with place, with time, and with one another. Every encounter is temporary, unrepeatable, and fragile. Perhaps this is where photography finds its deepest meaning: in recognising a moment that would otherwise disappear and bearing witness to its existence.

What is the difference between looking at a city and seeing it? What transforms an encounter from a coincidence into an experience?

Mustafa Seven’s exhibition NASİP opens these questions for reflection through photographs produced in Istanbul over the course of many years. Yet the subject here is not simply the street, the individual, or the city. At a more fundamental level, NASİP questions the visual and temporal relationship human beings establish with the world, as well as the conditions of looking, encountering, and coexisting.

The Turkish word nasip, from which the exhibition takes its title, has no exact equivalent in English. Fate, destiny, chance, fortune, serendipity and contingency each approach part of its meaning, yet none fully encompasses it. Nasip refers not only to what happens to us, but also to the possibility of what has not yet happened; it carries time, possibility, and encounter within the same concept. For this reason, the title has been left untranslated. What is at stake here is not a linguistic deficiency, but a way of thinking that cannot be fully transferred into another language.

Photography, too, exists on a similar threshold: between what has happened and what might happen.

The moment the shutter is released, the photograph belongs to what has already taken place. The image before us tells us that something, someone, or a particular relationship was present there at a specific moment. Yet for that image to come into being, countless possibilities must have intersected in the same place for a brief instant. A few seconds earlier or later, the same photograph would no longer have been possible. In this sense, every photograph bears the trace of what has happened, while also containing the absence of all the other possibilities that did not come to pass.

NASİP is situated precisely within this field of tension.

While urban life constantly exposes us to images, it also teaches us not to see. Being able to move through a crowd often requires disregarding the presence of those around us. The anonymity of the modern metropolis is formed not only through the coexistence of strangers, but also through the ways in which they pass one another without contact.The gaze, therefore, is never entirely neutral. Seeing is not merely an optical act; it is a subjective mode of selection shaped by attention, experience, memory, and cultural codes. What we do not see is as much a part of this selection as what we look at.

Seven’s photographic practice operates within this selectivity. Rather than searching for extraordinary events, the artist notices the relationships that have become invisible within everyday life. The direction of a gaze, the distance between two bodies, solitude within a crowd, waiting, walking, passing one another, or briefly sharing the same space… What is often decisive in these photographs is not the event itself, but the relationship momentarily established between people and their surroundings.

Seen in this way, the street becomes not merely a public space, but a field in which social relations are continually formed. As people who do not know one another share the same physical space, they create invisible boundaries, proximities, and distances. The collective experience of the city arises, to a great extent, from this network of small, temporary, and often unrecorded relationships.

In NASİP, Istanbul is therefore more than the geography in which these relations take place. The city’s density, its historical and cultural layers, and the continuously shifting character of its public spaces make encounter one of the defining elements of urban experience.

As different characters move through the city, they transform it; the city, in turn, determines the ways in which these characters encounter one another. Thus, the city and life become not separate entities, but an interconnected whole that continually shapes itself and is shaped in return. The photographer, too, is part of this whole.

Seven’s photographs, the photographer participates in the moment in which an encounter takes place; what he sees, what he chooses, and the moment at which he releases the shutter shape the meaning of the image. When the photograph meets the viewer, that meaning opens up again. In NASİP, encounter thus becomes not only the subject of the photograph, but an ongoing relationship between the photographer, the image, and the viewer.

This relational structure is also reflected in the representation of Istanbul that emerges throughout the exhibition. The Istanbul we encounter here is neither singular, fixed, nor complete. Seven’s Istanbul is continually reconstructed through encounters, distances, coincidences, moments of solitude, and brief forms of togetherness. In this respect, the exhibition approaches the city—not unlike Georg Simmel’s reflections on the modern metropolis—not merely as a physical environment, but as a field of experience formed through distances, proximities, and encounters between individuals. At the same time, Roland Barthes’s reflections on photography as a structure that bears witness to “that has been” acquire another layer here: while the photograph points to a moment that took place in the past, the meaning of that moment continues to be reconstituted with every encounter with the viewer.

The conceptual power of NASİP becomes most apparent here: not every encounter produces meaning, not every moment is noticed, and not every image takes its place in memory. Yet certain moments detach themselves from the flow of everyday life and draw attention to themselves. Photography emerges precisely as the result of this selective act of noticing.

In this sense, NASİP is not simply what appears before us; it is what acquires meaning at the moment it is noticed.