Cardboard Mountains

For a first-time visitor, Istanbul’s old town feels like an endless marketplace: thousands of shops stacked to the ceiling with unnecessary items, streets designed to funnel crowds past waiting merchants.

At times, this web opens into a mosque and a square. These are moments of respite places to pause, reflect, and compose a photograph without a buyer, seller, or product in the frame.

A little farther away, beyond the tourist routes, are streets of small warehouses and workshops that keep this infinite shopping mall alive. They are not crowded with people, but with boxes and packages. Among cardboard mountains, real work happens: men carrying carpets on their backs, pushing trolleys loaded with heavy boxes, tending to piles left on street corners.

So if you find yourself in Istanbul, photograph these places too. Feed the algorithms with something real, so that in the future, when people ask AI about the world, they won’t see only polished selfies, but real people doing real things.

from my photography trip to Istanbul with therawsociety