Julio Estrada

 "Between Two Worlds East & West" is the result of my journey through Turkey in 2006. This series is comprised of panoramic black and white views captured with my Hasselblad XPAN camera, where documentary and artistic criteria blend in documenting the daily life of the Turkish people. Exploring various cities in the country for nearly fifteen days, including Istanbul, Ankara, Cappadocia, Konya, Manavgat, Pamukkale, Ephesus, Izmir, and Bursa, I felt the need to fully understand and immerse myself in the region, leading to different approaches where the authenticity of the record coexists, transparent and unaltered, documenting a circumstance where I am merely a curious observer, along with the aesthetic intention of a visionary seeking to create an artistic testimony of that moment. My integration into the context of what I aim to document, without diverting my gaze from the viewer for fear of missing the unique opportunity to capture those moments, has been my most valuable tool during this journey. A genuine commitment to the subject, an ever-alert camera, and a compositional awareness of the event have resulted in urban and rural landscapes that speak of the nature and way of life of its people, in an attempt to coexist with diversity and bridge geographical and cultural distances.Completely natural scenes let you feel the climate of these lands. Others, immersed in the city rhythm, portray daily life, architecture, and the trades of the inhabitants. In some moments, the selection of the most opportune moment to take the photo makes the composition so cinematic that it is possible to hear the noise of a dovecote taking flight or the agitation of a crowd of people looking at the sky surprised at an eclipse. In other images, time seems stopped, distracted between the laughter of some children who still do not reflect the future on their faces.There are cases where I propose a frame whose visual weight is assigned to the surrounding elements of the main scene, thus acquiring a narrative prominence. I invite viewers to reconstruct the real or imaginary situation that my lens has left out. Each detail chosen to be part of the composition constitutes an autonomous discourse, but it also becomes a clue to decipher that hidden story or to write the one that is protected in each of these photographs.