Istanbul Street Vendors Photography: The City's Old Trades
Istanbul street vendors photography starts with sound before it starts with sight — the singsong call of someone selling something, pitched to carry over traffic and a hundred other voices doing the same thing. We spent two mornings walking without a fixed route, following whichever cry sounded most interesting, camera down at chest height, waiting for people to stop noticing it.
Istanbul Street Vendors Photography: Trade by Trade
The first vendor we photographed set the tone for the rest of the day: a simit seller with a basket balanced on his head, the rings threaded onto wooden pegs and a couple of plastic shopping bags swinging from the rim, crossing a cobbled square with the domed rooftops of an old stone building behind him.
The tray seller — Canon EOS 40D
Simit is Istanbul's constant — a sesame-crusted ring of bread sold from carts, trays and glass cases on nearly every block — and the vendors who carry it on their heads make the whole street stop and look, which is presumably the point.
A few streets over, Muhittin Usta had set up his shoe-shine box against a wall, its brass fittings polished brighter than most of the shoes waiting in line. A hand-painted sign over the box called him "the king of shoe-shiners," and nobody nearby seemed inclined to argue.
Muhittin Usta, king of shoe-shiners — Canon EOS 40D
Further down, under a grapevine on a café terrace, Nadir Temiztürk was drawing a portrait in pastel. His price list leaned against the easel, hand-lettered in red: three minutes, ten lira for adults, five for students and children, and in smaller letters at the bottom, a note that he would be gone after Bayram. The sheet already carried a printed border and the words memory of the Sultanahmet, Istanbul, waiting for a face to drop into the middle of it. His sitter held still on a low stool with his back to us, white hair and a scarf, while a glass of lemon water went flat on the empty table beside them.
Three minutes, ten lira — Canon EOS 40D
The food trades made their own small parade. A corn seller's cart carried a sign reading "MISIR 1 TL" — corn, one lira — printed in red on white and propped above a striped red-and-white awning, the cobs steaming under the midday sun.
MISIR 1 TL — Canon EOS 40D
Beside him, a watermelon vendor in a red fez guarded a pyramid of fruit with the patience of someone who has done this every summer for years.
The watermelon man — Canon EOS 40D
A block on, a cart of green plums and striped acur cucumbers had gathered its own small queue. The seller worked in an orange shirt and a blue apron trimmed in red, a towel over one shoulder and a paring knife still in his hand, holding out a peeled piece to a man in a checked shirt whose hands were already cupped to take it. Two of the people waiting behind him were still carrying corn from the cart we had photographed ten minutes earlier, the cobs going cold in their paper trays while they queued for the next thing. That is how the street feeds you here — not a meal, but a sequence of small ones bought from strangers on the way to somewhere else.
Negotiating — Canon EOS 40D
And on a corner near the market, a woman rolled out gözleme dough by hand at a stall known locally simply as "the HAN," flattening and filling it before folding it onto a hot griddle in one practiced motion.
Gözleme, made by hand — Canon EOS 40D
Faces of the Old City
Istanbul's street is as much about who's on it as what's being sold. An elderly man with a flowing white beard and a plain white cap crossed a quiet side street using a long wooden stick as a cane, his dark coat open over a white shirt, unhurried even with traffic nearby.
An elder of the street — Canon EOS 40D
Nearby, a group of men had stopped what they were doing to pray together under a stretched tarpaulin, unhurried, the street continuing to move around them without much notice.
A pause to pray — Canon EOS 40D
Three women in black crossed the square ahead of us, two of them veiled, the third with her cloak pulled up over her head. We took the frame from behind, from where we already stood, and kept walking — there are photographs you do not step in front of someone to get. What makes it work is everything they are walking past: a man in a white polo shirt, and a billboard in supermarket green selling football at 12.99 lira a month. Midday sun, hard shadows, and the black fabric catching light like water.
Three in black — Canon EOS 40D
Further on, a group of women in bright hijabs stood fanning themselves against the heat, a small cluster of colour against a grey wall.
Colour and shade — Canon EOS 40D
Four young women in patterned harem trousers stood at a waterside railing, watching the boats drift past, and the frame that stayed with us afterward was the one taken from behind — backs, not faces, telling as much of the story as a portrait would have.
From behind — Canon EOS 40D
And in a quiet corner of a park, a man in full Ottoman dress — turban, red trousers, the whole costume — sat as if waiting for something, though for what, we never found out.
In full dress — Canon EOS 40D
What the Street Teaches You About Waiting
None of these photographs came from planning. Street portraits, more than most kinds of photography, are a discipline of standing still and letting a scene arrive rather than chasing it. With a 24-105mm zoom and no fixed spot to work from, most of the discipline was simply choosing where to stand and then not moving for a while — long enough that the simit seller, the shoe-shiner, the praying men stopped adjusting themselves for the camera and went back to what they were doing. Shooting these trades on a Canon EOS 40D, a body already three years old by 2010, taught us more about patience than it did about gear.
Istanbul in summer has a particular quality of light for this kind of work: high, flat and unforgiving at midday, but warm and directional for the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset, when most of these frames were made. The street smelled of roasting corn, hot sesame and diesel in roughly equal measure, and the noise never really dropped — even the quiet moment with the elderly man had a call to prayer somewhere behind it.
This is the same city and the same archive as our walk through Sultanahmet's mosques and the vaulted arcades of the Grand Bazaar — but where those posts were about buildings, this one is about the people who make the street between them worth walking slowly.
If you're ever in Istanbul, skip the sit-down breakfast one morning and just walk — the street vendors are at their most interesting before nine, before the tourist crowds arrive.
Photos: Canon EOS 40D · Canon 24-105mm f/4L · ISO 200-400 · 1/250-1/500 sec · Istanbul, 2010
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