These uncanny photographs document the search for belonging

Photographer Olgaç Bozalp is known for his uncanny images provocatively blending traditionally Eastern with Western aesthetics and documentary with staged scenes. The Turkish-born photographer’s latest photo book, Leaving One Home for Another (work from which was originally displayed earlier this year in The Elephant in the Room: Provocations on Artificial Intelligence, a collaborative event by FOAM Magazine, Der Greif, The Photographers’ Gallery and Photoworks at Paris Photo) explores his relationship with home and place, investigating displacement, migration and the experience of familiarity, the unknown, distance and proximity through his unique lens. 

Shot between 2018 and 2022, it documents the photographer’s “constantly moving from one place to another”. “I didn’t have a place of my own. I was constantly sleeping somewhere else, my friend’s room, a living room… I really wanted to travel, and I didn’t want to pay rent in London,” Bozalp tells Dazed. This period caused him to reflect on his desire for a nomadic lifestyle but also, crucially, the wider implications and causes of migration. “Of course, this happens for political reasons, conflict reasons and impersonal reasons as well. I was wondering about all these reasons and that’s how it started.”

Alongside his photographs made while travelling around the world, we encounter Bozalp’s unpredictable yet strangely methodical pictures of his hometown in Turkey – which he visits frequently, often shooting landscapes, family and friends – and his vision of travels around locations including Uzbekistan, Iran, Tel Aviv and Cyprus. “I was travelling quite a lot with my commissioned work, I travelled to 14 or 15 countries in that period of time,” he recalls. “I’d try to find something wherever I was, I looked for scenes that looked staged but without my intervention. I kept searching for this mix.”

Creating striking tableaux playing with AI-created aesthetics, he also applies these unique methods to the orchestrated scenes shot with models. His pictures are impregnated with uncanny details – multiple bodies in monochrome spilling out of vehicles or piled on top of one another, a gilet dried into the mud, mattresses covered in carnations and a glittering dingy in a pile of flotsam. Together, they provide a surreal and compelling meditation on migration, the concept of the familiar and the strange, and our precarious, shifting sense of belonging.

Visit the gallery above for a closer look. 

Leaving One Home for Another is available now and can be purchased here.