As part of the Trieste Photo Days Festival, the exhibition “Istanbul, faces of freedom. Between past and present” was inaugurated at the Museum of Oriental Art in via S. Sebastiano, which will remain open to the public until January 22, 2025.

The contemporary shots of the Slovenian photographer Manca Iuvan dedicated to Istanbul, suggested by Stefano Ambroset, president of the dotART Association, dialogue with the nineteenth-century testimonies preserved in the Photo Library of the Civic Museums of History and Art.

The exhibition, curated by Claudia Colecchia, head of the Photo Library, in collaboration with Francesca Avignon, curator of the Civic Museum of Oriental Art, proposes an itinerary through images of the Turkish city in time and space, organised into two sections.

In the first part the Slovenian photographer tells Istanbul through some of its iconic places: the Bosphorus overlooked by the limitless dome of Hagia Sophia, the triumph of vegetation over the remains of Byzantine defensive architecture, the houses with clothes hanging out to dry, crowded together as Mark Twain recalls, the maze of alleys, of which the beginning and the end cannot be perceived to the point of recalling a perfect labyrinth, as Hermann Melville claims.

The 1837st century shots are compared with the positives, preserved in the Photo Library, which illustrate the elegant buildings created by the Muggia architect, Domenico Pulgher (1917-XNUMX), in the XNUMXs.

The allure of the exotic is also evident in the world of nineteenth-century stereoscopy. Three-dimensional photographs have the ability to lead the user, thanks to stereoscopic viewers, around the world, allowing him to expand his knowledge. geographical, ethnographic, anthropological and historical-artistic.

In the second section the protagonists of yesterday are compared, in a refined game of references and contrasts, with those of today.

The ethnographic portraits with intense colours of the Turkish photographer Pascal Sèbah (1823-1886) and other unidentified oriental authors, created in the second half of the nineteenth century, are widely distributed. The modest cost of the carte de visite allowed a vast and heterogeneous public to purchase the small positives, including the Piacere family from Trieste who left their assets to the Municipality in 1940.

The photographs inserted in the albums, leafed through in the living room next to the fireplace, provide a pleasant pastime, objects of entertainment and instructive information at the same time.

The staticity that characterizes the positives of the buildings immortalized in the nineteenth century also characterizes the historical portraits. The subject is always photographed centered, evenly lit, whole. The representation of the faces and professions of yesterday is isolated from their environmental context, artificially reproduced in the studio. The protagonists are anonymous subjects recognizable only by the role they represent, a synthesis and expression of the seduction exercised on the tourist by the past, by the exotic.

The contrast between the stillness of yesterday's faces and the liveliness of today's is strong. The images created in the 21st century by Manca Juvan are contextualized and full of information. The photographer's attention takes on the function of a speculum of anthropological origin: evident thirst for knowledge of the other. Eloquent, objective and at the same time evocative images, capable of restoring the empathy between the portraitist and the photographed subject.

Through the selection and comparison of images, it is thus possible to explore, in time and space, the evolution of a city extraordinarily full of history, or rather stories.