The Dreamspace between Istanbul and NYC

“I wanted to throw an idea to you… I shot a roll of film in New York, rewound it, and then shot it in Peru. It was a weird and surprising and fun way to see two such different parts of the world mashed together in one frame. So I thought about how much I'd love to do that with you … I like the idea of trying to be penpals, but with images.”

Since 2014, I've been swapping rolls of film with my dear friend, writer and photographer Katie Nadworny in Istanbul. It's our way of combining our shared love of analog photography and letter-writing into a sort of visual dialogue. We each shoot a roll in our home city, then the other shoots it again half-way round the world.

We use film photography to capture the visual textures and rhythms of our adopted cities, a dreamspace of memory and feeling. Our cities and our lives are so different, but these images exist in the between-spaces, in an ethereal plane where we've grown our friendship, where our dreams of Istanbul and New York overlap. The result is a poetic amalgamation of home.