Photographer and photojournalist Ali Öz’s archive is available online at Salt Research. The collection added to the Salt Research City, Society, and Economy Archive consists of photographs documenting Turkey’s social and spatial transformation from 1978 to the early 2000s.
The Ali Öz collection comprises nearly 5,000 photographs documenting the social and spatial transformation of Türkiye from 1978 to the early 2000s.
The black-and-white images, often focused on people, capture the struggles of the working class—from women working in the highlands of the Black Sea and nomads raising livestock in the Taurus Mountains to miners in Zonguldak, fishermen in İzmir, cotton farmers in Adana, and child laborers on construction sites in Istanbul.
The archive also includes photographs from the demolition of slums in Istanbul and the changing landscape of Beyoğlu during the construction of Tarlabaşı Boulevard in the 1980s. Portraying both individual stories and social changes shaping collective memory across a wide geographic scope, these photographs serve as an important visual record of Türkiye’s sociocultural and urban fabric.
About Ali Öz
Born in 1954, Ali Öz graduated from the Department of Radio and Television at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Sciences in 1982. He began taking photographs in 1978 with a camera he acquired on a limited budget. In his youth, he worked in the field of social politics before turning to press photography. Adopting a style that can be described as “political documentary,” Öz aimed to use his camera to capture social protests on issues affecting people in Türkiye and around the world. Throughout his career, he has worked for various publications, including Nokta, Güneş, Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, Aktüel, Tempo, NTV MAG, and Birgün. He continues to work as a freelance photojournalist.
