Beyond Crime

Beyond Crime explores how killing becomes thinkable and justified. Inspired by Dostoevsky, the project examines violence not as passion, but as an idea shaped by calculation, abstraction, and power—asking what remains once the right to kill is accepted.

Beyond Crime is a photographic project that examines the moral and psychological mechanisms through which killing becomes possible, acceptable, and eventually ordinary.

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the project does not retell the novel, but enters into a dialogue with its central question: does a human being ever have the right to take another life? Rather than focusing on violence as an emotional outburst, the work explores violence as an idea — shaped by abstraction, calculation, and the belief in moral superiority.

At the center of the project is the moment when crime ceases to be perceived as crime and is transformed into justification. Murder appears not as chaos, but as a rational act, framed as necessity, progress, or justice. This shift is made possible through dehumanization: when a person becomes a category, a burden, a number, or an obstacle, their death no longer demands remorse.

The visual structure of the project follows a progression from thought to action and from action to consequence. Portraits and staged scenes trace how power emerges from belief, how justification precedes violence, and how responsibility dissolves into silence. Certain figures function not as characters, but as moral positions: the theorist, the witness, the collateral life, the one who refuses, the one who remains.

Recurring symbolic elements — such as the stone, the ledger, and the extinguishing candle — act as visual anchors throughout the series. The stone represents moral burden and transferred weight; the ledger marks the moment when life is reduced to calculation; the candle signifies fragile awareness — not redemption, but the possibility of responsibility while consciousness remains.

Although rooted in a literary context, Beyond Crime speaks directly to the present. The project reflects contemporary realities in which violence is increasingly explained, legalized, or excused through ideology, rhetoric, or necessity. Whenever killing is justified, someone inevitably becomes collateral — erased not by intention, but by indifference.

The project offers no resolution and no redemption. It does not accuse, nor does it console. Instead, it insists on a single, unresolved question:
what remains of a person — and of society — once the right to kill is accepted?

While the candle still burns, responsibility is still possible.