Woman On Verge

Woman On Verge is a series exploring loneliness, intimacy and the cathartic moments of figuring out who you are while forming a chosen family of female friendships. The portraits focuses on our shared experiences and the intimacy that comes with it.

Moving away is an inherently introspective process. A month after turning 18, I moved alone from Istanbul to New York. It was my first time being away from my home and immediate family, and it forced me to reevaluate myself in a context that was completely unfamiliar to me. It was liberating, but I also felt lost and scattered. I found comfort in the women around me, and I eventually started to form stronger ties with some of them, slowly creating an interconnected web of friendships that became a community. I started documenting the creation of my own second family, where the intimacy of female friendships fulfilled something in me that was a growing loneliness. I have captured the arrival, growth and sometimes departure of these friendships through portraits that I have taken over a year in an attempt to capture the raw and complex inner lives that women have. However, looking back, I realized that in every picture I took I was also trying to find pieces of myself. Every portrait that I take is, in a way, a self-portrait, even though I’m never their explicit subject. The subject is really not either them or me, but our shared experiences and the intimacy that comes with getting closer to them. It was in these women and the relationships that I built with them that I was able to find myself again.