Photography Collections at Salt Research

Salt Research integrates print and digital resources focused on art, architecture, design, city, society, and economy, contributing to the preservation of the public memory of Turkey and its surrounding geography. The photography collections, developed over the years through donations and acquisitions, constitute a significant part of the Salt Research archives.



The Photograph and Postcard Archive, initiated in the early 2000s with the cataloging of staff and branch photographs from the Ottoman Bank Archive, offers visual insights into urban life in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. The photographs in the Households and Families Archive illuminate the social life of the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, rendering the ordinary and everyday visible.


The Architecture and Design Archive encompasses not only the conceptual designs and realized projects of experts active in 20th-century Turkey, but also images they captured or collected for their professional work, teaching materials, photographs from their professional travels, and selections from the archives of architectural photographers. These sources offer diverse perspectives on the built environment.


Focusing on the history of art in Turkey after 1950, the Art Archive features images related to historically significant exhibitions and visual material that shed light on the artistic and cultural milieu of the period.


The collections from institutions such as the Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes (IFEA) and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), in addition to the archives of contemporary photographers, are accessible online at Salt Research. Among these collections are M. Erem Çalıkoğlu’s photographs documenting Turkey’s cultural and natural heritage between 1982 and 1998, painter Eleonora Arhelaou’s photographs tracing the Greek architectural heritage in Istanbul from the 1970s to 1998, selections from Gültekin Çizgen’s architectural photography, and street photographs capturing life in 1980s Turkey from photojournalist Ali Öz’s archive, transferred to Salt Research and planned to be accessible online by the end of 2024.


Salt Research provides access to these collections while maintaining their archival integrity and situating them within their immediate and broader contexts. The photographs are presented in conjunction with other documents in their respective collections and the broader archival body. Visual and textual sources complement and inform each other, facilitating in-depth studies.

The visual material on art, design, built environment, social history, and education in 19th and 20th-century Turkey also includes print photographs, glass negatives and positives, slides and negatives, postcards, photocards, and press images.

All images available at Salt Research can be used free of charge for individual research purposes under the Terms of Use.