Orhan Pamuk

"Cela fait maintenant quatre ans que je me consacre à l’écriture d’un roman historique dont l’action se déroule en 1901, pendant ce que l’on a coutume d’appeler la «troisième pandémie de peste», une épidémie de peste noire qui a fait des millions de morts en Asie, mais relativement peu en Europe. Or voici que depuis deux mois, mes amis, ma famille, mais aussi des éditeurs et des journalistes, toutes celles et ceux qui connaissent le sujet de mon ­nouveau livre, les Nuits de la peste, me pressent de questions sur les pandémies."

Présentation de l’éditeur
The dominant color in Orhan Pamuk's new book of photographs is orange. When the Nobel-Prize-winning novelist is finished with the day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighborhoods, visiting the backstreets of his town, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, spaces with a particular light. This is the orange light of Istanbul's windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood―from the Istanbul of 50 years ago, as he mentions in his introduction.

But Pamuk also observes that the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy white light from new lightbulbs. His photographs from the backstreets of Istanbul record and preserve the cosy effect of this old, disappearing orange light, as well as the recognition of this new white vision.

Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us the unseen corners of his home city.