Muristek
The big picture: A Turkish stallholder’s face emerges from the clutter
Walking in the back alleys of the ancient city of Mardin, American photographer Billy Dinh almost missed this man amid his junk
For a moment, Billy Dinh didn’t see that there was a man’s face among all the junk in the shop. The photographer was walking in the back alleys of Mardin, the ancient city in the south of Turkey not far from the Syrian border. The narrow streets there are lined with hole-in-the-wall shacks like this one, where it seems you might buy old paint tins and a bit of pipe. It was only when the stallholder took a drag on his cigarette that he emerged from the wreckage.
Dinh, a 32-year-old part-time photographer from Brooklyn, has come to live for such moments. Over the past four years, since he started taking photographs seriously, he has visited 50 countries with his camera, in weeks off from his day job as a product manager for a tech firm. With an extraordinary feel for cinematic light, he has built a following of 180,000 on his Instagram feed. He has made a series called Moments: Around the World in which he finds people, like this Turkish man, at home in their own reality. “I am always looking for people just going about their day,” he says. “The trick is quickly getting a sense of the available light; in this case, fortunately, there was a bare lightbulb right above him.”
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