Bikers is part of a photo collage series from my new project, which I began in March this year. The project represents a new creative impulse for me and draws on my earlier street photography—I’m using figures I captured in urban environments over the past years and placing them into stylized, semi-surreal scenes. This body of work includes series such as Runners, Bike and Water, Motorcycles, Suitcase, and Skateboarders. The winning image is from the Bikers series and originated from capturing cyclists in a skate park. I was fascinated by the energy of movement, the contras between human silhouettes and the raw urban space. Through this method, I connect reality with imagination, creating a new visual world where motion and space become the core of the narrative.

It’s a mix of intuition, feeling, and experience. In documentary work, it’s often clear—either you catch the right moment or you don’t. In collage-based work, where I combine multiple elements, I search for balance between visual composition and the message. I often save a work and return to it after a few days. If it still speaks to me and feels coherent, then I know it’s ready.

What draws me in is the tension between the known and the unknown—between documentary and dream. Reality is the foundation of my work, but I aim to go beyond it, expand and reinterpret it. Surrealism offers freedom to break away from conventional perception and create space for new meanings. It’s not an escape from reality, but a way of reimagining it—a dialogue between the everyday and the internal world.

I’m usually inspired by the environment itself—urban structures, architecture, and especially people. Many of the figures I now use in my photo collages come from years of street photography. I’ve photographed in various cities such as Istanbul, Gdańsk, Dallas, Brno, and Trieste, and now I’m assembling these fragments into new visual stories. I’m drawn to scenes intuitively—sometimes because of the light, other times due to mood or the relationship between people and space.

I’d love to create an extensive series set in industrial spaces, where characters interact with brutalist architecture, abandoned factories, or technological structures. I’m drawn to exploring the relationship between the human body and space—movement versus stillness, presence within inhuman scale. Another dream is to build a complete visual story in a totally abstracted city—something like a photographic version of a sci-fi film.

I’m deeply inspired by Salvador Dalí and Sebastião Salgado. Dalí for his limitless surrealist thinking and ability to create symbolic, imaginative worlds. Salgado for his profound humanism, masterful use of light, and the emotional power of black-and-white photography. Their contrast—between dream and reality—shapes my own visual language.

Right now, I’m fully immersed in developing my new collage project launched this spring. Series like Bike and Water, Motorcycles, and Skateboarders are expanding, directly linked to my past documentary work. At the same time, I’m finishing a photo book titled PEOPLE, which focuses on authenti portraits of people from various parts of the world. I’m also continuing my long-term project SIDEWALKS, which includes over 1,000 images of sidewalks across nine cities in Europe and the US. All these projects have different tempos, but they’re united by an emphasis on atmosphere, motion, and human presence.