Picture the World: Burhan Doğançay as Photographer

West Galleries

A prolific artist who spent most of his artistic career in New York, Burhan Doğançay (1929-2013) rose to fame through his abstract “ribbon “paintings and works devoted to urban walls. For him, walls were record-keepers of people, time, and place. While many knew of his paintings, few realized the enormous photographic archive that Doğançay created for himself and the ways in which his photographs informed his vision of the world and humans’ place within the urban environment. This exhibition, pulled from the artist’s personal archive of roughly 30,000 images taken in more than 100 countries in a 40-year span, is a small reflection of that artist’s output.

Picture the World: Burhan Doğançay as Photographer was originally curated in 2015 for the Doğançay Museum in Istanbul by the late renowned photographer and filmmaker Sedat Pakay and is comprised of 99 black and white photographs divided into three major themes: “Walls of the World”, “The Ironworkers & the Brooklyn Bridge”, and “Parallels and Discrepancies”.

This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Turkish Airlines, the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Turkish Consulate General in Los Angeles.