Çağla Polat is an Istanbul-based multidisciplinary photographer with eight years of practice and a background in Arts Management. Her work moves through memory, emotion, and urban solitude, transforming everyday moments into cinematic, poetic visual stories rather than straightforward documentation of the world as it is.
Her process begins before the shutter clicks. With a foundation in painting, Polat approaches color and framing through feeling rather than technical convention — actively seeking atmospheric conditions that match an interior mood. Fog, night light, extreme weather: these are not incidental to her work but central to it. She shoots toward states that most photographers wait out.
The editing process extends that patience. Images sit in her archive for days or weeks before she returns to them with fresh eyes, fine-tuning color until the result feels simultaneously extreme and completely natural. The tension between those two qualities is where her work lives.
Photography, for Polat, changed her relationship to her environment entirely. Where she once moved through the city, she now reads it — finding stories, colors, and emotions hidden in plain sight, in the quiet spaces between things.
We asked Çağla to share with us some of her favorite images for this Visual Q+A.
Follow Çağla
Instagram: www.instagram.com/nurcaglapolat
Website: www.behance.net/nurcaglapolat
This remains my most valuable work and the one that had the biggest impact on my photography journey.
One of my self-portraits—I often stand in front of the camera myself.
A night camping around 4 AM with a friend, lit by the moon all night long.
From my trip to Tbilisi, Georgia, a city that was visually deeply satisfying.
An old shot taken completely by chance, yet one of my most emotional pieces.
I captured this after randomly walking onto a film set, where the entire street was soaked in neon lights.
One of my earliest shots, taken with my phone on a day when heavy fog covered the city.
