Along the Kadıköy coastline on the Asian side of Istanbul, one of the city's small, enduring traditions still plays out every evening at sunset: for one Turkish lira, passersby can take a shot at balloons with a BB gun, part carnival game, part local ritual that's been part of the seaside promenade for generations. Before the shooting starts, someone has to do the quieter work of setting the stage. In this photo, a boy blows up and ties off dozens of balloons by hand, stringing them along a line strung between two posts on the rocks, working steadily as the sun drops behind the Sea of Marmara. The title comes from his side of the game: every balloon that survives the evening is money saved, so while the shooters are hoping to pop as many as they can, he's quietly hoping for the opposite. --------------------------------------------------------- Taken in Istanbul, Türkiye September, 2018 --------------------------------------------------------- About Street54 Collection Street54 began as a way of walking — moving through cities without destination, observing without hunting. The work collects moments of quiet internal shift: a figure in light, a shadow, a pause mid-step. Not dramatic events, but felt ones. The photographs were made across different cities and years, never planned as a series, yet they share a quiet emotional coherence. The street is neither romanticized nor explained. People, light, and architecture exist as parts of a larger emotional field. The work protects ambiguity. It offers fragments, not answers. If a viewer pauses before an image without knowing why, it has succeeded. --------------------------------------------------------- License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/