This year our submissions have truly been representing on a global scale. We've featured photographers hailing from Poland, Canada, Taiwan, Germany, and have a queue of other contenders from at least as many other countries waiting for us to discuss here. Today we're taking a look at the photography of Uygur Yilmaz, who hails from Istanbul, Turkey.

Untitled, by Uygur Yilmaz

Yilmaz, like a few other contenders, is proferring to us images of normally familiar surroundings made foreign and uncertain to our eyes because they are taken at night. This sequence of images focuses on a commercial beach, and in the evening, completely emptied of kids, tourists and beach bums, the landscape seems lunar, the sand instead of reflecting light absorbs it, and what's left on the beach causes us to strain our gestalt mechanisms to try and make sense of what we're looking at.

Untitled, by Uygur Yilmaz

From Yilmaz's artist statement:

This work explores the human impact on land, the interaction between mind and space, utilization of nature... Yet it focuses on the tension between reality and abstract. Studying a popular beach, a crowded summer spot, in the off-season and only at night, it intends to reveal a less observed aspect of leisure culture...In this sense, no subject is altered, staged or reconstructed. But the practice of photography as a tool of defamiliarization still transforms the reality.

To my eye, there's a certain kind of poetry in the devoid landscape (appropriate since Yilmaz is also a poet), in this landcapes that depict environments that though shot in color, show a nearly monochromatic palette. There's also a languid formality to these compositions that pleases me, having the world divided up by golden means and thirds.

Uygur Yilmaz's work is in collections and has won awards in Turkey, Greece and London. His website is currently under construction.