The same streets can look bright and playful, dark and cinematic, chaotic, quiet or almost dreamlike — it all depends on who is holding the camera.

Trying to describe Istanbul as one particular kind of city is nearly impossible. It can feel romantic from the deck of a ferry, overwhelming in the middle of a crowded street and strangely quiet when you turn into the right passageway.

It is a city of grand views, but also of small accidents: a person stepping into a patch of sunlight, two strangers briefly mirroring one another, a bird crossing the frame at exactly the right moment.

These photographers below all look at Istanbul differently. For one, it is a city of colour and perfect geometry. For another, it is made of shadows, crowds, memories and visual coincidences. Together, their work proves that there is never just one Istanbul.

Forget the familiar Istanbul of domes, minarets and sepia-toned streets. Yener Torun finds another city hiding behind it — one filled with lemon-yellow walls, pink balconies, blue staircases and sharply cut geometric shapes.

Having studied architecture, Torun naturally notices lines, surfaces and the relationships between buildings. He searches beyond the city’s best-known neighbourhoods, finding modern façades that most people would probably walk past without a second glance.

Through Torun’s lens, the city feels clean, playful and slightly unreal — as if Istanbul has been keeping its brightest colours secret from us.

Timurtaş Onan’s Istanbul is darker, slower and full of atmosphere. It lives in old passages, wet pavements, ferry terminals, narrow streets and faces that seem to belong to several different decades at once.

His black-and-white photos are built around contrast. Sunlight cuts through the darkness, silhouettes appear and disappear, and ordinary street corners begin to look like scenes from an old film.

There is nostalgia in his work, but the city never feels frozen in the past. Old Istanbul and modern Istanbul keep interrupting each other. A historic façade may stand behind a rushing crowd; a familiar street may suddenly feel mysterious simply because of the way the light falls.

Onan shows Istanbul as a city where time rarely moves in a straight line. The past is always nearby, even when nobody is actively looking for it.

Murat Harmanlikli does not try to calm Istanbul down. He lets the city remain crowded, strange and slightly chaotic — then waits for all that chaos to briefly form a perfect picture.

In his photos, children run through flocks of pigeons, mannequins seem to watch people from shop windows, giant faces on advertising posters hover above the street, and complete strangers accidentally become part of the same story.

Harmanlikli walks through Istanbul like someone who is happy to get lost. He follows the crowd, notices visual rhymes and catches the brief moments when the city seems to organise itself purely for the camera.

Seda Bikan Toksöz looks for the moments most people miss.

A figure moves through a narrow strip of sunlight. Two people repeat the same gesture without noticing. Someone briefly blends into the lines, colours or shadows of the street around them.

Nothing dramatic needs to happen. The beauty is in how quickly the scene appears — and how quickly it disappears again.

Born and raised in Istanbul, Toksöz knows the city well, but she photographs it with curiosity rather than familiarity. She pays attention to the way people move through urban space and to the small, accidental relationships created between bodies, architecture and light.

Her Istanbul feels like an unwritten choreography. The people in it have no idea they are performing, yet for one second, everyone seems to be standing exactly where they should be.