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4 January 2020
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 325th in our series of Saturday matinees today: One Year With the Mustafa Hacalaki.
We confess, we confess. We altered the title of this 4:30 video slide show of images that street photographer Mustafa Hacalaki took with his new Fujifilm X100F. He calls it One year with Fujifilm X100F but we think of it as a year spent with him. He spent the year with the camera but we get to see the year through his eyes.
The Fujifilm X100F is a 24.3-Mp APS-C digital camera with a 23mm f2 lens. All you really need to know about the camera is that these images were all shot with the equivalent of a 35mm lens.
But Hacalaki needs a bit of an introduction.
He was born and raised in Izmir, Turkey, but moved to Montreal in 2009 after receiving his MA from the Department of Fine Arts at Dokuz Eylül University. The streets of Montreal are, apparently, where he took these images.
In 1999 he fell in love with photography, using his grandfather's Kiev film camera and learning how to develop his own film. When he upgraded, it was to his uncle's Zenit camera. He made the switch to digital in 2014 with Fujifilm cameras, whose handling resembled his old film cameras.
He picked up the X100F late in 2018.
In an interview with Jennifer Cloutier last year, Hacalaki revealed his influences:
I admire a lot the works of great masters such as Elliott Erwitt, William Eggleston and Harry Gruyaert. But I must admit that I take most of my inspirations from cinema and from famous directors. I love the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Abbas Kiarostami and Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
You can see more of Hacalaki's work on Instagram, Behance and Twitter.