OB:

It wasn’t something I consciously set out to do when I started this journey. Initially, my work was driven by a frustration with the Western gaze and the lack of recognisable representations of the Islamic world. I was also taking on assignments for magazines and fashion brands that allowed me to travel to countries that shared a similar culture and faith with my native Turkey and Jordan, where I travelled with my dad in 2016, and where I first began to feel a sense of belonging to a larger Islamic world.

It was only around ten years into working across the region, when I started thinking about bringing everything together in a book, that I had a kind of lightbulb moment. I realised that throughout all these years, I’d been introducing myself as Mustafa: “Selamünaleyküm, my name is Mustafa, ” I would say. It’s my middle name. Growing up, I never felt particularly connected to it. It seemed old-fashioned, uncool, and too religious. But wherever I went in the region, the name was met with incredible warmth and hospitality. I suddenly understood that what connected all this work, and the sense of belonging I’d found through it, came from somewhere deeply personal. Mustafa was also my late grandfather’s name, so the book is, in a way, a tribute to him, too.

OB:

In the beginning, if somebody called me Mustafa, I wouldn’t even register that they were referring to me, haha. And it worked the other way around too: I was born in Turkey, but I have lived in London for many years and could easily pass for someone who’s originally from there. So using my middle name felt a bit strange at first. But experiencing time and again the immediate and unconditional warmth it was met with across the Islamic world, I got more and more comfortable embracing Mustafa and the cultural and spiritual world it connects me to. As Dalia Al-Dujaili writes in the book’s afterword, our relationship with our name evolves over time. It can gradually come to feel like an expression of who we are, rather than simply something we’ve been given. That’s definitely been true for me.

OB:

I can definitely relate to that. Coming from a non-Western country and working in a Western one, that kind of validation can feel like a high. I think we’re often exposed to these ideas from a very young age, to the point where they become ingrained in how we see ourselves. Growing up in Turkey, I remember how popular culture and ideals of beauty were, and still are, very much oriented towards the West. With this came a tendency to underestimate our own people. Even people close to me would say I’d never make it, that I wouldn’t make money or be able to survive pursuing a career in the arts. When I started working in London, I encountered that same scepticism, which fed my self-doubt and made me sensitive to that same Western validation.

Despite all this, I always held on to the belief that being that being Turkish had nothing to do with my talent or abilities. That conviction pushed me to challenge the Western perspectives that had shaped my own understanding of culture, beauty, and artistry, and to use my photography to create an alternative visual world that wasn’t defined by the West.

OB:

For me, an important first step was unlearning what the Western gaze considers beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Growing up in Konya, my hometown in Turkey, I found a lot of the kitsch aesthetics and traditional styles around me quite ugly. But over time, my perspective shifted, and the very things I’d learned to dislike became the things I found most interesting and eventually embraced in my work.

Collaboration is also central to my practice. Most of the photographs in Mustafa emerged from chance encounters, so while I have a broader vision for the work, I try not to approach each photograph with a fixed idea of what it should look like. Especially as my work has become more documentary, I’ve learned to figure things out together with the people I photograph. In Iran, for example, I would go to the bazaar with the people I was photographing and choose clothes with them, exploring different looks and seeing what felt right to each of us. When photographing inside their homes, we would move furniture around and rearrange objects, experimenting with the space until we found a setting that felt natural and meaningful. This makes the process playful, intuitive, and grounded in the moment. It also gives the people I photograph a sense of agency in how they’re represented, which I think is essential to moving away from the Western gaze. I have a background in theatre, and I think that experience has shaped this way of working: creating something together through curiosity, play, and intuition.

OB:

I didn’t want things to be in order. I wanted different years, places, and photographic approaches – editorial, personal, documentary – to blend seamlessly together. That reflects how I look back on the journey behind Mustafa: it wasn’t linear or orderly. Rather, everything I did over the past decade gradually came together, often subconsciously, to shape the person I am today. Each experience contributed something in its own way.