From an early age, Yıldız Moran aspired to be a painter, though she lacked confidence in her talent. In 1950, upon the advice of her uncle, the art historian Mazhar Şevket İpşiroğlu, she set out for England to study photography. Between 1950 and 1952, she trained at Bloomsbury Technical College and later at Ealing Technical College. After completing her studies, she began her professional career as an assistant to John Vickers, the renowned photographer of London’s Old Vic Theatre. During this period, Moran successfully combined the technical and theoretical knowledge she had acquired in school with the experience she gained through studio and stage photography. Her first solo exhibition opened in Cambridge in 1953, followed by five more in London, all received with great interest and acclaim. With her Rolleiflex camera, she traveled extensively across Europe and prepared a photographic book on Spain and Portugal. In 1954, she returned to Türkiye. There, she began accompanying the annual field expeditions to Anatolia organized by the Art History Department of Istanbul University, thus producing a rich visual archive both for her own artistic repertoire and for the department’s future publications and documentaries.
Between 1955 and 1962, Moran continued to hold solo exhibitions and photographed many notable figures in Istanbul. Her studio was known for its distinctive atmosphere, where she played records and shared music with the sitters of her photo sessions. Critics have since often remarked on the musicality of her portraits and her landscapes. Moran opened her last exhibition in 1970, after which she withdrew from professional photography to devote herself to lexicography and translation. In recognition of her contributions to the art of photography in Türkiye, the Photography Institute of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts granted her honorary membership in 1982. She passed away in 1995. Her legacy has since been celebrated through major retrospectives and accompanying monographs at Pera Museum (2013) and at Istanbul Modern (2018). In 2021, her works were displayed in the window gallery of the exhibition I–You–They: A Century of Artist Women at Meşher Museum, greeting millions of passersby along Beyoğlu for eight months.
Since 1997, Moran’s oeuvre has been meticulously revived by her sons, and in 2021, her estate began to be represented by Galeri Nev. Previously unseen photographs from her archive were exhibited for the first time in Kindness of the Shadow shows held by Galeri Nev in Ankara in 2022 and in Istanbul (Adas) in 2023. These exhibitions were accompanied by a catalogue authored by art historian Professor Deniz Türker of Rutgers University. Last year, Galeri Nev presented Between Two Nights, a solo show of her works at Paris Photo 2025 and the booth was named the fair’s best by New York Times. Her work was recently featured in Phaidon’s Great Women Photographers, published in October 2026, placing her among the leading photographers of our time. For Paris Photo 2026, Galeri Nev with its second solo presentation titled Thrilling Ride, after one of her photographs. The selection offers a broader view of Moran's œuvre, focused on her travels in Europe and in Anatolia she made in her twenties, with her Rolleiflex as her faithful companion.
