Published by Editions Le Bec en l’air in 2014, Yusuf Sevinçli’s Marseille(s) inaugurates an annual collection devoted to photographers from the Mediterranean. Each participant is given carte blanche to form a personal view of Marseille. Sevinçli’s volume establishes that premise in its clearest form: not a comprehensive survey of the city, but an authored encounter shaped by one photographer’s attention and choices.

The parenthetical plural in Marseille(s) is central to the project’s meaning. It declines the idea that a multicultural city can be reduced to a single, stable portrait. The collection was conceived so that differing photographic languages would accumulate over time, each returning Marseille under another aspect. As the opening volume, Sevinçli’s book occupies a particular position: it supplies the first viewpoint in a structure designed around plurality.

The publication is deliberately concentrated. Its 48 pages and softcover-with-flaps format give the work the scale of a focused photographic statement rather than an encyclopedic account. That economy is significant. The book introduces both a city and an editorial method, leaving room for the individual vision to stand on its own while also establishing a basis for later comparison across the collection.

For a serious photobook collection, Marseille(s) merits attention chiefly because of this documented place at the beginning of a sustained publishing framework. Read independently, it presents Sevinçli’s response to Marseille; read in relation to the series, it becomes the initial reference point for observing how different photographers may interpret the same multicultural subject. The volume’s interest lies not in claims of completeness, but in the productive tension between a singular authorial position and a city explicitly understood as multiple.