Olay—Turkish for “event” or “incident”—is Emin Özmen’s first book, published by MACK in 2023. It is a retrospective of his work to date, drawing on a decade in Turkey marked by a failed coup, uprisings, natural disasters, political purges and continuing military operations. The title is not abstract: it names the condition Özmen photographs, a country repeatedly pulled into upheaval.

The book’s structure alternates rapid sequences of black-and-white photographs with quieter colour images and personal texts by Özmen. A substantial timeline, introduced by Piotr Zalewski, Turkey correspondent for The Economist, supplies historical grounding, and the volume is co-edited with Cloé Kerhoas. These elements do not merely frame the pictures; they establish a rhythm in which pressure and pause, reportage and reflection, are set against one another.

Özmen’s subject is not only violence but the ordinary life that persists around it. He describes Turkey as a place where beauty and ugliness, sadness and joy, intertwine and clash, and where daily calm can be interrupted without warning. His photographs seek that doubleness: tension is constant, yet warmth and graciousness emerge. The result is a layered comment on the Turkish state and on the feelings of its people, rather than a simple record of crises.

For collectors, Olay merits attention as a first book that already has an archiving impulse. Its Swiss-bound hardcover format—192 pages at 17 × 21 cm—is modest in scale, and the sequencing of black-and-white and colour, together with the timeline and Özmen’s own writing, makes the volume read as a constructed document. It deserves consideration not for claims of rarity but for how deliberately it holds a tumultuous period in view.