In Hafiz, her first photobook, Sabiha Çimen returns to the girls’ Quran schools of Turkey — institutions she once attended as a teenager, together with her twin sister. Over three years she photographed at five such schools in different cities, working from inside a world she already knew. The book takes its title from the hafiz, the student who commits all 604 pages of the Holy Quran to memory, a task that can occupy as long as four years and that here falls to girls between the ages of eight and nineteen.

Çimen’s familiarity shapes the pictures. These are not images made by a visitor passing through; they register the routines, the friendships, the boredom and ambition of institutional life with the ease of someone who has lived it. Across 99 photographs the sequence holds daily study and play in the same frame, attending to the inner lives of students whose discipline is usually described from the outside. Turkey maintains thousands of Quran schools, yet the experience of the girls within them has rarely been pictured at such close range.

Red Hook Editions published the first edition in 2021 as a 140-page hardback in open-spine binding with handmade Ebru marbled endpapers — a design whose paper-marbling tradition echoes the book’s subject without illustrating it. In 2022 the book was named a winner in Aperture’s Photobook Awards in the first-photobook category, an early recognition of a project that has since become a touchstone for discussions of memory, faith, girlhood, and documentary access.

For a collector, Hafiz matters less as an object of speculation than as a document of a photographer’s formation. Çimen joined Magnum in 2024; the work here precedes that affiliation and shows the instincts that earned it. Its combination of sustained access, medium-format colour photography and a binding rooted in regional book traditions offers a specific way to study how a documentary project becomes a carefully shaped object.