Balat is Charlotte Schmitz’s long-form photographic record of a neighborhood on Istanbul’s historic peninsula, made between 2012 and 2025. Schmitz arrived as a photojournalism student and was taken in by families who opened their homes to her; the pictures that followed — of women, children, domestic interiors and celebrations — grew out of those friendships rather than a reporting assignment. For more than a decade her life moved between Berlin and Istanbul, and the book registers that continuity of contact.

The district itself carries centuries of layered presence: Jewish, Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Kurdish and Roma lives have shaped its streets, rituals and memory. In recent years gentrification has repainted historic houses for visitors, pushed rents upward and displaced long-term residents. Schmitz photographs within that pressure — kinship loosening, bonds between people and place shifting — but the images dwell on trust, mischief, tenderness and ordinary joy as much as on loss.

VenAmiga’s 2025 edition gathers more than 220 photographs with a personal epilogue by the photographer and a text by Ilgın Deniz Akseloğlu, who also curated and edited the project. Ania Nałęcka-Milach designed the book, and it was printed at MAS Matbaa in Istanbul. The making was unusually shared: the women and families depicted helped decide which photographs to include, discussed design, reviewed the text, and some visited the press.

For collectors drawn to sustained documentary practice, Balat offers a decade-long arc rather than a single visit, and an authorship that admits its subjects into the editing room. The book was launched in Istanbul in late September 2025, first within the neighborhood, and was shown in an exhibition at the German General Consulate there. It received the 2026 Fotobus Society Library Award.

Those qualities — duration, collaboration, and a city under transformation — give the volume its place on a shelf of socially engaged photobooks concerned with memory and belonging.