Anıl Uzun is an architect and a photographer. He was born in 1968 in İstanbul. He has been taking photos since 1990 and has been an architect since 1994.
Anıl Uzun’s family had migrated from Bulgaria to Istanbul. He started taking photos of immigrant families. He grew up in a migrant community and had much observation in the immigrant community. He was also interested in cities. He traveled and visited many cities with his family; he took photos of the people, the cities, and the architecture during the trip.
He studied in Istanbul until university. He graduated from high school in 1985 and started to study architecture at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. He continued to travel as he studies and took photos of monuments and historical places. After graduation, he started traveling abroad. He took pictures of architectural structures, festivals, temples, and nature.
He moved to New York in 1995. He made a network of photographers in New York and met many artists and assisted them in exhibitions. He took part in photography projects. He also continued to work as an architect for nonprofit organizations. He worked voluntarily in the social projects for refugees.
He moved to Canada after a while and worked as an independent architect there. In 2000, Anıl Uzun and a group of photographers started a trip to Asia. The trip took four years. He took photos of the trip and then published a photography album called “Silk Road Architecture.” The albım was his first serious work and had much praise from many other artists. The album was not published in Turkey first, in the following years, the Turkish version was published in İstanbul.
Anıl Uzun moved back to New York in 2004 and continued to work for social projects as an architect. He worked on architecture and photography and has exhibitions with artists. He took photos of the projects that he did and made an exhibition called “Social Dilemma and Architecture.”
In 2008, Anıl Uzun returned to Turkey and started to lecture on Visual Communication Design – Architecture and photography in community college. He worked with post-graduate students and participated in the projects led by students. He published studies with many other lecturers on architecture and photography, made collaborations with international photography artists.
When he finished his lecturing career, he started working on refugees, women, and children. He donated the money he made to the social projects that create resources for the ones in need. He created and published projects with NGOs; his works have been published in the USA, Canada, Austria, Germany, and The UK. The projects help many refugee artists to raise their voices and to be seen.
Anıl Uzun still lives in Istanbul, facilitating projects for independent photography artists. He organizes group exhibitions for the underground artists and makes their work seen. He also joins the photography projects and presentations with his books. He works as an independent architect for many companies and projects and continues to traveling around to world to take photos.