Cemre Yeşil Gönenli is a photographer and artist based in Istanbul, with a long list of exhibitions and publications behind her at home and abroad. She characterizes herself as a visual storyteller, chronicling, amongst other things, the importance—and challenges—of building personal relationships. She creates intimate conversations between herself and the subject, and between the photograph and the viewer. The camera, she says, helps her see things that the naked eye can’t, while the act of photographing “becomes a breather in the ebb and flow of life.” With impressive energy, she’s also the founder of FiL, a bookshop-cum-publisher-cum café in Beyoğlu. WePresent featured her award-winning book, “For Birds Sake,” created in collaboration with Maria Sturm, which documents the declining culture around the keeping of captive songbirds in Istanbul, an activity that is firmly masculine but surprisingly tender.
