Hazal Karadag did not plan to begin shooting film the day she bought her first analogue camera. She had walked into a small second-hand shop in Schöneberg simply to browse. Then she saw an inexpensive compact camera and a curiosity she had carried for several years suddenly became tangible.
She knew almost nothing about the camera—not even which film or battery it needed. The decision was spontaneous. That accident became a long-term practice.
When a small detail asks to be kept
Karadag photographs ordinary life: objects, colours, patterns, friends, animals and small moments found while walking. What makes something worth isolating is difficult for her to rationalise because the decision often begins as a feeling.
A colour or arrangement simply catches. The reaction is immediate: I want to remember this.
Photography gives a little more importance to something that might otherwise pass unnoticed.
Aesthetic value and emotional value do not always agree
Karadag distinguishes between photographs she keeps for their formal qualities and those she keeps because of what they make her feel. Sometimes the two overlap; often they do not.
A technically imperfect photograph can remain important because it returns her to a person, a place or a period of life. That willingness to separate emotional value from technical success is particularly visible in a photograph of a large red car against a white building.
The red car
The scene was unstaged and found during one of Karadag’s first photo walks after moving back to Berlin in 2023. She was rediscovering her neighbourhood and photographing whatever interrupted the ordinary rhythm of the walk.
The frame is not technically perfect—the front of the car is not even completely visible—but the photograph carries the memory of the day and the pleasure of unexpectedly finding something beautiful.
Chance matters, but she does not treat chance as passive. Carrying the camera and going on photo walks create the conditions in which accidents can happen. The more she walks, the better she becomes at recognising where an encounter might be waiting.
Animals that do not perform for the camera
Karadag is drawn to animals because their expressions often remain unreadable. A person usually changes posture or expression as soon as they recognise a camera. The original moment is altered by awareness.
Animals, if they are comfortable, often continue behaving as they were. Their neutral expressions also leave space for the rest of the composition rather than dominating it.
Recently she has become curious about photographing children for a related reason: their movement can be uninhibited and difficult to predict. Their world was not previously part of her photographic attention, but she is increasingly interested in observing it.
Reconnecting with Berlin through walking
The red-car photograph belongs to a broader relationship between photography and returning to a city. Film became part of the way Karadag re-entered Berlin: carrying a camera through familiar streets, making those streets strange enough to notice again, and slowly converting everyday surroundings into a personal archive.
Understanding the whole process
Her next step is to learn development and scanning. The attraction is not simply self-sufficiency. Karadag wants to understand the cause-and-effect relationship between each stage of the process and the final image.
Knowing what development, scanning and other choices do would allow her to approach exposure with a fuller sense of intention. Control, for her, comes through understanding rather than eliminating uncertainty.
When ordinary moments become memory
Karadag wants the final story to communicate something uncomplicated: a colour, animal, object, person or small event may seem ordinary when it happens, but attention can give it another life.
Over time, these fragments stop being only pictures. They become coordinates for places, people and stages of a life. Photography cannot know in advance which ordinary moment will later matter. It can only decide that the moment deserves to be kept.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind the film we develop.
