The First Summer Crush | Bahar Kural

Series: When Time Played Along
Medium: Archival Fine Art Photographic Paper

“In When Time Played Along, I reimagine the lightness of youth through the language of abstraction. The skies, seas, and shores of memory dissolve into bands of pure color — yellow, coral, turquoise — each one an emotion rather than a place. These hues are not drawn from nature but from recollection: how a day once felt rather than how it appeared. The figures remain real — youth caught mid-gesture, sunlit and unguarded — yet the world they inhabit has been transformed. By replacing natural tones with vivid, synthetic fields, I invite the viewer to experience nostalgia not as longing but as vibration, as pulse. The familiar becomes dreamlike; the past becomes present through color.

By flattening the sky, mountains and sea into pure pigment, I strip away the familiar markers of place and time. What remains is the essence of recollection — fragments vivid, others faded, like the way memory edits itself with passing years. Each hue becomes a mood, each silhouette a trace of innocence and impermanence. The color blocking doesn’t just stylize the scene; it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance — a push and pull between warmth and unreality. It’s youth remembered through the prism of time: heightened, simplified, and unreal in its perfection.

This series continues my search for what lies between photography and painting, reality and reverie. The youth remain alive and tangible — skin, light, gesture — but the world around them becomes stylized and symbolic. It’s as if the emotional memory of the scene has overtaken the physical one. This tension between photographic realism and painterly abstraction mirrors how we actually recall childhood — fragments vivid, others blurred or re-colored by time. These are not documents of summers past; they are translations of how memory breathes — imperfect, shifting, and achingly alive.

Each piece exists as a single edition — one image, one object, one moment preserved. Like the memories it embodies, it cannot be repeated.”