“The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision. Tears and not sight are the essence of the eye.”
Jacques Derrida, “Memoirs of the blind’’ 



AUTRUI is the French word used for 'the other'.

The focus of this photography project is 'the other' and 'the otherness'. It aims to make the invisible other, visible. The main objectives of the project are generating awareness for the other and respecting the absolute difference with the other.

It is inspired by the ethics philosophy of the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas who is one of the most important ethical theorists of the 20th century and a survivor of Holocaust.

In his ethics philosophy Lévinas explores morality through the Face of the Other and tries to create a dialectic relationship through this ethical approach. He is known as “the philosopher of the Other” because the fundamentals of his ethics lays not in the self, but on the Other. He states that their otherness renders impossible the reduction to sameness, conceptualizing in this way, the ‘irreducible alterity’.

Lévinas’ concept of the Other gains its importance by revealing itself as a structure of thought that creates this engaging relationship with the Other through the mechanism of one’s own responsibility towards the other.  Lévinas talks about the moment of ‘encountering the Other’ and states that meeting with the ‘Face of the Other’ automatically gives us a responsibility. Because the face has a special language and it speaks to us. With Lévinas’ words “face and discourse are tied. The face speaks. And the first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.” 

In this context, the project aims to create the moment of the encountering the Face of the Other by using the photography as a medium and the narrative stories of people from different part of the world to create the Face of the Other.

THE EYE

‘Touching’ Through the Eye

Is the eye for seeing or touching? Do eyes really see? Is it possible to touch the untouchable? How can we touch without being touched? The two themes: Object and Subject. The subject that touches, the object that is being touched. Is the opposite possible? The object that touches and the subject being touched? Then is there a transformation of subject and the object? The object is not an object anymore and the subject is not a subject.  But do they keep their distance? Their Otherness?

The project aims to bring an intersubjective experience through the touch / the gaze of the pair of the eyes. With the art practice of this work I aim explore the moment of encountering with the Other within and the moment of touching and being touched.

The philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy and their writings about the body and the mind create the main approach in this context.

This is a moment of the encountering the Other. 

The stories are published by Biamag ( in Turkey) and by Buala (in Portugal)