146. Constantinople, Bosphore N. [ord], Village S. [ud]

A view of the Bosphorus, showing a village nestling in the curve of a small bay, this has more light and is more open than many of the artist's other small plates. A few vertical poles break through the surface of the sheet of water conspiring with the rough stones along the water's edge to define a rather lonely sense of place. The dark verticals repeat the form of the brightly-lit minaret, which catches the sun against the heavy vegetation on the hillside in the distance, and the scene is finished off with a row of solitary trees isolated against the light blue sky on the top of the hill. The minimalism of this image, with its few scattered elements, is more familiar to us from the work of photographers of the later twentieth century rather than any closer contemporaries of Girault de Prangey.