Orhan Pamuk: Orange

The dominant colour in Orhan Pamuk: Orange is orange. When the Nobel Prize-winning novelist finishes with a day's writing, he takes his camera and wanders through Istanbul's various neighbourhoods. He often explores the backstreets of his hometown, areas without tourists, spaces that seem neglected and forgotten, washed in a particular light.

This is the orange light of the windows and streetlamps that Pamuk knows so well from his childhood in Istanbul 50 years ago, as he tells in his introduction. Yet Pamuk also observes how the homely, cosy orange light is slowly being replaced by a new, bright and icy-white light from the more modernised light bulbs.

His continuous walks in the backstreets are about recording and preserving the comforting effect of the old, disappearing orange light, as well as recognising this new white vision. Whether reflected in well-trodden snow, concentrated as a glaring ball atop a lamppost, or subtly present as a diffuse haze, orange literally and aesthetically gives shape to Pamuk's pictures, which reveal to us unseen corners of his home city and inside this creative artist's mind.

There is genius in Pamuk's madness. - Umberto Eco