The Borrowed Apartment

Every person with a cheap camera thinks they’re a photographer. I’ve been that person: birthday snapshots, street scenes shot from the hip, whatever catches the light at a party. Then you come across someone who actually knows what they’re doing, and the distance between what you do and what they do becomes extremely clear, extremely fast.

Murat Aslan is a Berlin-based photographer who covers an unusual range. His subjects have included Peter Fox—the German musician whose 2008 album Stadtaffe was inescapable for a solid year—the Berlin hip-hop collective Süd Berlin Maskulin, the rock veteran Marius Müller-Westernhagen, and the hosts of MTV GameOne, Germany’s answer to gaming television. That’s a lot of different registers to move between, and the images don’t feel inconsistent. Each shoot finds its own tone without losing a consistent eye behind it.

What gets me in his portrait work is a specific kind of ease. The subjects don’t look like they’re being photographed. They look like someone they trust has a camera out and they’ve forgotten about it. That’s the thing you can’t fake with technical skill alone—you have to actually be in the room the right way before you ever pick up the camera. Berlin photographers seem to understand this better than most, and Aslan is a strong example of why.