Nedret Sekban, the prominent Turkish painter featured in my The Man and the Sea series, was born and raised in Trabzon, an old port city on the Black Sea.
The sea has shaped not only the geography of his childhood but also his inner world and artistic vision.
Throughout his life, it has been his constant companion—a source of inspiration, solitude, struggle, and renewal.Known for his powerful and expressive seascapes, he has spent decades translating the movement, weight, and emotion of water onto canvas.
In this series, I turn the relationship inward and reinterpret his lifelong subject through my own medium. Instead of painting the sea, I photograph the painter within it. Through these black-and-white images, I place him beneath the surface and allow water to become both his environment and his emotional landscape.
The photographs explore his sensations of relaxation, surrender, and quiet pleasure in the sea. Being enveloped by water, I relate this experience to what I imagine as a prenatal state—an original memory of safety, serenity, and inner balance. This feeling becomes visible in his floating body, suspended between breath and silence.
Nedret and I share more than an artist–subject relationship; we share a friendship and years of journeys at sea together. We have swum in the same waters, watched the same horizons, and observed how light, wind, and depth constantly rewrite the surface of the sea. Our conversations—sometimes spoken, sometimes silent—have always returned to water. This shared experience allows the photographs to move beyond portraiture and become a mutual act of observation and trust.
In these images, he is no longer simply the painter of the sea; he becomes part of it. His body drifts, tilts, and releases itself into the liquid space he has spent his life observing from the shore. The Man and the Sea is both a tribute and a quiet collaboration—an exploration of friendship, memory, and the lifelong dialogue between an artist and the element that shaped him.
Titles – Portrait of a Painter – Dissolving – Breaking the Surface – Into the Blue – Poseidon – Night Watch – The Leap – Splash – The Descent – Freedom – Near the Surface -Footprints of Silence
About Nadide Goksun
Nadide Goksun (b. 1967) is a Turkish-American artist working primarily with photography and ceramics. She is a graduate of Bogazici University in Istanbul and Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul, and she participates in the ICP Continuing Education Program in New York.
Goksun’s work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including Foley Gallery’s Exhibition Lab in New York City, the Soho Photo Gallery National Competition, The Photo Review’s 36th Annual International Photography Competition, Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, Australia, the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards in Barcelona, Spain, and LensCulture’s 250 New Examples of 21st-Century Street Photography, among others. Her first solo exhibition, Swimmers, was presented at Bondi Beach, Sydney, as part of the Head On Photo Festival in 2021. Her work has been published in The New York Times, PDN (Photo District News), ArtAscent International Art and Literature Journal, Pastiche Magazine, All About Photo Magazine, and Dodho Magazine. She currently lives and works in New York State. [Official Website]
