Faruk Ulay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1957. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Graphic Design from The State Academy of Fine Arts, he earned a postgraduate diploma in Visual Communications at Goldsmiths’ College, London. He moved to the United States in 1982, and settled in Pasadena, CA.
In his work that embraces both verbal and visual elements, he uses photography as his medium of choice to stimulate an ongoing dialogue between oppositions, a shifting landscape which put dichotomies into play: identity and difference, presence and absence, concrete and abstract, the past lingering in the present. Urban landscapes, as well as barren lands, and found objects are frequently featured in his photographs. Text accompanying these images live independently in the collective space and point to what is not accentuated in the photographs. It is hoped that viewers could undertake the task of seeing the mutating world through the juxtaposition of images and rebuild it from their own perspective.
In addition to the work that incorporates both the visual and the textual, Faruk Ulay has written ten volumes of short stories and experimental fiction, two novels, and one non-fiction work – a design manifesto.
