Erhan Tırlı (TR/AU)

Born 1994, Melbourne, Australia
Lives and works Melbourne, Australia

Erhan Tırlı is a Türk-Australian photographer who centers his practice around long-term ethnography of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in Melbourne, Australia. In this project, Tırlı explores ideas of cross-cultural belonging and existence beyond singular frameworks of identity through a series of collaborative portraits, still life, street photography, archival images and text. Of the work Tırlı notes: ‘You are Turkish or you are Australian. You are Western or you are Eastern. This kind of bipartisan reasoning denies our right to nuance, to multiplicity. Coaxing us into conformity.’ Engaging in a collaborative practice with his sitters leads to intimate insights and playful portraits which reveal a more nuanced, multifaceted, and at times surreal, representation of the participants that shifts thinking beyond common stereotypes.