Provenance over polish
We prioritize photographs with a traceable history — a date, a place, a hand that held the camera. A scratched 4×6 contact print with notes on the sleeve is worth more to us than a flawless scan with no context attached.
The people behind the pictures — and why the analog era still matters.
Resimdizin began as a small archive of forgotten film rolls. Today it is a curated home for visual stories from the analog era — built by collectors, photographers, and archivists who believe a frame of film still says more than a thousand pixels.
Origin
A drawer full of negatives, and a question that wouldn't go away.
In 2019, our founder Elif Yıldız found herself cleaning out her late grandfather's flat in Kadıköy. In the back of a wardrobe, beneath old letters and receipts, sat a tin box containing more than four hundred undeveloped rolls of 35mm film — Kodachrome, Agfa, Fomapan — dating from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. She asked the family what they wanted done with them. The answer was silence, then a shrug, then a polite question about recycling.
Elif didn't recycle them. She spent the next eighteen months having the rolls developed, scanned, dated, and slowly catalogued. When the resulting photographs went online, the response was overwhelming: strangers wrote in to say that the images felt familiar — not because they recognized the people in them, but because they recognized the way the light fell, the grain of the film, the slightly impatient smiles of relatives mid-conversation. That recognition is what Resimdizin is built to protect. We are an independent, reader-supported archive dedicated to the visual culture of the analog era — the decades when photographs had to be chosen, not captured a thousand times.
Curation Philosophy
Three principles that guide every photograph we publish.
The web is saturated with images. Our role is not to add to the flood — it is to slow it down. Every picture in our archive has been looked at, by a person, for longer than a scroll.
Slow looking
No infinite feeds, no autoplay, no algorithmic remix. Each story is hand-edited, sequenced in the order we believe it should be read, and accompanied by notes from the curator who chose it.
Respect for the maker
Every image is published with the photographer credited, the family contacted where possible, and the option to request a takedown honoured within 48 hours. We do not claim fair use where consent is reasonable to seek.
Archival first, art second
We are not a gallery. Our first job is to preserve. Original scans are stored in triplicate, metadata is open, and high-resolution copies are made available to researchers, museums, and families at cost.
From many places, no border
The analog era was not owned by any one country. We actively seek submissions from underrepresented regions — the Middle East, West Africa, Central Asia, the Andes — where film was used but rarely digitised.
Reading is part of looking
A photograph without context becomes a postcard. We commission essays, oral histories, and translations to sit alongside the images, so the picture arrives with its story attached.
The Archive · 2024
A small, deliberate collection — and it is growing.
We add fewer than forty photographs a week to the public archive. The numbers below describe the work as it stands today.
11,840
Photographs Published
Spanning 1958 to 2003, from 47 countries.
326
Curated Stories
Each one a sequence, not a single image.
92
Contributing Photographers
Plus 1,400+ family archive submissions.
5.2M
Words of Context
Essays, captions, and oral histories.
The People
A tiny team of curators, archivists, and writers.
Resimdizin is run by four full-time staff and a rotating panel of regional editors. We work from Istanbul, Berlin, Lagos, and São Paulo.
Elif Yıldız
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Elif founded Resimdizin after spending two years restoring her grandfather's archive. She oversees editorial direction and the regional desk covering Turkey and the Balkans.
Markus Kessler
Head of Archival
A former photo conservator at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Markus handles the scanning, metadata, and long-term storage of every image we publish.
Adaeze Okafor
Regional Editor, West Africa
Adaeze is a documentary photographer based in Lagos. She leads our Lagos–Accra–Lomé desk and curates the monthly series Frames of the Wet Season.
Rita Souza
Commissioning Editor
Rita writes and commissions the long-form essays that accompany each story. Her own work on family photo albums in 1980s Brazil won the 2022 Aperture Essay Prize.
Take Part
Have a box of negatives, a contact sheet, or a story to tell?
We accept submissions from photographers, families, and estates on a rolling basis. If you have material that deserves to be looked at slowly, we would like to hear from you.
Submit to the Archive