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We are thrilled to share two exciting announcements for TRAVEL: An Atlas of Stories, Places and Faces, Exhibit Around APS’s international open call, a project that explores travel as experience, encounter and transformation.
This edition of TRAVEL welcomes an exceptional guest: Stefano Mirabella, one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in Italian documentary and street photography today.
Mirabella came to photography in 2003, training at leading schools in Rome before finding his direction in social reportage. His projects have taken him to Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territories — places that became the heart of exhibitions and publications. Since 2012 he has committed fully to street photography, a language he considers deeply his own and practises as a form of direct, personal engagement with the world around him. He was a member of the Italian collective Spontanea and has been a Leica Talent award winner since 2014. He teaches photography at Officine Fotografiche and is a member of the faculty at the Leica Akademie. In 2021 he curated Caio Mario Garrubba – FREELANCE SULLA STRADA for the Istituto Luce, helping to bring renewed attention to a key figure in twentieth-century Italian photography.
With Istanbul, Mirabella takes us into one of the most elusive and captivating cities in the world: a journey through light, gesture and silence, into a metropolis that never quite lets itself be known. In his own words:
Some cities reveal themselves quickly. Others seem to resist every attempt at understanding. Istanbul, for me, is one of the latter.
Every visit adds something, yet at the same time unsettles what came before. The neighbourhoods change, the people change, the light changes. And so does my eye. This is why I think of this project as an open-ended search: not a finished portrait of a city, but an attempt to build, over time, a relationship with it.
The photographs in this exhibition belong to one phase of that journey. They are fragments of an ongoing body of work, born from the desire to observe everyday life away from the city’s most predictable images. What draws me is what happens at the edges of the tourist narrative: a gesture, a moment of waiting, a coincidence, a balance that lasts only an instant before it disappears.
Colour is central to this research. It is not an aesthetic choice but the language through which Istanbul asserted itself from the very beginning. Its light, its surfaces, the constant presence of people and the endless layering of situations make colour an essential part of the story.
More than a description of Istanbul, these images aim to convey the experience of an encounter that keeps unfolding over time. Every return to the city is a new beginning, a new chance to observe, to understand, and to be surprised. Perhaps that is precisely why this work cannot yet be called complete.
Istanbul will be exhibited at Trieste Photo Days 2026 (22–25 October) and included in the TRAVEL editorial volume.
We are delighted to reveal the official cover of the volume. The image is by Andrea Klausner, with the photograph titled I Spy Lady Liberty. Congratulations to Andrea Klausner on earning the cover of TRAVEL!
