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Orhan Pamuk:
The new generation of collectors that came to the fore in Istanbul in the early 1980s—by which time a valuable trove of papers, calligraphy, and photographs that represented traditional Ottoman culture and Istanbul’s minorities had been destroyed—were very interested in photographs of ships passing through the city.
There are two types of collectors of photographs of ships passing through Istanbul:
1. The systematic kind. They have made it their mission to possess each and every photograph of a series of ships—concentrating on all of the City Line ferries or the car ferries or the ships of the Ottoman Seyr-i Sefain Administration, for instance.
2. The romantics. This word may not describe these collectors accurately, but I feel a particular kinship with them. They are interested in any ship that passes though the Bosphorus—local or foreign, passenger or freight. What matters to them is not when and where a ship was built, the flag it flies, the line it belongs to, or what it carries; their main concern is the feeling evoked by the photograph. I cannot adequately describe what this feeling is; but I set up the Museum of Innocence to explore and express this mysterious feeling.