b. Gümüşhane, 1944
In 1951 His first encounter with photography was when his grandfather İbrahim Celebci brought a photographer to their village and got a picture taken of him, Halim Kulaksız, and his four other brothers. In 1958 at Erzurum High School, he bought himself a bakelite camera and started his photography works at high school’s photography club.
In 1969 he started MEFO (Color Photography with Letter Correspondence) with his friend Akın Öktem. The same year he initiated REFO Color, the iconic central photography lab of Turkey. In 1971 he opened the first ever color photography exhibition in Ankara Zafer Bazaar under the name “Images”. The same year with an invitation of CIBA PhotoChemi A.G. he participated to a CIBAChrome training in Fribourg, Switzerland. In 1972, he opened his second exhibition “Images 2”. In 1972 he successfully completed New York Institute of Photography. In 1973, he won the second price in the “Our Turkey” photography contest organized by Ministry of Culture.
In 1978, he became a lecturer at Akademi (later knows as Mimar Sinan Fine Art University) and paleyed an important role establishing the photography department at the university. In 1979, Sakura invited him to Japan to make researches on photography. He got introduced the first ever prototype minilab at Noritsu factory. In 1984, he was titled as the Artist of FIAP (AFIAP) by the International Federation of Photography.
