Photography: Serdar Öner @photoserdar

The Sound of Silence

There are images that capture a moment. And then there are images that seem to exist outside of time altogether. Images where the horizon cannot quite be seen, yet its presence lingers somewhere beyond the fog. The mist softens the landscape into something almost mythical, carrying its own quiet weight. It promises something we cannot yet name, something just beyond language, but deeply felt.

Nature has the rare ability to slow us down. It asks us to listen, to observe what we may once have taken for granted. Its rhythm is different from the rhythm of the city. Slower, quieter, more patient. Nature moves according to its own time, and we are only a small part of it.

Serdar Öner, whose work appears in the current issue of Houses & Art, spends long periods immersed in nature. That patience is visible throughout his work. His photographs are not captured in haste; they are shaped by waiting, walking, and returning again and again to the same places. They reveal a relationship built over time, a quiet dialogue between photographer and landscape. In each image, you can sense his deep affection for both nature and the act of observing it.

There is a Japanese practice known as Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing — the idea of entering a forest not simply to walk through it, but to be absorbed by it. Serdar’s photographs invite the viewer to do the same. You do not simply look at them; you step into them. You feel the cold air, the stillness, the presence of water and fog. They awaken the desire to disappear into those landscapes, if only for a moment.

There is a particular kind of silence in the north, especially in Sweden. A silence filled with texture: the soft movement of fog across water, the distant suggestion of something unseen.

Perhaps nothing here asks to be fully understood or explained. Some things are simply meant to be felt.

Anna, Sicily 2026

Houses & Art is available here.