Before the Light: The Unseen Riders of Veliefendi
This project follows a world that opens in that fragile moment between darkness and daylight. Long before the city wakes, before the streets fill with noise and movement, another life begins in Veliefendi. The steam rising from the horses’ breath, the muddy track, the silhouettes emerging through the mist… At the center of this world stand the exercise riders — often unnoticed, rarely named, always essential.
This work was born from a desire to look into their lives.
Far from the illuminated stage of the race day, it reaches toward a long and largely invisible history of labor. This is a profession that demands not only physical strength but emotional endurance. A life shaped every morning by cold winds, sleeplessness, risk, and instinct. They don’t simply guide a horse; they carry its mood, its rhythm, its tension, its power. The trainer’s name is heard, the horse’s name is announced, the winner is celebrated — yet the person who prepares that horse before sunrise is almost never mentioned.
These photographs exist to listen to those unheard voices.
To show a real life hidden in the trackside shadows, in the quiet doorway of the stables, in the anxious eyes of a horse and the tired hands of its rider. The aesthetics of this world are not built on speed but on ritual, not on applause but on discipline, not on spectacle but on the mixture of sweat, mud, breath, and persistence.
Here, Veliefendi is more than a location; it is a constellation of rituals, a working culture, a silent community. A universe where the same gestures repeat each morning, where every movement carries meaning, where each horse brings its own character into the relationship. To look at the lives of these exercise riders is to witness a working-class story that has long remained in the shadow of the racing industry — a story of risk, labor, belonging, and solitude.
This project is not made to romanticize or glorify anyone.