Kodak released the camera it produced in 1888 with the motto "You push the button we do the rest" and it was true, everything that was needed to take a photograph was inside that box (apart from the button one has to push): photosensitive surface, a completely dark setting and even an optical lens to ensure focus.

It might be one of the most important reasons in separation of photography from painting and the beginning of discussing whether photography is an art or not. As for painting, the painter does it on a blank canvas with paints and brushes. And photography is produced using a camera by someone pushing a button in the face of an already existing situation. As the marvel of photography is its reproduction of reality for some artists, for others it is its biggest obstacle...So the latter started creating their own reality: the pictorialists, avantgardes and others...

Melih Dönmezer who is influenced by pictorialists like Robert Demarchy and Edward Steichen, is also one of those who prefer this second way. His works don't have a thematic coherence, but creates a new kind of association in its own way in terms of the techniques he uses. Instead of searching for a tension within photographic moments in his works, he reflects the tension by combining the existing images. If we are to listen to Melih Dönmezer's own words on in his works: "When the distance between things is interrupted by a machine, there occurs a common plane, a new combination and a setting for existence for all forms. When these substances which have completely different orientations in functional and visual terms come together on this common plane, the results can be something that hasn't been envisaged or visible to the eye. This is to me, much more exciting than determining some theme or form, and searching for and recording it. Lots of different outcomes through a combination and within these outcomes a single image taking shape through aesthetic tendencies."

Melih Dönmezer by means of this combination with an aesthetic which the likes we aren't familiar with in Turkey, brings together different entities in terms of form, content and feeling on a single plane; and he allows the viewer to discover this association along with himself. And the viewer is thrilled to see that the energy his photographs have in individual and collective terms is much too familiar.