Suha Derbent

Süha Derbent, who has been working as a photographer for 30 years, was born in Istanbul in 1963. He  started his professional life as a reporter in Cumhuriyet newspaper, continued as a photographer-writer in Atlas and Marie Claire magazines. After working as a visual director for Gezi National Geographic Traveler, he became more interested in travel and wildlife photography. Derbent has worked in more than 80 countries, from Scandinavia to Madagascar, from Sri Lanka to Canada.

He took photos and prepared projects by traveling around the world in pursuit of wildlife, especially animals called big cats. In April 1998; he tracked down the Bengal Tiger, which is feared to become extinct , in India and became the first Turkish wildlife photographer to photograph it.

His first book, Face to Face, was published by İş Bankası in July 2002. In 2003, he joined a project with BP and Emirates to take care of endangered animals and lived in Africa for two months. In 2006, he founded a photo sharing website called fotofanclub that attracted 35,000 members, which he later sold. His personal web page suhaderbent.com received 32 international awards.

In 2011, he prepared an exhibition called 7 Cats, consisting of photographs taken by seven big cats living in the world in their natural habitats. In 2015, he was invited by the Rwandan government to create the country's visual archive. He lived with mountain gorilla families for 10 days for one of his works in this project.

He worked as the photography consultant of Mustafa Koç for the last 15 years until his death. At the end of their travels together, Mustafa Koç published his prestigious book “Wild Encounters”. The preface to the book was written by Süha Derbent.

In 2016, he created the brand "Nature by Süha Derbent" and published the book "The Wild Face of KENYA" with the support of TAV. In 2017, he gave a speech at TED Reset, telling his success story.

Süha Derbent lives and works in İstanbul and provides consultancy services to individuals and institutions on wildlife photography, animal behavior and publishes articles. Derbent's personal archive contains more than 2 million photographs.