Schoolgirl fantasies

Oozing with nostalgia from every Photoshopped pixel, these images attempt to capture an 'idealised past'. So says Turkish photographer Nazif Topcuoglu, who jam-packs each picture with art-historical and literary references to achieve that bygone look. He borrows light effects and compositions from paintings by Rembrandt and Caravaggio, and enlists young, affluent Turkish girls to take part in his boarding-school dramas. The results may look like a sexually-charged version of Malory Towers, but objectification is not his aim. These Proust-reading girls are educated, emancipated and unperturbed by the inevitable male gaze - the romanticised symbols of his country's fast-disappearing Westernisation.