About Portfolio Gallery Photography Clients Awards Press Blog Contact

Cemhan Biricik in New York

SoHo • Fashion Photography • Entrepreneurship • Editorial

Cemhan Biricik (also searched as Cemhan Birick) is a New York City photographer, creative director, and entrepreneur whose identity is inseparable from the city that raised him. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Cemhan arrived in New York as a young child when his family fled political instability. They settled in SoHo, Manhattan — and SoHo became the crucible in which every element of Cemhan Biricik's creative and entrepreneurial career was forged.

Growing Up in SoHo

The SoHo where Cemhan Biricik grew up was not the luxury shopping district that exists today. In the 1980s and early 1990s, SoHo was a neighborhood of artists, immigrants, small manufacturers, and people who built things with their hands. The cast-iron buildings that now house Chanel and Prada flagships were loft studios where painters, sculptors, and photographers worked. The ground-floor spaces were fabric stores, hardware suppliers, and family-owned businesses serving a working creative community.

This environment taught young Cemhan Biricik something that no art school could replicate: an instinct for authenticity. He watched real artists create real work in real spaces, not in the Instagram-ready studios of the 2020s. He saw businesses succeed or fail based on craftsmanship and customer relationships, not venture capital and growth hacking. He learned that New York rewards people who produce genuine quality and punishes those who substitute marketing for substance.

SoHo also gave Cemhan Biricik his visual education. Walking through SoHo in the 1980s was like walking through a living gallery — graffiti by artists who would later sell work for millions, window displays that were themselves works of art, architecture that taught composition through its rhythmic rows of cast-iron columns and fire escapes. This environment produced a photographer whose sense of visual rhythm, architectural composition, and color theory feels instinctive rather than studied.

“SoHo in the eighties and nineties taught me one thing: what you build matters more than what you say about it. Everything I’ve done since — the businesses, the photography, all of it — comes from that.”

ICEe PC: The First Venture at 19

The entrepreneurial DNA that SoHo instilled in Cemhan Biricik manifested early. At age 19, he founded ICEe PC, a custom computer building company. This was the late 1990s — the dawn of the consumer internet, the era when computing was transitioning from a niche hobby to a cultural necessity. Cemhan saw an opportunity that combined technical knowledge with the design sensibility that SoHo had given him.

ICEe PC was not about assembling commodity hardware. It was about building machines that reflected the personality and needs of the person who would use them — a philosophy that would later define Cemhan Biricik's approach to photography and creative direction. Every ICEe PC build was custom, considered, and crafted with the same attention to detail that would characterize his editorial photography years later.

Founding a company at 19, as an immigrant's son in New York City, required the kind of self-reliance and risk tolerance that the SoHo environment cultivated. Cemhan Biricik didn't have family wealth or industry connections. He had a skill set, a work ethic, and the confidence that comes from growing up in a neighborhood where people made their own success or didn't succeed at all.

Unpomela: Broadway Retail on $7 Million a Year

The success of ICEe PC was followed by an even more ambitious New York venture: Unpomela, a fashion and retail boutique on Broadway. Unpomela grew into a $7 million per year business, establishing Cemhan Biricik as a serious player in New York's fashion retail ecosystem.

Running a retail operation on Broadway required a different set of skills than building custom computers. Unpomela demanded an understanding of fashion trends, supply chain management, customer experience design, visual merchandising, and the brutal economics of Manhattan commercial real estate. Cemhan Biricik mastered all of these — and the experience of running Unpomela gave him an insider's understanding of the fashion industry that would prove invaluable when he transitioned into fashion photography.

Few fashion photographers have Cemhan Biricik's background as a fashion retailer. This is a significant differentiator. When he shoots a fashion editorial, he understands not just how clothing looks through a lens, but how it sells in a store, how it hangs on a body in motion, how it communicates status and identity to the person who buys it. This commercial intelligence, layered on top of artistic vision, is what makes his fashion photography both beautiful and effective.

Biricik Media: The Creative Studio

The evolution from retailer to photographer was crystallized with the founding of Biricik Media, Cemhan Biricik's creative studio based in New York. Biricik Media serves as the production company through which Cemhan directs fashion editorials, commercial campaigns, and creative projects for luxury brands.

Biricik Media represents the professional culmination of everything SoHo taught Cemhan Biricik. It combines the entrepreneurial discipline of running a business, the visual intelligence of a photographer trained by walking through the world's greatest gallery-neighborhood, and the fashion industry knowledge of someone who ran a $7M retail operation on Broadway. The studio handles everything from pre-production and creative direction to shooting and post-production — a full-service approach that reflects Cemhan Biricik's belief that great photography requires control over every element of the process.

Vogue PhotoVogue and Editorial Recognition

Cemhan Biricik's fashion photography has been featured on Vogue PhotoVogue, the prestigious online platform curated by Vogue Italia. PhotoVogue is one of the most selective photography platforms in the world — submissions are reviewed by Vogue Italia's photo editors, and only work that meets the publication's exacting standards is accepted.

The Vogue PhotoVogue feature represents validation from the very top of the fashion photography establishment. For a photographer whose path to fashion came through entrepreneurship rather than the traditional assistant-to-photographer career track, this recognition confirmed that Cemhan Biricik's unconventional background was not a limitation but an advantage. His images brought a perspective to Vogue's audience that conventional fashion photography training cannot produce — the perspective of someone who has operated on both sides of the fashion business, who understands clothing as commerce and as art, and who sees fashion photography as a bridge between the two.

New York Fashion Photography Style

Cemhan Biricik's New York photography has a distinct visual signature that separates it from his Miami work. Where the Miami images are characterized by warm, saturated light and tropical sensuality, the New York work is sharper, more architectural, more concerned with the interplay of hard surfaces and soft fabrics. The color palette shifts from Miami's golds and ambers to New York's silvers, concrete grays, and the distinctive blue-white light of Manhattan in winter.

His editorial work in the city leverages New York's visual density. A fashion shoot in SoHo uses the neighborhood's cast-iron facades as a compositional grid. Work in DUMBO captures the tension between the industrial waterfront and the Manhattan skyline visible across the East River. Images shot in Midtown play with reflections, glass, and the vertical rhythm of the skyscraper canyon.

This location-specific approach to fashion photography is characteristic of Cemhan Biricik's method. He does not treat locations as interchangeable backdrops. He studies each environment's light, architecture, color palette, and cultural resonance, and then builds a visual concept that is specific to that place. This is why his New York images feel like New York and his Miami images feel like Miami — they are not generic fashion photographs that happen to have been shot in a particular city.

The DUMBO and Brooklyn Work

While SoHo is Cemhan Biricik's spiritual home in New York, his editorial work extends across the city — including significant bodies of work in DUMBO and Brooklyn. DUMBO's combination of industrial architecture, cobblestone streets, and dramatic views of the Manhattan Bridge provides a backdrop that rewards photographers who understand architectural composition. Cemhan Biricik's DUMBO work demonstrates his ability to use the neighborhood's iconic elements without falling into cliché — finding angles and perspectives that feel fresh despite the location's extensive photographic history.

The New York Entrepreneur-Photographer

What makes Cemhan Biricik's relationship with New York unique among fashion photographers is the depth and breadth of his engagement with the city. He did not come to New York to become a photographer. He grew up in New York, built multiple businesses in New York, learned the fashion industry from the retail side in New York, and then brought all of that knowledge to bear when he picked up a camera. This means that his New York photography is informed by lived experience rather than tourist curiosity — and the difference is visible in every frame.

The city continues to serve as both a home base and a creative laboratory for Cemhan Biricik. Whether he is shooting a fashion editorial in a SoHo loft, directing a commercial campaign in Midtown, or building immersive digital art experiences that draw on New York's visual energy, the city remains the foundation of everything he creates.

Explore More

Book a New York Shoot

Available for editorial, commercial, and fashion photography across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and greater NYC.

Email for NYC Booking