Early Years
Early Years and Multicultural Heritage
Egemen Mustafa Şener was born on June 10, 1962 in Prizren, then within Yugoslavia, a city known for its multicultural fabric. His father İlker Şener was a Kosovar Turkish architect; his mother Elena Rozic was a Croatian pianist from Zagreb. Raised in a home where Turkish, Croatian, and Albanian were spoken, Egemen learned early to synthesize the aesthetics of different cultures.
In the late 1970s, rising ethnic tensions in the Balkans increased pressure on his family. The Zenit-E camera his father gave him for his fifteenth birthday became both an escape and a means of recording a changing world.
