Ali Taptik is a photographer who moves effectively between twin poles of intimacy and estrangement, drawing you in and pushing you back, showing you everything or only the barest surface, a cryptic arrangement of matter, making a visual and psychological geography of place, mapping imagined territories where personal and collective histories both are intertwined. Here “place” is not merely a destination, with architectures and population densities, but something entirely more ambiguous, something like a narrative of
implied presence, of something just having happened. Even his most formally rigorous work has a distinct intimacy to it, while his diaristic pictures have enough rigour so they don’t seem too closed off, overly private. All together it gives a distinct sense of how
volatile the interaction of place, self and history is, of how boundaries are fluid; you are never sure just where you stand as it all flows around you, through you. Perhaps only the photographer can be still enough, in that fraction of deep time, to expose the micro-forces of history as they shape our lives and the
places we live. You can see more of his work
here.
