Ali Taptik

 

 

 

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.

 

 

John Stezaker Interview

In a bumper week for interviews, this time with John Stezaker, discussing various aspects of his intriguing collage work. Admittedly it's a few years old (way back in 2006) but given the consistency of Stezaker's methods over the years it all seems quite relevant. You can read some more thoughts on Stezaker a few posts down...

(Recorded by and for Tate Britain, via)

Ballen In Conversation

From Jim Casper's venerable Lens Culture comes an insightful video interview with Roger Ballen, who I think we've established as one of my most admired contemporary photographers. In the course of the interview Ballen discusses the development of his work and the psychological quality of his images. You can view it here.

Serkan Taycan - Back Street

The city is not a destination, but a set of possible encounters, a psychological landscape of need and desire, of destruction, of fleeting bliss. Or at least that’s what these pictures suggest. Anyway, let’s not think of the “city” as being one place (one city), but a maze of overlapping territories, when the night comes especially; these other cities are the dark mirror drawing us out, looking to fulfil whatever it is that drives us to risk the narrow zone, the borderland portrayed here, a city of whispering shadows, of temptation and repulsion, underscored by violence, by lust. The series entitled Back Street by Serkan Taycan, a Turkish photographer, visually describes the experience of negotiating an obscure corner of Istanbul where night life congregates in a permanent after-hours gloom. It is formally quite unlike most of his other work, but still consistent with the intention of exploring social complexities in modern Turkey. You can see the rest of it on his site here (be sure to have look at some of the other projects, Homeland in particular).

Arja Hyytiäinen

 

 

 

Photographers make journeys, they cover ground, and while some do this at the closest distance, in rooms or in studios, some make the journey itself a starting point, a way of defining what is possible – or rather of not defining it, of making their own map, allowing lines to cross. So it is the sense of a fortunate encounter that defines such work and the work of Arja Hyytiäinen in particular, the sudden, brief overlap of lives and places, then gone again. The journey is endless, tracking across continents, the destination some-place between where you arrived and where you left, in the air. Her pictures, cumulatively, are a record of the distance she has put behind her, the short intensity of lives touching, of new, unfamiliar places and they also look toward where she has yet to go. Motion is the catalyst. They are history pictures too, measuring the weight of Europe’s past on an individual scale, intersections again, the stage for a long-running drama and for those we have yet to write, or the one we are writing now, as Hyytiäinen’s pictures show, the work in progress, the tension, the pause, the curtain going down. For her actors it is life and death, the performance is their own – and hers too maybe, forging a new connection between aspects of reality otherwise distant, and the journey continues, a scattered, disconsolate memorial for the seemingly insignificant, passing stuff of life, foggy plumes of breath in the cold night, all the shadings of desire, of grief, the transient meetings, hurried departures; this journey (and these pictures) are a way of marking a path that might never be followed, but we all know where it goes… See more here and here.

Decayed Time - Daido Moriyama

People steadily lose the landscapes they have accumulated. At some point the landscape of a town will undergo transformation. It’s not likely that anyone can now faithfully recall how scenes appeared ten or twenty years ago. That’s because people actively incorporate the scenes before their eyes into their daily lives, to the extent that they even forget that the landscape has changed. Still, just a small number of yellowed afterimages are closeted away as reminiscences in some corner of the mind. I think people are able to continue living in the present because we forget most every little thing.

- Daido Moriyama, “Decayed Time” in Memories of a Dog