FLASHLIGHT ON
the Young Generation OF PHOTOGRAPHERS IN TURKEY Between Europe and the Middle East, Turkey is without a doubt an amazing photographic playground making Istanbul an attractive hub for freelance photographers. The local photography scene is now one of the most vibrant in the world and Time Out met with six of its most inspired representatives.
Somewhere in between photojournalism and art, they have developed a deeply personal way of looking at and capturing the world around them. In other words, their photographic appetites have taken them way beyond the Galata Bridge and its hordes of fishermen. By Antoine Remise & Julius Motal.
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THE PHOTOJOURNALIST Name: Kürşat Bayhan Website: salon.io/kursadbayhan Age: 34 Publication: Away from Home (2013)
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immediately after. He had a short stint before he came across a job listing for a photojournalist position with Today’s Zaman. He got the job in 2003 and has been there ever since. With his cameras, he’s covered major moments in Turkey’s recent history, from the influx of Syrian refugees to the Gezi protests two years ago. As he worked, he found himself drawn to the stories of migrant workers in Istanbul, young men who left their families in Anatolia for the financial promise of the big city. He spent time with them, and learned what they had left behind. While he would photograph digital for news assignments, he went back to basics with black-and-white film. The images have a nostalgic quality to them, and there’s a rawness, too, in the emotions captured and conveyed. We feel their efforts to survive and the loss they experience in doing so. The photographs became a book called Away From Home, the foreword for which was written by renowned American photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who passed away this year. Bayhan spent roughly five years photographing these men and their lives, and the story isn’t as direct as you’d find in a newspaper. It has a deep emotional resonance that stays with you long after you’ve closed the book. JM
Courtesy of Zaman Daily Newspaper
Away from Home
family sits around a small fire in Zakho, a city in Iraqi Kurdistan. They’re a Yazidi family, and they had found a degree of safety in a UN refugee camp. They were on the run from ISIS who had terrorized their homes. A woman stokes the fire to help cook dinner. A child looks into the flames. Another looks into the camera of Kürşat Bayhan, a Turkish photojournalist for the daily newspaper Today’s Zaman. When Bayhan heard that Yazidi families were fleeing the rising tide of ISIS, he traveled to Northern Iraq as soon as he could. There, he found families beleaguered by horrifying circumstances, and he photographed their plight in order to tell their stories. “l had three trips to east of Turkey and North of Iraq to cover the living conditions of Yazidis,” Bayhan said. There was a mix of shock and glee among the survivors who had just trekked through the Sinjar Mountains, which was the only route they could take. “Most of them were living in abandoned constructions and the tents given by the local governor,” Bayhan said of what he found there. His coverage of their struggle to survive earned him recognition from the Days Japan International Photojournalism Awards earlier this year. Bayhan’s journey in photography began with an old Zenit camera that his geography teacher gave him in high school. He shot for himself mostly before focusing on journalism in university where he learned the value of documentary photography, but he didn’t become a photojournalist
THE iPHONEOGRAPHER Name: Elif Suyabatmaz Age: 40 Where you can see her work: @fisheyedreams on Instagram Elif’s thoughts on shooting with an iPhone: “I know this is awful maybe for some photographers but this phone is very liberating. You just don’t think, and that brings a lot of good things. I think it depends on what you want to do, and what language you want to use in your images. For street photographers, it’s just excellent.”
Elif Suyabatmaz's self portrait
line with how she sees as a photographer. There is a huge market for hyper saturated color photos on Instagram, but Suyabatmaz errs on the side of a vintage aesthetic with today’s tools. To look at her photographs is to both see a place that is and isn’t Istanbul. She finds places and moments that are distinctly of this city but outside our conception of it. They’re monochrome meditations in urban chaos. Her time on Instagram also led to a creative collaboration with a photographer half a world away. A large part of what makes Instagram so popular is the community aspect and the connections and relationships that can engender. Through Instagram, she became friends with Sydney-based photographer Markus Andersen. They went back and forth on each other’s work, and
eventually, Andersen proposed a project in which they would have a photographic dialogue between their respective cities. “They’re very different cities, EasternWestern, and they’re very far. Also, both cities are on the sea,” Suyabatmaz said. Her female perspective and his male perspective, she reasoned, also helped to establish a duality. They photographed over the course of three years (2011-2014), and in order to maintain visual consistency, they used their iPhones with the same settings on the photography app Hipstamatic. In some cases, it’s easy to identify which city is which, but in others, the lines aren’t so clear. Shoot a city in a certain way, and it can look like any city. This is particularly the case with Istanbul. If you want gleaming towers with no personality, you can find them. If you want ramshackle houses, you can find them. If you want old boats side by side with ritzy schooners, you can find them. Photographic possibilities abound in Istanbul. “It’s photographers’ heaven. Someone who doesn’t shoot well can shoot well here,” Suyabatmaz jokingly said of the allure Istanbul has for people visiting. Anyone can take a picture here, and anyone can shoot with their phone. Yet, not everyone can create something original. That takes time, and Suyabatmaz has managed to capture an Istanbul truly her own with the most ubiquitous camera around. JM
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THE IMPRESSIONIST Name: Emine Gozde Sevim Age: 29 Website: www.eminegozdesevim. com Publication: Embed in Egypt (out this summer) Emine’s tip on photographing Istanbul: “Pictures of a woman with a headscarf close to another woman who doesn’t wear one leaves me very perplexed. OK, this is happening but that doesn’t make Istanbul a bridge between East and West at all! What’s inspiring here is the city’s complexity with so many layers and histories built on top of each other.”
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© Christopher Morris
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mine Gozde Sevim is a young photographer who doesn’t “believe in such a thing as female photography.” She’s her own kind of storyteller who thus far has not taken any assignments from newspapers. Rather, she carries a notebook where she writes down what goes through her mind as she and her camera meander around the turbulent corners of the Middle East: Egypt, Afghanistan, Israel and her native Turkey. Her words sound like poems but Emine prefers to call them “ambiguous texts.” Ambiguity is actually what shapes Emine’s photography. Whether it’s the revolution in Egypt or the Gezi protests, she often prefers to leave the spectacular front-page images to news photographers and allow her curiosity to linger over more intimate scenes from a daily life that
Homeland Delirium
keeps on going despite the violence. With an almost impressionist aesthetic, she builds a personal narrative that freely navigates between moments of urban chaos and more subdued, almost poetic episodes (a wedding, kids playing on a swing, blurry neon lights). Emine’s photographs would be difficult to use in a newspaper but that’s not what she’s aiming for anyway. She portrays history differently, with a personal approach that is a way of asserting that photography can’t pretend to reflect such events in their entire complexity. “It’s not that I’m not making a point. It’s just that the point is that there are no
conclusions that photography can give,” she explained. “What I don’t want to do is make a judgment about a group of people or a specific place. Instead of looking at people like ‘These are Arabs, these are Egyptians, these are Turks,’ I prefer to look at them as people going through particular ordeals as I think there’s a universal quality in such experiences.” Emine is now based in New York but comes back frequently to the Middle East and Turkey in particular to work on her project Homeland Delirium that started during Gezi and for which she has received the much coveted Emergency Fund from the prestigious Magnum Foundation. Yet, she’s not sure when she’ll be able to put the final touch on it. “We’re at a very critical moment and there’s always something happening here that keeps me coming back,” she said. Meanwhile, her first book Embed in Egypt will be published this summer. Emine describes her book, shot in a grainy black and white, as “a minimalist and dark silent movie,” in which her beautiful images are complemented by her short poems… sorry “ambiguous texts.” AR Embed in Egypt
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THE BLACK & WHITE ARTIST Name: Yusuf Sevinçli Age: 34 Where you can see his work: www.yusufsevincli.com Publication: Good Dog (2012), Walking (2015) Yusuf’s tip for photographing Istanbul: “Foreigners should make indoor shootings. Streets of Istanbul can be very entertaining and stimulating but a photographer should avoid that because it can be too easy. Let me correct myself. They shouldn’t make any photographs in the first few days. Or they should photograph indoors. Kind of playful answer, eh?”
aesthetic and off-kilter in their composition, a far cry from his time as a press photographer in the early aughts. Press photography was never his bag. At least, he realized that after two years of working for the wires and local publications. “There were only two choices: to quit photography or to find a new way in my own photography,” Sevinçli said. Change for him came when he attended a four-month intensive photography course at Nordens Fotoskola in Stockholm. The photographs he realized he wanted to make were personal ones with an artistic sensibility. “I started to find my own
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usuf Sevinçli never really expected to make money from his photography. For nearly eight years, he worked odd jobs to make a living while he photographed around Istanbul with a medley of cameras and Kodak Tri-X 400, a black-and-white film stock that for him is “the best film ever.” Eight years of photographing culminated a book called Good Dog, a series of 45 blackand-white images that are at turns haunting and abstract, all the while grounded in reality. The title is a reference to Daido Moriyama’s landmark series Stray Dog, though it’s more than just a nod to the legendary Japanese photographer. “It’s not only referring to Daido Moriyama the master, but also saying 'good dog' to me,” he explained. The photographs are gritty in their
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All the photographs on this page are from the book Walking
language during that time, so this was the section point where I quit documentary photography and started to focus more on a kind of personal and subjective photography,” he said. Around 2011, Sevinçli had a chance meeting with Christine Ollier, the director of the Parisian Galerie les Filles du Calvaire. Ollier responded warmly to his work, and offered to represent him, which opened a new world for Sevinçli. He went from small jobs to supplement his photography to actually making a living from it, and he’s the first to recognize how lucky he is. The publication of Good Dog was a turning point, and he’s since been working towards finding something new. “From time to time, I’m publishing or I’m exhibiting more series. Sometimes, they are kind of similar to what I did before, but I should avoid repeating myself. It is not that easy, but I am not in a hurry,” he said. A few months ago, Sevinçli finished a short artist’s residency in Vichy, a small town in central France, where he was given carte blanche. He spent five weeks making photographs of the town and its people that became an exhibition and a book called Walking. While Vichy isn’t a place you’d think of as a prime destination for a photographer, Sevinçli made it work with a fine mix of portraits and landscapes, each a splash of high contrast, often grainy black-and-white. They are more of an interpretation of Vichy than they are a representation. Perhaps they are pointing towards a new way for Sevinçli’s photography, but who knows? He’s not in a hurry. JM
All the photographs on this page are from Postcards from the Black Sea
T H E F R E E L A N C E E X PAT Name: Mathias Depardon Age: 34 Website: www.mathiasdepardon.com Publication: Postcards from the Black Sea His tip for photographing Istanbul: “Spend your first two days here to shoot all the cliché images and get them out of your system. Then, spend some time with the locals, make your own experience of the city and find an angle that reflects something more personal.”
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hen Mathias Depardon settled in Istanbul back in January 2012, he had just spent a turbulent year covering the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – the latter being “quite a scary experience” – and after several years of traveling around the world, the French freelance photographer thought it was the right moment to find a steady place to work from. “For a long time, the real base for photojournalists in the Middle East was Beirut, but it became complicated there so Istanbul took its place. Since it’s close to the Middle East, Iran, Greece or Caucasia, it’s the ideal playground for us,” Depardon explained. At the time, he was already in contact with Le Monde as he had previously worked for them on a feature story about immigration, which actually was his first major publication. Today, he continues to
collaboratie with the prestigious French newspaper, but also works regularly for other foreign papers such as The Wall Street Journal, Der Spiegel, and The Sunday Times as well as a few others occasionally. Photography, however, is not only a job. Between his press assignments, Depardon saves time to explore and develop more personal projects that take shape in the long run and allow him to adopt a slower pace in his photographic approach. A few years back, it was a long-term project on immigration that took him to Greece, Mexico and Calais in France, the infamous transit point for illegal immigrants. More recently, it’s been a keen interest in the gigantic dam projects in South East Turkey, but perhaps the most stunning example of Depardon’s “side photography” is his series on the Black Sea region titled Postcards from the Black Sea. “I started it after having been constantly on the run for tough, newsy stuff during the Arab Spring. I wanted to venture into something that would slow me down, something lighter and more introspective where I could create my own story,” he said. The result is a captivating collection of vivid and often humorous images of leisure and daily life scenes stolen along a coastline that crosses northern Turkey, part of the Balkans and several countries that used to belong to the former Soviet Union. Last year, Depardon had the good fortune to have this series featured at the art fair Contemporary Istanbul thanks to the artistic platform BookLab that came up with an ingenious idea to publish Postcards from the Black Sea. They created a foldable map of the region with four booklets organized geographically and containing 10 photos
each. Next October, they will be exhibited at FotoIstanbul, Istanbul’s annual photography festival, and before that at the French Institute on Istiklal in September. Even though Depardon keeps working as a photojournalist, he feels blessed that that his photography can navigate towards a more artistic approach. “I still enjoy the adrenaline of press assignments, being on the field, and the teamwork with a journalist, but with the experience, I’ve become more skeptical about how information and images are treated in the media. Editors usually go for sensational photographs with little space for interpretation,” he explained. “It’s not an easy transition given my journalistic background, but leaning more towards the lyrical side of photography allows me to express a more personal and ambiguous touch.” In 2011, Mathias Depardon won the Bourse du Talent, a coveted photo competition in France that rewards young talents, for a series taken from his extensive work on immigrants. That year, the Jury’s president was Gökşin Sipahioğlu, the charismatic Turkish founder of the mythical Parisian photo agency SIPA Press. Considering moving to Turkey at the time, Depardon went to him for advice and Sipahioğlu said he would gladly help him. Unfortunately, the old man passed away a few months later, but it seems like it didn't prevent Depardon from successfully working his way into the Turkish photography scene on his own. AR
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T H E M YS T I C VOYAG E R Name: Cemil Batur Gökçeer Age: 33 Website: www.cemilbaturgokceer.com Publication: Düğüm (out in October) Cemil’s tip on photography: “I would suggest concentrating on only one photograph. What’s important is not so much how it was taken but to choose an image that you feel deeply connected with and exaggerate what you see in it. There is so much you can express with one photograph but you’ll only show what you really feel if you let yourself be driven by it.”
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emil Batur Gökçeer’s aforementioned piece of advice is a good sum up of his own approach to photography. Even though he started his career covering conflicts in Turkey in a more documentary fashion, he’s now leaning towards the artistic side of photography finding almost mystical bonds with his subjects. “I wasn’t satisfied with the information people were getting through my images. I was receiving much more than I was giving. I wanted to add layers to my photographs, express things I felt inside me, and unveil other dimensions,” Gökçeer explained. These extra dimensions are what make the Ankara-based photographer’s work so special and so mysterious, as his photographic impetus is driven by stories he almost makes up in his mind. For his eerie series titled Düğüm ("node" in Turkish), the starting point was a tale he heard about a woman from Aksaray, an Anatolian village in Cappadocia, who after having disappeared for three days, supposedly met and fell in love with a genie, a fantastical creature mentioned in the Qur’an whose belief is still widespread in Middle Anatolia. Having traveled to the place, he soon realized that asking people about such an intimate story was considered offensive and Gökçeer never got to meet the woman. “So it turned into my own tale because as I was traveling there, some really mystic things happened to me. I was venturing into a geography that was a favorable environment for this kind of story to happen,” Gökçeer said. The result of his two-year meandering in the Aksaray area is a fascinating collection of intriguing urban scenes, disturbing
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Mağaro Albino
portraits in black and white, and mesmerizing landscapes that he captured with a poetic sense that is truly his own. Even technical decisions are more determined by his sentiments rather than logical questions of light and depth of field. For instance, his frequent use of flash in his project Düğüm was not determined by any lack of light. Rather, it was a way for him to spontaneously express his anger, as if the white shadow of the flash had the ability to erase what’s around him. “Most of the time, my technical decisions depend on those kind of stories,” he confessed. With time, Gökçeer has delved deeper into abstraction as he let his flourishing imagination give birth to new projects that really stand outside of photography’s wellworn path. With the series Mağara Albino ("The Cave Albino"), he aims to create almost unreal touristic places while the conceptual Gökhan is an attempt to drown his subject into the photographic paper and material. With these two projects, he gives free rein to his idea of creating new dimensions around a photograph by manipulating it and subverting developing techniques. Given Gökçeer’s very specific creative process, one may wonder if his work can still be considered photography, but it’s a distinction that doesn’t make much sense to
him. “Even when I seem to get away from its traditional forms, I am still strongly attached to the powers of photography. I have taken, dug and developed tons of photographs, trying to sharpen the feelings that came along with them. So when I alter the images, it’s not so much a question of aesthetics but rather decisions derived from my relationship with photography,” he explained. Last May in Ankara, Cemil Batur Gökçeer inaugurated his new exhibition in his art space, Torun. Entitled Parazit, it mixed his photographs with enigmatic video works. “It was personal and atmospheric. It didn’t really have a proper topic,” Gökçeer said. His days as a documentary photographer now seem further away than ever. AR Düğüm