Views of a Landmark

Legend has it that in the year 1632 Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi flew with wings he cobbled together, supported by strong scirocco winds, from the top of Istanbul's Galata Tower all across the Bosphorus and landed in Usküdar, about 3.5 km towards the east. Many historians dispute the truth of this story for various reasons, one being that the only source mentioning this event is a short entry in the travelogue of the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi. He concludes that sultan Murat the IVth watched the alleged flight from his palace and eventually declared "this is a man to be scared of; such people should not be kept alive" and exiled Ahmet Çelebi to the farthest corner of his realm, Algeria. There, at the ripe old age of 30, Ahmed Çelebi died. His nickname "Hezarfen" means "man of a thousand sciences".

Hezarfen's departure point, the Galata Tower is one of the most prominent landmarks of Istanbul and therefore often appears in my  (and others') cityscapes, intentionally or not:

While I was crossing Galata Bridge over the Golden Horn, I was delighted to see the tower reflected in the window (of one of the bridge's support structures). In order to add an extra layer to the photo, I waited for one of the many fishermen pull his protein out of the sea. Or maybe it's the tower that's the extra layer!

Sometimes the tower is just "there"...

...and sometimes I make a conscious effort to photograph the tower. This is very much a cliche, a view from the garden of the Süleymaniye Mosque over the chimneys of the neighbouring medrese (a school in the Ottoman days).

All three photos were made on the same day whilst on a short trip to Istanbul over last Christmas. I used to bring along analog cameras and B&W film on my travels. But it's become so cumbersome with the security procedures and the constant anguish that the film might get fogged in the x-ray machines, especially now that CT Scanners are being gradually installed, that I now prefer a Nikon DSLR while travelling. I still use my old manual focus Nikkors though, as they are extremely rugged and perform like a charm. Here, the first two pictures were made with the humble but superb AI 50mm/f1.8 and the last one with the AI 200mm/f4.0 Nikkor, which again is optically excellent and relatively compact.

Totally unrelated to my musings above, I'd like to recommend this documentary about Dorothea Lange. It's been uploaded to Youtube just a few days ago. I watched the 2 hour documentary twice, I found it that good. What an amazing photographer she was but what a sad end she had to face.

Roads, Swallows and an Inner Dialogue with Plossu

After his young employees show him a creature they created with AI, a creature writhing on the ground, with movements the AI "imagines", Miyazaki's reaction  hits the nail right on the head: "Every morning...I see my friend who has a disability. It's so hard for him just to do a high five, his arm with stiff muscle reaching out to my hand. Now, thinking of him, I can't watch this stuff and find it interesting. Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is... I am utterly disgusted....I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself."

Recently I fell in love with the photography of Bernard Plossu. And I began to wonder why. That's when I thought back to the Miyazaki quote, especially the bold bit. Whoever created this stuff had a human sensibility that I could connect to.

Although I haven't been as much of a nomad as Plossu, I felt that the notion of "the road", for example when looking at this photograph of his, might have lifted his heart in a similar way to mine when I took this one.

Or when I look at his pictures of swallows, let's say this and this, I imagine that Plossu felt a similar kind of excitement as myself, the moment I took a picture of two rows of swallows on electric lines next to ancient Roman columns.

I even love it when he seems to be goofing around, taking a picture of his camera, because I did the same recently (who hasn't, right?), whilst I was photographing with my Rollei again after a two-year break (it felt quite weird initially...and I was so surprised when I reached the end of the roll after only 12 exposures!)

And there's even more. I find it charming that Plossu's been using nothing but an old Nikkormat with a 50mm f1.4 Nikkor for the majority of his work. Even his preferred look of his prints speaks to me: "The printing is still traditional black-and-white, no gimmicks, no black skies, nothing fancy—when something is gray, it has to be gray."

You see, it's all these imaginary threads that we weave in our minds that bond us to another person. On a deeper level, there's also the consolation that - although it very often does not feel like it - we're not alone!

Now, the million dollar question I ask myself is: what if tomorrow Plossu turns out to be an AI. It isn't so hard anymore to imagine such a future.

* In this post I used links to some of Plossu's photographs, which means there's a risk that you will not see the pics if the link is removed. I will not directly insert the pictures, as they are copyrighted material. These days not many people seem to respect this though. For example, Instagram is awash with Plossu's photos under #BernardPlossu. I have no idea if this is lawful.