Stardust

Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck playing Stardust

the bass line, chug chug chug chug...

the consolation of watching infinity

in a river flowing, a cloud drifting, a child laughing.

The Print Experience

Do we appreciate a painting more, or let's say at a higher, more sophisticated level, if we paint ourselves? What about music, literature, poetry? At least from a craft point of view it has to be so. Only when we practice a craft ourselves do we have a much better understanding and appreciation of its history, theory, practices, challenges etc.

In my archive I have a set of a dozen photographs by Turkish photographer Fethi Sabunsoy. It was 2003 when he gave them to me, a few years before he passed away in 2007 at the young age of 57. In the 22 years since, I have returned to these prints again and again; like you would open a small poetry book and re-read the same poems that you have read hundreds of times before.

This picture is one of the gems in the set. He took it in 1998, in an old, traditional coffeehouse in Gaziantep, a city in southeast Turkey. Every time I flip through the photos I stop at this one (and many others) and stare at it for a very long time. The wonderful mood, the silent poetry pulls at my heartstrings. And man, the print! Fethi was a first-rate craftsman.

But let me put print quality aside for a moment. The first thing that always springs to my mind is, what a huge risk to place a window that bright so prominently right on the corner. Fethi must have had time to contemplate the composition and he went for it. As far as I'm aware, in those days it was his regular practice to include the film rebate in the print - a la Cartier-Bresson - so it's very likely he correctly assessed that the rebate would pull in the window and that the risk of a totally unbalanced print was minimal. In any case, what he’s done is masterly.

Every time I hold the print, I tend to scrutinise the glasses and ashtrays on the table. The way light has rendered their edges is just so delicate, so sublime!

Then my eye always wanders to the cheap, lonely light switch, dangling from a thin cord that appears to have a knot in it. I'm sure, before pressing the shutter Fethi noticed this switch, saw how it was illuminated by windows perpendicular to each other, rim lighting it from two sides. He possibly even saw this switch as the "punctum" of the picture (this is the first time I said punctum on this blog) and made sure he placed it in front of deep shadow. Again, absolutely delicate and rendered pin-sharp.

The calendar on the wall also never fails to catch my eye. The date reads 17, the rest is not legible. On the back of the print Fethi has dated the photograph as 18th April 1998. Most probably, on the day the picture was taken the calendar had not been attended to yet.

What else? The sense of depth thanks to the diagonals, the chair in the far window frame, the question why the tables are all racked together (in preparation for a planned gathering?), a portrait of Atatürk hanging in the deep shadows in the upper left corner...the little details and questions go on and on.

I know that Fethi printed this picture on long-discontinued Forte Polywarmtone paper, lending it a lovely chocolaty finish. It is fiber based, 18x24cm in size. Before the year 2000 Fethi was using a Nikon F90x (later he switched to a Leica M6). And if I'm not mistaken, he was using the AF 28mm/2.8 Nikkor (alongside the 50/1.4 and 80-200/2.8 Nikkors). So it must have been this combo he used here. The film was most probably Ilford HP5. I've seen the negative of another photo from this trip to Gaziantep and that was HP5, so that is what my assumption is based on.

On the back of the print Fethi wrote: "The corner of an old coffeehouse is quiet and calm, awaiting the people who will come for a chat".

How a photograph can transport you to another world...

Thank you, Maestro!

Big Dreams

"A man dies the day his dreams have died" - Yaşar Kemal

~

I recently came across a short street interview. The backdrop is a city in southeastern Turkey. The interviewer and interviewee are both young man in their early 20’s. 

Q: “What is your biggest dream?”

A: “My biggest dream?...(pause)…I had a big dream…but I can’t remember it now”

Both start to giggle.

Q: “You can’t remember your biggest dream?”

Another short pause.

A: “I swear I can’t remember what it was”

 

 

A few days ago, Instagram recommended me an account. I recognized the name; it was an old friend from university. Back then we were both in the Track & Field team. I ran the long distances, and he was a very good 400m runner. After graduation he made his PhD in the US and then became an academician, a sociologist, at a university in Turkey. The last time I saw him was about 17-18 years ago. What intrigued me with his IG account name was that it ended with “music”. I went ahead and checked his feed and was almost knocked off my chair. He had turned into a musician, a guitarist, a singer and songwriter. Had produced 2 albums and 30 songs. Was doing live gigs and producing video clips. Had his music videos on Youtube, his songs on Spotify. He had grown long hair, and – to rub it really in - it was still black! I’d had no idea that he had all this in him. I haven't asked him how he felt about this transformation, but from my point of view, it all looked like he was living his big dream.

The Rhine and a Poplar

When I first saw Gursky's "Rhein II" I was mesmerised. The 1,9 x 3,6 meter print was hanging high on a wall in the Istanbul Modern museum and it had a presence that gets lost on a screen.  That feeling of awe has stuck with me ever since. Now I live minutes away from the Rhine and it has become a muse, not least due to the lasting impression of Gursky's masterpiece. During my walks I enjoy observing how the seasons, the time of day and the kind of light changes the mood of the river. 

At a very sweet spot there is a poplar tree, which has become a subplot in all the photos I make of the Rhine. On this particular overcast day last January, the waters were high and the tree was half submerged. The sky had a delicate range of pastel blues, a kind of softness that always strikes a chord with me.

Only while writing this post and looking at Gursky's website did I realize that 19 years after "Rhein II" he made "Rhein III". Clearly, it's a river that lends itself to decades of exploration.

The Golden Horn

The golden colours of the Golden Horn in Istanbul at dusk have been immortalised in paintings such as this one by Aivazovksy, from 1845. If you look closely at the painting you'll see white sails at the lower left of the setting sun, close to the shore. That's roughly from where I made all three photos in this post. 

Over the course of almost thirty years I must have walked and photographed on the same shores many hundreds of times. Saturdays, my feet took me there almost automatically. It's a place with a certain magnetism.

The earliest photo at the top is from 1996. Looking at the clothing, it must've been late fall or early winter. I was still a young man and had started my first job in October that same year. Here, on a Saturday afternoon I was taking in the bustle on the piers of the Golden Horn, my camera loaded with Fuji Sensia slide film. Back in those days fishermen would sell their daily catch right at the shore.

The second photo is about 20 years later. In the mean time I have married, have had a child, have been fully shooting B&W film and have become a decent darkroom printer. The afternoon light over the Golden Horn is still glorious at times. At the back is the Suleymaniye Mosque. The boat at the far right is named "Golden Boy".

Life went on, it got harder by the day, and Istanbul also kept evolving and growing (massively). Towards the end of the pandemic I started to increasingly use an old digital SLR, but with my much older manual lenses. Still, I kept being drawn to the same place. Like here, on the 11th December 2023 at 13:43 (thank you EXIF file). See the funny rainbowy spot on the back of the bench? Somehow the lens (a Nikkor 28mm f2.8 AIS) managed to  produce this little trick.

The tremendous change in technology from the earliest to the latest picture goes without saying. But I keep thinking about a more subtle change that has happened in parallel. Here's an anecdote. Sometime around 1998 or 1999 I rose very early and went to the Suleymaniye Mosque (have a look at the B&W pic again) to photograph the Golden Horn from up there. The mosque has a garden facing the waters and I was taking pictures from the garden. It was a cold day and the place was completely deserted, until a man approached me. It was the imam of the mosque. He asked what I was doing. I explained. I asked whether I could make a portrait of him. He accepted. Then he asked me whether I'd like to come up and enjoy the view from the domes of the mosque! Of course I did. And so we went up some narrow stairwells to the top of the mosque, climbed out from a door  into open air and began skipping from dome to dome. He was very accommodating and I made pictures from up there towards the Golden Horn...with a tripod! But the light was too harsh, or more likely I wasn't good enough: the pictures turned out to be unremarkable. Anyway, the reason for this anecdote is, I believe this would never happen today. Obviously, increased security is one reason. But also, with the rise of the smartphone and mass tourism, that garden has been packed with phone yielding crowds ever since. Today, I think the imam would rather sit in his office, either for his peace of mind or maybe to doomscroll on his social media feed, only popping out from prayer to prayer. And that thought keeps nagging me ever so slightly.