editorial

Contemporary Photography

Contemporary Photography

Photography began as an industrial discovery. It was the evolution of tools used to capture and record the light that illuminates everything we see. Because of photography’s ability to document it was praised by some, and feared by others, as the most realistic medium. Its association with reality has placed photography ubiquitously into scientific, journalistic, and vernacular fields as well as art and design. Photography can record the way something or someone appeared at a specific moment in time, but its truthful connotation is highly debated. The digitalization of the medium has both increased its spread in our lives as well as the doubts of its assumed realism. This issue of Euro Art attempts to scratch the surface of this wide-ranging subject, and examine more deeply a few of the many important conversations surrounding photography. We are excited to have the opportunity to act as guest editors for this issue dedicated to a medium that, as artists, we both use. As an introduction we would like to briefly outline each of our unique influences and approaches to photography. Through the articles and interviews in this issue, we hope to shed further light on the complex and fascinating subject of contemporary photography.

 

Michael Borowski:

My artistic practice explores the relationship between people and the places we build and inhabit. I began by photographing urban landscapes. An early series of photographs of the banal architecture of gas stations, hotels and track housing questioned the assumed familiarity with our surroundings. The following series of empty high school sports fields examined how the landscape can become a metaphor for adolescent isolation and longing. I was strongly influenced by “new topographic” photographers such as Stephen Shore. Their images elevated the landscape of ordinary urban spaces to be as important as untamed wilderness. I chose common spaces as my subject, but what interested me most was how these places are activated by the viewer’s memory or imagination.

Robert Smithson wrote that while his earthwork sculptures existed on site, the two-dimensional representations he made were like metaphors or analogies of the work. These are located in the non-site space of the gallery. After receiving my Bachelors of Fine Arts I began applying this to my own work. My photographs become the “non-site” for a place that exists in the mind of the viewer. I wanted to see if these imaginary places could be evoked through something other than landscape images. Shomei Tamatsu’s photograph “Melted Bottle” is a composed still life of an organic curving form. Once accompanied by the text that this bottle was distorted by the heat of the atomic blast at Hiroshima the viewer becomes aware of the disturbing history of the place. I started making photographs by scanning found and hand-made objects. This work is about my experiences leaving my home in New Mexico and moving to Shanghai. The images tell stories about both of these places; combining feelings of familiarity and foreignness; and were the first steps towards my question of “what is home?”

My most recent work examines the definition of home, and how experiences of moving complicate that concept. Home is often thought of as a place of stability, where we have grown up or where we live now. But the feeling of home is not always so straightforward, and the process we all go through to build our homes is complex and difficult. Continuing to explore the relationship between physical and photographed spaces I have incorporated sculpture, installation and video in my work, as well as using the photograph as an object. Artists such as Alfredo Jaar use installation to show the limits of photography, particularly in representing the experience of marginalized people. Through my current work I hope to illustrate the difference between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we desire; between the place we live and the feeling of home that we build within ourselves.

 

Gözde Türkkan:

Photography has been the medium through which I explore myself and dig out my intentions and interference degree to what I choose to capture. As a photographer, getting fully conscious that I am and will be making choices whether it be the time, the place, the subject to photograph, and above all the affective approach in which those will be captured was crucial in determining my stance on photography. There is no getting away by saying that there were no conscious choices because any photograph is at least the result of its photographer’s decision to capture a given moment; the photograph of that moment which would have never been made otherwise. I believe the act of taking and displaying photographs is, in most cases, similar to laying out the dirty laundry. In Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s words: “Well, it’s a tricky occupation. After all, what you’re doing is betraying people by releasing the shutter. You really are. It’s not all like this, but this certainly one side of the photographer’s job.” This, maybe, is one of the results of photography’s fascinating, elusive and also illusive ability of documentation.

As I recalled the memorable ‘moments’ of my early photographic fascination, I immediately had Borthwick’s uncanny familiarity, Araki’s lucky holes and blue-eyed Nan in mind.
I was deeply moved at first sight by the feelings and emotions of ‘homeness’, belonging, ordinariness contradictorily along with singularity, longing and homelessness, inertly and endlessly existing in the four photographs of Mark Borthwick’s Statements (Six). Such intensive emotions coexisting in such simplistic approach is still striking...

As for Nobuyoshi Araki, his book “Tokyo Lucky Hole” was also a gravitational force at first sight: The book consist of over 850 photographs taken between 1983 and 1985 in Tokyo’s red light district Shinjuku. But Araki does not only document the everyday life in this pornographic cityscape, he actually documents his life as he lives it in Shinjuku, because the viewer is constantly reminded of his presence in the scene and forced to interpret the photographs through his experience. So to me, many of Araki’s photographs tell more about him than what we actually see in it. This is the power of Araki’s “I Photography”.

And last, Nan Goldin who is well-known for her straight-forward photographic attitude towards her marginal entourage stroke me once again with, among others, her self-portrait taken one month after she got beaten up by her boyfriend. Here, I could almost say that the photographer lays out her own dirty laundry. Almost, because later on Goldin seems to have moved away from this “confession of culpability” and chose to emancipate herself from the documentation power of her own photographs.

Those photographic “moments” left significant impressions through my photography’s maturation. Even though Mark Borthwick’s Statements (Six) direct impact can easily be discerned in my series “Lux et Veritas” (2006), more recent works such as “Şükran / Gratitude” (2004-2008) and “ I was looking to see if you were looking at me to see me looking back at you” (2008) reflects a more complex blending of these impressions with my own tendencies and resolutions.

But all in all, I believe in laying out some of my own dirty laundry, as I feel the impulse to be subject to the same exposure as my photographs’ subjects.

 

 

Michael Borowski (b. 1981) is an American artist and MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. He received his BFA from the University of New Mexico in 2003, with an emphasis in photography. His work has been exhibited in New Mexico and Michigan. http://www.michaelborowski.com

Gözde Türkkan (b. 1984) is an İstanbul-based photographer mostly interested in subjective documentary and self documentation. She taught photography courses at İstanbul Bilgi University’s Photography and Video Department, from where she holds a BA degree. http://www.mimiko.net