Well-Swept Yard

Begüm Yamanlar   Begüm Yamanlar, untitled (1/3), from Zone Series  Begüm Yamanlar, untitled (2/3), from Zone Series Begüm Yamanlar, untitled (3/3), from Zone Series Begüm Yamanlar, an Istanbul photographer and video artist explores the mystery and uncertainty of space, urban space, rural space and objects in indeterminate space.  Her Zone Series consists of landscapes that simultaneously invite and repel, give the viewer easy entrance tempered by doubt or dread.  Each image includes a path running from the viewer's location into a forest until the path curves out of view or disappears in an unexplained fog. Would I step into the scene? In a dream perhaps; otherwise I move on to the next image. But I always return and contemplate, wondering if I haven't detected a whisper from the image. The artist clearly has a catalog of tree trunks, limbs, foliage and fleeting spots of light. She uses these judiciously in a way that pulls the individual ima

" for birds sake ," an online exhibition by Cemre Yesil and Maria Sturm, begins with a statement offering a fascinating bit of history and contemporary politics: Since the time of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul has been a very important city for aviculture. The city’s geographical location for bird migration has led to the establishment of a huge culture devoted to birds and their care. The photographers’ statement goes on to describe the purpose of the photographs: This work is about the birdmen of Istanbul and focuses on the shrouded relationship between the bird and the birdman, one full of contradictions of love, possession and pleasure. The birds compete to determine which has the most beautiful song of the day. The authors of the show put it this way:  an illegal tradition  an addiction a meditation Something they need in order to feel good. The first photograph shows two hands pulling apart curtains that hang over a birdcage. We can see past the do

Among recent works exhibited by Ege Kanar is a remarkable series of portraits on glass called Mortals . Kanar is a photographer steeped in theory and philosophy. His work explores being, existence and the unfathomable relationship that photography has to being. He writes How can photography, a tool that is presumably incapable of depicting what is beyond the visible, that which lies not on the surface but beneath it, possibly be used to contribute to the formation of a new transcendent representative state, a hypothetical real, which exists beyond dualities such as visible or invisible? Mortals immediately reminds one of nineteenth century portraiture, that time when Europe and America celebrated the surface and rarely questioned what the surface really meant. I find that Kanar's Mortals journey back, taking with them the questions that should have been asked but were not. Because the surface ideas of photography's beginnings remain with us, Kanar's work is releva

I graduated from Hopkins with a Ph.D. in Byzantine art and architecture and then turned my research efforts to the history of photography. On the face of it, that is a radical career jump. But Byzantium, in particular the Byzantine icon and the justifications for the icon intrigued me. The proper (working) icon had to bear a resemblance to the saint represented and had to be made "in the right way." Then there was a special kind of icon that was not made by human hands (acheiropoieta), images that miraculously appeared (the earliest example may have been the Veil of Veronica, an imprint of the face of Jesus left when Veronica used her veil to blot away the sweat on the face during the march to Golgatha). The icon, a representation rather than an idol, seemed to enjoy a special identity with the person represented.  I wondered if any post-Byzantine European civilization shared a belief in this very powerful kind of image and one day it hit me that the ge

Photographs reveal more than the subject. A photograph always speaks of the intention of the maker or the intention of the subject cooperating with the maker. Alexander Gardner’s Civil War “ What Do I Want, John Henry? ” speaks volumes on the social attitudes within the Army of Liberation . The decision of Roy Stryker to widely release only one image of the Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother series tells us about a sway from reportage to poignancy. The several views of Che talk to us about the cooperation of the photographer in establishing the fame of the hunters (everybody gets his chance). So, I do not want so much to see the Osama bin Laden death photographs as I would like to see them and think about what they mean, to see if I recognize an emotion or an illusion. Or maybe myself. But I am also content to wait for the release. After all, that will not be long. I can see them in the grocery store checkout next week.