Saturday, June 23, 2007

Art can illuminate what history excludes and marginalizes. Writing stories is one way of bringing the marginal to the center and giving voice to the voiceless. To capture in portraits the different shades and stories of a country is another way to cherish the individual against a culture of collectivism

Elif ŞAFAK

  As the month of June slips away, the whole country is fixed on daily politics and the upcoming elections. Notwithstanding artists and writers in Turkey restlessly struggle for new venues of expression and more sophisticated understandings of reality eschewed by politics and politicians. One of these artists is the photographer Attila Durak and his exhibition on cultural diversity and harmony in Turkey is being displayed from this week on in the historical quarter of the city. The portraits of people, ‘ordinary people from all over Turkey are being put on view in the dazzlingly spiritual atmosphere of the Basilica Cistern, the old underground water storage area.

   Durak s portraits celebrate not only diversity and harmony, but also value ‘those small things in life and vignettes of ‘ordinary women and men. His approach becomes all the more important given the fact that history as we learn in school in Turkey is oftentimes an abstract, tedious meta-narrative devoid of individuals and their stories. We know the historic events, but not the ordeals of ordinary men and women who had lived through them.

  For a long time it was the art of miniature that composed the main visual art in this country. In the miniature tradition, however, costumes are depicted with great care, so are the hair, the hats, the quilted turbans, the crowns, the shoes, the fountains, the gardens…. But not the faces. The faces are drawn with utter indifference. People are distinguished by their costumes, not by their expressions. In the miniaturist s art there is, if not a social equality, a facial equality, one could even say a facial uniformity. Human faces appear as though shaped at the same potter s wheel, cast in the same mould, as though they were reflections from the same mirror, in this collectivist culture that shuns individualism.

The eye of the sultan

  Photography came to the Ottoman Empire in 19th century. And the sultan who was keenly interested in this new art was no other than Sultan Abdülhamid. There were periods when he seldom left the palace. He trusted neither the public nor his luminaries. Thus he chose to stay inside, safe and sound, but sent his eyes to the outside world. One of his eyes to the east, another to the west, his fifth eye to the north, his hundredth eye to the south… Sultan Abdülhamid would send his loyal photographers to all four corners of his realm, especially around Istanbul, to all quarters near and far, the remote and the hidden, of that city of cities. Faithful to their assignment, these stealthy photographers took hundreds and thousands of photographs so that the Sultan could see what the county he ruled looked like.

    The eye of the camera became the eye of the sultan.

   And the Sultan employed this eye not just to see but to show as well, sending those photographs to the European elite.

  The Europeans, in turn, would look and behold life in Ottoman cities through the photographs –as well, of course, through the accounts of travelers and the testimonies of their spies…

    Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Abdülhamid s photographers, scattered in all four directions, came back with the images of palaces and bathhouses, buildings and monuments, city squares and fountains. What mattered were the buildings, not the people. Even in those rare instances when the citizens were photographed, people were almost always shown in studio settings. In Abdülhamid s photo archives, Istanbul was depicted without the people of Istanbul….

   How did they live, what did they eat and drink, what made them cry and laugh, those “ordinary” individuals who lived in the past centuries? Who knows how diverse, how unlike each other, and in their unlikeness, how so very much the same they were? The Sultan s camera eye did not capture these. It failed to record the sounds of the street, the encrustation of everyday life, those seemingly immaterial details that actually give a culture its vitality and distinctiveness…

  Art can illuminate what history excludes and marginalizes. Writing stories is one way of bringing the marginal to the center and giving voice to the voiceless. To capture in portraits the different shades and stories of a country is another way to cherish the individual against a culture of collectivism. Turkey s artists continue to capture its different identities, its struggles, sorrows and joys, as well as the spirit of harmony, cooperation and synthesis that doesn t wither away despite the roughness of politics.