‘We now live in a culture so saturated with media imagery and media models of how people live, that our idea of how one lives one’s life of who one is made up of that kind of media myth and in a sense it negates the idea of portraiture, the idea of that you can dress up and go to a studio and somehow reveal your strength of character or your inherent humanity or whatever… you don’t have any inherent humanity in the post modernist analysis of things. We are all these composites of myths and narratives written by other people…’
Excerpts from the Genius of Photograhy (BBC)
Colin Westerbeck in Postmodernism in Photography
The portraits where borne out of me being bored to my wits. Frustrated on not being able to string a thought or a narrative to the photographs that I was taking. I turned to taking portraits when we arrived in Bursa, the green bastion of Turkey. Coincidentally it was here that we met Mahir a local from Istanbul, he served as my translator while doing this series. Fortunately the locals of Bursa were warmer and much more welcoming. Thus began my journey to the unexpected.
On this day alone, I was able to capture almost 60 portraits and then factoring in the people that didn’t respond positively and you can imagine how much connection I made in this space of time. I was blessed that they found me interesting enough for them to let me take they’re portrait.
The portraits where all taken with a telephoto lens, in the same approximate distance. I wanted the portraits to stand on they’re own, isolated, making them much more distilled so the resulting images became more like objects when strung together. The arrangements of the images were not planned to put the focus not on the sequencing, and other technicalities, but on the portraits themselves creating a document on typology…
Camera: Nikon F4
Film: Kodak TMAX 400
Developer: Kodak D-76
Location: Bursa, Turkey
‘The only people who see the whole picture, are the ones who steps out of the frame’
