“As photographers, by accompanying the spirit of the times, the state of the world, and the world’s course with the images we create, could we be witnessing, objecting to, or rebelling against a city, the city’s emotions, its people, places, and various states by reflecting our own perspectives, questions, and feelings?”

standing close to the urban defiance
with one or many frames.

touching the faces,
streets,
(inner) voices and feelings,
the things we’ve kept silent,
emptiness, ruins,
our loneliness, and the rebellions accumulated in our hearts

as Feride Çiçekoğlu says,
For a new “threshold of rebellion”
and as Charles Baudelaire says,
Not to (by)pass the hells that populate this world

Can we look at ourselves,
life, the changing world, and “vibrant and permeable” images
 with our dreams and stories, we’ve never known,
from the times when images will be part of the “defiant” notes of the city?

In photography and with photography, “to create an atmosphere of ‘nowhere’—a place that is no longer connected through memory”.

Because the photograph can only become universal as it becomes more personal/subjective; it cannot become personal as it becomes more universal.

The creators of optical images are mental images.

Mental images do not carry the static nature of optical images, and when captured, they can be a reflection of a different reality.

As Susan Sontag expressed in ‘On Photography,’ “when the spirit that conquers the mechanical adds a new interpretation to the likeness in life”, images that are concerned with ‘what I perceive from reality’ rather than ‘what actually happened’ can transcend what the image shows (and the frame) and, with the context constructed by the photographer, become the ‘now,’ replacing the time within the photograph.

The photographer must take refuge in new/different ways of seeing, speaking, thinking, in the uncanny, in unanswered questions, in unease, in doubt, and in discomfort; the photographer should escape into restlessness.

The photographer should demand a disconnect, a break from the universe, should get away from exterior voices, exterior talks to turn inwards, to the inwardly, to turn to what she/he has not noticed so far, for novel questions…

Because with every photograph, the possibility that the viewer might [each time they look] notice or discover an unknown emotion is magical.”

Laleper Aytek