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FABRÄ°KA
FABRİKA
Fabrika Fanzine aims to become a platform for emerging Turkish photographers being able to present their work to a wider audience and to introduce them other photographers from all around the world.
Cover photo: William Eggleston Created by Melike Koçak with thanks to Koray Işıldak
Bieke Depoorter Melih Dönmezer Melike Koçak İrem Güngez Jack Smith Sayna Soleimanpour Wolfgang Tillmans
lnterview: Bieke Depoorter ( from Joop Swart Masterclass video)
Everything I do, I really follow my feelings. So I guess with photography, I had a feeling, I had to do it, so I just started to do it. With photography I think I look more concentrated in the world and I think that’s why I do it or maybe that’s why I started it, I don’t know and I think I also take pictures because I want to be amazed by things and I think photography really helps me to keep being amazed by several things. What is really important for me is that if l’m doing a project, that l’m there really as a person, like if I approach people it’s very much as a person not really as a photographer. So I think photography and myself, it really goes together. Its manner to take the moment I have with people. I’ve graduated with my work in Russia. Actually, I travelled through Russia with the trans Siberian train and I asked random people on the street if I could spend the night in their house. I took pictures about the intimacy and the families and about my relationship with people cause I only spent one night with these people. I could see that sometimes I had a very special, intimate moments with these people. in the beginning I thought maybe it’s because I don’t speak the language and then I wanted to go somewhere where I could speak the language and then I went to the States and I am still doing this project actually now, it’s a work in progress. I’ve been there five times now and I’ve kind of done the same approach to people in the street and entered
their house and take pictures .. It’s not about people. I don’t want to say people in The States live like this or in Russia they live like this. It’s really much about more about intimacy, intensity. lntense moments. For ‘Trust’, I went to Cairo. I didn’t really took pictures on Tahrir Square. I went to peoples homes to take pictures there and actually first I was invited on another project to go to Cairo and in there -for this project- I thought maybe I can take pictures in the streets, do something else. But then I was there, I realized that it was really important to do this, to try to enter into peoples’ houses and also in Cairo (I think because of the culture) they really wanted to be private (and also because of the revolution you could feel the tensi on in the street.) When I was in Cairo as well, they show it on the State TV that you could not trust people, foreigners - like me-. So I thought for this project, Trust, it could be very interesting to try to enter and to see how it work because sometimes I like it to be difficult. I was only there for 5-6 weeks so don’t want to say that I give a portrait of the Egyptian people, but of course these pictu-
res are taken at a certain time. l’m preparing an exhibition now, and I would like to put like the Cairo pictures next to the States and next to the Russian work so it’s not important anymore, which is the country. So, it’s really much this kind of intensity with this people. I really like to take pictures when people just go to sleep because then, they are in their own world, they are preparing to sleep really much in their own world and I like to capture these small things. For me, it’s very difficult to describe what my work is about. Because I think I try to capture while I think or what I feel in these moment. Like I’ve said l’m there as a person and it’s a conversation with these people. Maybe my pictures are more like conversations with these people or maybe I try to capture how they see the world as well. Or in between moments, moments in between. When l’m in Belgium, I really feel a sort of unrest. I don’t know, maybe that’s why I started to shoot, I wanted to go away. I don’t if it’s really photography who can slow down this unrest or maybe it’s the contact with these people. Or maybe it’s both of them together. I think it’s both of them together.
-Bieke Depoorter@ 2012 Joop Swart Masterclass lnterview
MELİH DÖNMEZER
“I was born in 1991, October. l’ve graduated from Anadolu University, with a Management degree. Right now, I live in Eskişehir. l started to develop an interest toward photography 5 years ago. Around 2009, l’ve realized that I had way less childhood photos than my peers. I didn’t know what was my face looks like as a kid because I don’t have any photos of myself taken between the ages of 6 to 15. Plus, I noticed that I don’t take any photos when I go on holidays and we don’t even have many family photos either. So, my photography archive was very limited and that became a real problem for me. Around that same time, I also gained an interest in movies and 19th century photography. All those things came together and created the foundation of my practice. At first, I took photos of every single thing I saw . A huge archive started to come into being and I kept observing and analyzing it over and over again. It was really huge. There was a special file for hundereds of pictures of literally the same building. It was some sort of a method I was using for all the files in my archive in order for me to achieve ‘‘the perfect image’’.
However, after a while, the idea of taking perfect pictures started to lost it’s effect on me. I had many “perfect” images of clouds or many ‘‘perfect’’ pictures of people but they were visuals that I can find whenever/wherever I want. Back then, if someone would show my photos to me anonymously, I probably wouldn’t recognize them, they were that much basic. When I realized this situtation, I started to try new things in photography. This led me to create less and less photos and to start thinking about post-process. As time progressed, I discovered new techniques to expand the limits of my photography. Photos that are easy to understand in their unedited versions gave birth to unexpected results when they got intervened in darkroom. This obscurity made the whole production process really exciting for me. “
MELİKE KOÇAK
I anı chasing the concepts that confuses my mind a lot with my photo machine: Silence, violence,eternity etc.
İREM GÜNGEZ
‘‘I was born in Istanbul, I grew up there also. My interest in painting led me to study fine arts in high school. Around that same time, I developed a passion toward cinema. As I got more interested in it, I saw the connection between cinema and photography and decided that photography has a more distinct presence as a medium and so that it’s more suitable to me.
While I kept shooting short movies, I kept nurturing my interest toward photography too. Somehow I ended up being an apprentice to a analogue camera repairman. Thanks to this, I got closer to the medium in the process of learning the essence and the mechanics of photography. While all this was happening, I graduated from high school and went to college to study Art History. Now, I continue my studies in Italy. I keep looking for inspiring details in any art form which may nourish my photography. I try to create new spaces and symbols for my new projects. I don’t need a studio to do all of that because I believe that natural light creates incredible scenes for us to capture. What I need is to catch the light in the right time and right place. This belief of mine led me to search for beauty. I want to create images which will give a nice feeling to the viewer.
To accomplish this, I use small, natural and open-ended details made out of colour in my photography. I believe that photography is the best way to make people feel the beautiful moments I experience in my life and to make them recognize the beauty of details in life. Also, I think it’s the most exciting form of communication. I hope everybody can find a suitable form of communication for themselves in which they won’t have to use words to understand each other.”
Jack Smith -Jack Smith: underground film director and master of photography As the sensational name of 1950’s and 60’s, Jack Smith was so poor that he had to use expired films (and not to waste even one frame) for his productions. His only fully completed movie ‘Flaming Creatures’ got banned in New York by the police. Still remembered as a notorious & provocative figure, Jack Smith demonstrated that there is an alternative cinema culture to what was already on the scene in his days. While everybody was so into their heads with existentialism and abstractionism, he gave birth to kitsch, nudist, orientalist pieces. Many articles have written on Flaming Creatures but none of them have managed to reflect it’s position in art history as well as Jack Smith’s own words: “’I started making a comedy about everything that I thought was funny. And it was funny. The first audiences were laughing from the beginning all the all the way through. But then that writing started and it became a sex thing. “’
Smith got famous worldwide without giving up on his underground identity. On this issue of Fabrika Zine, you’ll find his not-that-much-popular photography.
SAYNA SOLEIMANPOUR
‘‘With photography, I reflect the confliction between my dreams and the outer world. I get my inspiration from baroque & symbolism era.”
WOLFGANG TILLMANS
Tillmans isn’t one of those photographers who sees their medium as a tool to contribute to the ‘‘collective memory of our world’’. In fact, I guess it would do no harm to say that he uses photography as a magnifying glass which he uses to look for answers to his personal curiosities. He don’t care about ‘‘telling something’’, or ‘‘representing something’’. He is just searching. As Lale Muldur (a Turkish poet) says, he is ‘‘a decoder of this world’s codes.’’
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2015, Istanbul