Annette Merrild
Bir kente ilk kez gittiğimizde, yerel kültürü yakından tanımak için müzelere gittiğimizi, ancak müzelerin bize genellikle uzak ve yakın tarihin seçilmiş olay, yer, kişi, sanat üretimlerinden derlenmiş bir kesit sunduğunu, bu derlemenin de çoğu zaman yabancı kenti bütünüyle tanımak için yeterli genişlikte bir yelpaze olmadığına değiniyor Murat Germen ve Orhan Cem Çetin: “Bir kenti yakından tanımanın en kestirme yollarından biri, turistik ziyaretlerde çoğunlukla mümkün olmasa da, çeşitli gelir gruplarından insanların evlerini görebilme şansını edinebilmek. Evler, özellikle de içlerindeki odalar, bize, etnografik bir birikimi en samimi halinde sundukları için kurumsal müzelere göre daha hakiki bir bilgi sunan kişisel müzeler olarak algılanabilirler.”
Murat Germen ve Orhan Cem Çetin, insanlar hakkında ayrıntılı bilgi sahibi olmak için, portrelerinden öte kendileri hakkında çok daha fazla veri içeren yaşam mekânlarına, yani odalara odaklanmanın, kayda değer bir fotografik ifade alanı ortaya çıkmasına yol açtığını belirtiyor: “Hakikatten söz açmışken, misafir geldiğinde ev sahiplerince “ideal” ve en derli toplu haline getirilen odalar, bu hallerinde bile sahipleri hakkındaki ipuçlarını sakla(ya)mıyorlar. Gerilimli iç hallerini en yakın arkadaşları önünde bile öteleyebiliyor insanlar; ama bazen, ya bir mimik ya da sarkastik bir şaka ile belki de buluşmadan biraz önce yaşanmış küçük bir gerginlik ifşa ediliyor ufaktan. Ne kadar toplarsanız toplayın, ne kadar dekore ederseniz edin odalardaki bazı ayrıntılar da bu mimik veya şakalar gibidir; insanı, iç dünyasını, gündemini, hatırlamak istediklerini, tercihlerini, yaşama biçimlerini, artıklarını, atamadıklarını ifşa ederler.”
Abelardo Morell
Odalar manzaraları ile de belli bir kimlik, özellik kazanırlar
Çevre / bağlam ile olan ilişki
Abelardo Morell travels the world and converts full-size rooms (some spare, some ornately rococo) into immense camera obscura devices. He brings the outside in through a tiny pin-hole, and by the alchemy of optics, the outside is projected quite naturally upside down superimposing and hugging the surfaces of everything in the room. Then, he photographs the resulting “installation” with his 8 x 10 view camera and enlarges the prints to mural size.
The effect is dizzying and delightful. And the photographs get better and better as you study them and soak in the exquisite overlapping details.
Morell who teaches photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Princeton University, became famous for his black-and white camera obscura images (as well as other black-and-white subject matter). However, he just recently started to explore using color film, and in many ways, the results are even more realistically rich and unnervingly set free from the laws of gravity.
Writing about a one-man show that included Morell’s new work in color, at Benrubi in NYC, the New Yorker quipped: “In the most spectacular of the latter series, a wall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stripped of everything but a de Chirico and some picture hooks, glows with the projected image of the museum’s façade, all the more marvelous for being flipped on its head.”
In a HYPERLINK “http://www.lensculture.com/morell.html#”great audio interview for Lens Culture, Morell talks about: his first camera obscura discoveries; his own delight and surprise at working with color; why he shifted from using a 35mm camera for ‘decisive moment’ photography to the slowed-down intentionality of working with an 8 x 10 view camera; and why he will never again stay in the room during the required 8-hour exposures – it was an hallucinatory nightmare!
Andrea Land 1997 Amerika
çocuklar / odaları
kurgusal ve otobiyografik yaratılar
kızların çevrelerine karşın duruşları
Andrew Moore – Cuba
Genelde Küba’dan hep sokak ve insan fotografları görürüz. Odalar şimdiye kadar bize ulaşmayan bir kültürel boyutu aktarıyorlar…
Christine Lebeck - Nocturnes
The series Nocturnes comes from the deep desire to document my life. I am interested in the idea of preserving as well as creating memories for myself. My pinhole camera is used as an apparatus of observation. I use it to record the passing of time for the duration of a single night. I open the shutter as I enter my bed at night and close the shutter when I wake the following morning compressing the intimate experience of an entire night’s sleep into one image. The result is the accumulation of the past, the present, and the passing of time preserved on a single sheet of film. I seek to capture more than just a single moment in my life but a collection of moments, layered on top of each other. For me, whether I was alone or with someone else, in my own personal space or in a hotel room, the spaces that I inhabit while deep in slumber become very intimate. These images represent all the information collected in the span of time while I was in another consciousness, creating a visual memory for myself of an event that I have no personal recollection of.
Ian van Coller
Interior Relations is a series focused specifically on the lives of domestic workers—nannies and maids—who seemingly embody the daily reproduction of apartheid-era relations in South Africa today. This portrait series explores the deep fault lines between the country’s public democratic ideals and the ongoing racial and economic inequality more than a decade after apartheid’s end. The institution of domestic service, so engrained in South African culture, is a complex arena of interaction that brings individuals together who would otherwise stand on opposite sides of an enormous gulf in ethnicity, culture, education and poverty into an intensely intimate, personal and sometimes awkward interdependence. These “relationships” hold unique potential for transformation in a society that was previously so conflicted, in part because black and white South Africans have led such separate lives.
In Sook Kim
The hotel itself serves as a metaphor for being a home away from home, a symbol of how we are constantly seeking to escape rather than being happy with others and ourselves at home.
Finally, conceptually, I constructed this piece by making it reflective of true stories that I found in the newspaper. Each of the 66 rooms is based on 66 different stories about things that occurred in a hotel room. Thus, together they chronicle life and our modern human condition.
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.” Octavio Paz
Julie Blackmon
Domestic Vacations: The Dutch proverb “a Jan Steen household” originated in the 17th century and is used today to refer to a home in disarray, full of rowdy children and boisterous family gatherings. The paintings of Steen, along with those of other Dutch and Flemish genre painters, helped inspire this body of work. I am the oldest of nine children and now the mother of three. As Steen’s personal narratives of family life depicted nearly 400 yrs. ago, the conflation of art and life is an area I have explored in photographing the everyday life of my family and the lives of my sisters and their families at home. These images are both fictional and auto-biographical, and reflect not only our lives today and as children growing up in a large family, but also move beyond the documentary to explore the fantastic elements of our everyday lives, both imagined and real.
Sasha Rudensky
The series Remains explores the political and social transformation of the former Soviet Union in the aftermath of the collapse of communism. Rather than concentrating on the global changes in the region, my photographs focus on the more intimate details of daily life; the interiors and exteriors that form an essence of a culture. The sparsely decorated kitchens and living rooms, abandoned playgrounds and store windows, the peeling facades all exhibit a stamp of sameness that Soviet ideology laid upon the region eighty years ago. The photographs transcend the specificity of locations where they were shot. Instead, my work concentrates on the common experience that at one point united the Soviet republics into a nation, and now unites them in the common experience of disintegration.
