Issue #17

The "Dozen" dossier began with that kind of an optimistic sentiment. As Orta Format, we noticed we haven't get to know enough young artists in Turkey. It is also an indicator that we, who see the magazine as a crucial part of our exploration, remain within the existing networks. On the other hand, the people we have met, encountered and those who did works that excited us during the time we started our exploration in photography, became known, appreciated and they came to display their works more easily.

"Attributum" is İbrahim Karakütük's photography project which departs from this context and which he describes as "I am getting close to myself." This is a rather personal photography series, it recounts something but at the same time preserves its ambiguity. This must be the good side of using photography as a language, so the mystery hidden inside the images, the decision whether to recount or not become solely the photographer's choice.

Onur Özen's photography series "09-12" is composed of images that recount a specific period of his life. The series can be argued to start spontaneously in 2009 in Çanakkale. In fact, the series take on its name by its own. Özen takes photos of people he is with, the places he has been to and he says after a while, he realizes there are photographs from the lives of the same people. So, this is the beginning of his photographic journal.

Neslihan Koyuncu is an artist who works on objects that are around us in our daily lives and we take for granted and who recounts people using these objects.

Apart from his cinema studies in Marmara University, always interested in photography from his childhood, Celil Kırnapçı started working as a reporter in various presses in his 20s. His work "You're So Beautiful Even in the Dark" he started in the summer of 2014 in ISSP has a feel so appealing and becoming: it is calm, but at the same time has a wild side. It is in between these two sentiments, well-balanced. Also, it is true to its name...

Kodak released the camera it produced in 1888 with the motto "You push the button we do the rest" and it was true, everything that was needed to take a photograph was inside that box (apart from the button one has to push): photosensitive surface, a completely dark setting and even an optical lens to ensure focus.

Fikret Can Kuşadalı's work “Self Consumption” questions the supermarkets and buying, ultimately capitalism and the habits of the consumption society. In his photography series, we see a gradual distortion of an individual in a supermarket. But what is distorted here? The woman in the photograph or the products inside the supermarket?

"Transition" is Emin Yüksel's project which he worked on when he was on a long distance journey between two cities, and which consists of roads, landscapes and found objects.

“Aesthetics of the constituted is more real than that of the existing." This is the last phrase in Beril Or's text about her work "Mid." The reason we begin with this phrase is because we believe it to be an extract of Or's artistic practice.

“6.4311” is Orhan Kolukısa's work which he constructs on the limits of our visual field. The photographs here contain a strong aesthetic sense as well as an extreme obscurity. They can make their viewers think they are from some part of a glacier, and at the same time dissuade them from thinking so. They don't give a clue about time, space or scale. In fact, maybe nothing of the like exists in the world and it is only a 3D modeling. And why not?

"Constructed Illusion" is Cihad Caner's project in which he emphasizes the homogenization by state through a reinterpretation of archival materials. In his project, Caner uses objects that were precious for some people once upon a time, but came to be detached from their owners after being archived, lost and became a found material in other people's hands. The anonymity of the objects ensure the objective view he wants to attain, on the other hand the information that similar images can exist in other archives, gives the work a more salient character.

Naz Ünal'ın projesi ismini Latince anonim bir deyişten alıyor, "mundus vult decipi ergo decipiatur" (world wants to be deviced, so let it deceived), yani "dünya aldatılmak ister, öyleyse aldatılmalıdır." Çalışmanın her bir parçası iki fotoğrafın bir araya gelmesinden oluşan yeni bir görüntü. Hepsinin merkezinde insan ile karşı karşıyayız.

Cansu Korkmaz has taken interest in the concept "infra-ordinary" Georges Perec created by asking questions in one his essays: "How will we explain what's happening every day, what is regenerated every day, the banal, the daily, the obvious, the collective, ordinary, the in-common, the humming behind the background, how will we question and describe it?" She also includes the description "You have an odd energy" a woman gave one day by chance, and she begins her work which gives that phrase its due in early 2013.