Frederic Lezmi, on iPhone photographs and book making.
May 30th marks the first anniversary of the Gezi Park protests, that enflamed Istanbul and the rest of Turkey last spring. This is for us the occasion to talk about a great iPhone photo-book that came out of it four months after the protest, put together by Frederic Lezmi. In an unstapled newspaper form, he brought his small polaroids together with old postcards that he enlarged up to a A1 size. He collected his iPhone snaps from the time of the lively events and printed them in conversation with old postcards from Taksim Square, thus infusing the project with an irrevocable historical anchor. The one side of each folded spread of Lezmi’s poster-book is a blown up and rasterized reproduction of Taksim Square in the 1930’s to 60’s, while the other side features a collection of portraits of protesters, barricades and close-ups of road signs taken during the protests in Gezi Park, the public garden and heart of Istanbul main hub: Taksim Square.
Laurence Cornet: How did you come up with this idea of mixing in a poster-book form, your iPhone snaps from Gezi with old postcards?
Frederic Lezmi: I went out a lot to shoot news for my German photo agency Laif, but I took a lot of iPhone pictures in the same time. I had a hard time figuring how to make something about Gezi outside a news context, as someone living in Turkey, and as a photographer situated at the edge of the art and book worlds. It took me a couple of months to think about the right idea because I had seen examples of amazing pictures from Gezi turned into boring exhibitions. We were only in September, and Gezi was already “museumized”, in a way. It had lost all the energy of the protests. I didn’t want to write a text because it would have always been my evaluation of the events, and I wanted to do justice to the Turkish perspective. This is why I chose to work with a newspaper format – the posters give respect to the tradition of protest, with the quickly bound political prints that you haven’t time to staple. It is important to find the format that is appropriate for the event and the images, especially since most Turkish artists have decided not to exploit Gezi for the art world. This is good. but this is also a sort of self-censorship. I think it always depends on the form you choose – this is why the distribution is important too.
L.C: We will get back to this point later, but for now let’s go back to this choice of mixing the most recent form of mass distribution photographs – iPhone photos – with one of the oldest – the postcard you chose are somehow evocative of the Ottoman Empire photographs that we find printed on touristic postcards all around Istanbul. Is it somehow a blink to the mall Erdogan was trying to built as a replica of an old Ottoman architecture?
F.L: The photographs I chose were taken after the Ottoman Empire collapsed- the first black and white image already has the Ataturk sculpture on it, so it was taken after the foundation of the Republic in the 30’s. The other black and white images shows the park right after its inauguration in the mid 40’s. The color postcards are from the 1960’s-70’s -, but I like the way they idealize the old times in the same way the mall that Erdogan was planning to built would have been a rebuild of an artificial and idealized Ottoman architecture conceived by an Armenian Architect in 1806 in a “near” Ottoman style, that drew its influences from Indian over Russian to Moroccan style elements.
L.C: Is iPhone snap the new post card then?
F.L: I chose the postcards first because they look good, and I love the way they look when they are blown up and the print-raster becomes visible. But they also help put my pictures into the historical context. Taksim is the most important square in Istanbul. These postcards were giving hints about the historical importance of the place. Gezi It’s not any park but the park on Taksim square. It’s a central meeting point that is so important for the Republic. The postcards serves as a reminder that Taksim represents the identity of the country. The postcards have a second level also, since their use came from a time when people didn’t have photo cameras. They bought postcards to send home as a proof they had been here. That’s something inherent to photography, and especially amateur photography : it’s a proof of the experience, and this is exactly what happens now with iPhone photography. Postcards are the early medium for the mass distribution of photography. Their equivalent today are iPhone photographs. All these pictures are the death of the postcards! People take their own now: the german Post Office has even started an application called fun card to instantly send postcards from your iPhone. You take a picture from your holiday and, instead of buying and sending a postcard, you upload your image to a website, add an mailing address and a message, and the card is printed and sent to the person you wanted to send it too. It’s a mix between a postcard and an iPhone photo.
L.C: The missing aspects of iPhone snaps that everybody seems to be fighting against is the physicality. The German Post office’s service is a good examples, as well as your book, with the posters that you are invited to collect and hang. You are currently working on a totally different project with Schaden called “The Photobook Museum”. This is not the subject here, but the website is introduced by a relevant quote from Quentin Bajac, curator of photography at MoMA, NY, and published in the Wall Street Journal last year: “Photography in no longer about the wall. The book form is basic to photography.” Is it true for gallery walls as much as for FaceBook and Instagram walls?
F.L: Yes, I think this is especially true in regard to the digital walls on Facebook and Instagram. We live in an age where billions of pictures are taken everyday, but if we turn of our computers/phones they are all gone or not existent. In this digital age, no one will be able to find a box of prints in an attic or cellar, forgotten there by one of their ancestors. An advice I give to all my (non-photographer) friends is to print out their images and not only store them on their hard drives. I do this regularly, printing all my iphone pictures. I have a big box where I put them and I am sure my daughter will find it one day.
L.C: So FaceBook and Instagram walls are more like an immediate distribution platform ?
F.L: People tend to say that the revolutions in Lybia and Egypt were fueled or triggered by social media – they were called Facebook revolutions -, but I think the full effect of these “digital revolutions” was actually demonstrated in Turkey. As an example, Vodafone had one quarter more overall traffic in their networks during Gezi! When the protests started in Istanbul, Turkcell, Avea and other mobile internet providers brought trucks to Taksim in order to provide better coverage. There were so many people who needed to post videos and photos that they had to bring these service trucks! They had signs attached to the trucks saying: “This service is for you guys, don’t destroy this truck”, and it worked ! With my iPhone I felt closer, in a more immediate relation to the events, and thus closer to the whole movement because all the protesters were using this technology. That’s why I used a hashtag as the title of the project, #Taksim Calling. Calling of course refers to the song by The Clash, but I wanted to bring it to a modern age as a general call for action. The reason why the posters are not bound in my book is because the political claim is not over yet in Turkey, so that I can always pages. As soon as you put something in a hard cover, it’s finished, so that would not have served the purpose of Gezi, which is an ongoing movement and will have a long term effect on Turkish politics.
L.C: The posters have a strong political value. They are inspired by the poster sellers who install their prints on Istiklal street – the pedestrian street that serves as a link between Taksim and the Bosphorus and Golden Horn shores. They somehow also inspired the financial choice of distribution: a part of the sales proceeded outside of Turkey covers the cost of a free distribution in Turkey – 200 paid poster-books for 800 copies given for free. The places where you distributed your poster-books were mainly art institutions – SALT and other galleries. Why?
F.L: I originally wanted to distribute my poster-books the same way street sellers do, but there was a witch hunt going on after the protest in Istanbul and we had to avoid the streets. Also, if you print a book you need a barcode, and to go through the national agency censorship process, which doesn’t apply to posters. They are like porn magazine a little ! They are like magazines you distribute under the table. But on Istiklal street, 800 copies would have gone in an hour! So what I did instead is to give out packages of about 10 or 20 copies to friends such as photographers Yusuf Sevincli, Selim Süme and Atalay Yeni, and asked them to offer a copy to whoever they wanted to share the project with. This is also why it was distributed on art institutions like SALT. For a while, I also went out at night and put on hanged some posters in the streets around Taksim and Galata, always on the postcard side. What you didn’t know when you looked at the glued posters though, is that behind this representation of Taksim as an idealistic place, there are the portraits of protesters fighting for another ideal. In that sense it’s very subversive.
L.C: In that perspective, can you talk about the step from the virtual to the physical form and the paradox for the images of staying within a few people versus not lasting within a wide audience? You have this strong way to put it: “It’s hard to talk about influence when you have only 1000 copies circulating and only 200 outside of Turkey”.
F.L: I wanted it to be wide enough, so that people who don’t know me would get a copy. I wanted the poster-books to be somehow delivered to people for whom Gezi was important. I received a good feedback, from Turks especially – many local photographers here didn’t photograph during the protests because they were too close and busy with other things and didn’t want to bring it to the art world. So as a foreigner I could fill that gap, I could help by documenting it and create a record of this times. By the time I printed the book, we were already mid-september and Gezi already felt like a faded dream – did it really happen ? Older people looked at the postcards and enjoyed being remembered of what Taksim looked like in their youth. Younger people were more interested in the back side of the posters, the protest side that triggered fresh memories. I had an interesting reaction from a man who opened the book and said: “I have a two years old daughter. I will keep it for her so she knows what happened in 2013 in Turkey.”
L.C: iPhone photographs are intrinsically digital. Is it because of its fugacity that you create printed objects with them?
F.L: I am not really social network compatible: I don’t have a FaceBook account, I am not on Instagram and I have the most shittiest website ever, so often I refer to #Taksim Calling as my printed blog. For me, the iPhone is the diary camera. I am not a photographer who carries his camera along all the time. I only take it if I have too, so the iPhone is a tool for daily documentation. iPhone is about practicality. One of the many things you can do with it is images, plus you can send them directly to the person you have taken a portrait of a second before, without having to export, edit and resize the photos on a computer . You save time and transparency! In 2011 I had used my iPhone for a funny event called Studio Lezmi, that took place in Cologne. It was a temporary studio set in the street, next to Schaden Publishing bookstore at the occasion of a street festival. I had built a pop up studio, hung a huge wall paper photograph of the Alps as a background, and a bunch of political not-correct objects – all collected from my various trips in the Middle East – were available to the passersby – there were beards and mustaches, a wooden AK 47, palestinian scarfs, a Taliban-style patshtun hat, etc. The people, for 2 euros, could disguise and have a picture taken and then directly take the pic with them. I took the portraits with my iPhone so that I could send the image directly to a ink-jet printer and print the portrait on a postcard. It was like at a small “become a terrorist” sort of photography studio! In the end it was very funny and the people loved it.
L.C: Technically, what photo apps and tricks to you use when shooting with your iPhone?
F.L: I don’t like the Hipstamatic app because it has too many filters, too many possibilities and alters the images too much. I only use a Polaroid app, called ShakeItPhoto that just slightly boosts the color and contrast and give the picture a rectangular polaroid frame. I used this app already on the first generation of iPhone, that was had a really bad camera. So in the end the colors came to nearly normal with this app. I love playing with the fact that they look like Polaroids – they directly evoke memories, family memories. The small file size actually serves this purpose – photographer Carolyn Drake asked me once if I had wished to have taken the picture with a bigger camera. The answer is “No”. I never want to printed these Polaroid images in a large format. They are Polaroids! They have to stay small, such as in their natural amateurish use. Though they can be saved into two different formats, the original and the altered version, but I always save my photographs only in the Polaroid version. Although these polaroids are difficult to work with for a book. Square format photographs are always a bit difficult, design wise.
L.C: Can you then tell us a few words about your photobook practice – you give a lot of photo book workshops, especially in Istanbul the framework of your PhotoBook MasterClasses, and you work with Schaden.com as a consultant. Is the iPhone format something you look at particularly closely, or an expertise you are asked for, since the phone is more and more used by professional photographers?
F.L: There is more and more professional photographers, especially in the United States, who take iPhone pictures more seriously, but I think it still needs a certain time for it’s full effect. People coming to our workshop are still proud to have shot everything on film! It hasn’t really occurred to them that one can do something with their iPhone photographs. Concerning my own photo book practice I did another book before, that was also based on iPhone pictures, called “Poor Politicians”. I published it as a two volume book in 2011 on my own little imprint called Sunday Books – made on Sundays for Sundays.
L.C: Besides Thomas Dworzak’s, Mike Brown’s , Henry Jacobson’s and your book, all good for different reasons – Dworzak is an interesting social study shaped by editing archive ; Mike is an apology of immediacy and invisibility in a context of urgency ; Henry’s is a visual diary ; yours lean on the same core quality of photography, be it the oldest or the most recent – have your seen other good examples of iPhone books that came out recently and why?
F.L: The first iPhone book I had in hand was a very bad example we saw at Schaden. We had an internal list of the worst photobooks ever and Joe Sternfield’s book on Dubai (iDubai) definitely was one of them. The images were somehow not going deep in this form and the editing was lousy. I didn’t see any really cool iPhone books lately and have never really had requests in workshop besides a German photographer, once. Personally I don’t think that it matters if the photographs were taken with a phone or a large format camera, as long as they are good pictures and serve the content and the idea of the photographer. This was my standing point during the “analog versus digital” debate. It never mattered to me how the pics are taken, but rather how they come out at the end, be it in a book form, or as prints on the walls.
