In Turkey, when economic boom and newfound international appeal came without warning, the country was faced with the sudden challenge of adapting its architectural and social structures.
George Georgiou traveled through Turkey from west to east over the past five years to meet with people whose opinions goes as well from left to right, to discover a landscape where hurried modernity gives the buildings the aspect of cardboard models, to understand a country whose 800 000 km2 resonate with social, political and religious diversity.
Georgiou’s language is therefore one of paradox, focusing on the coexistence of two contradictory realities and on the disturbing look these issues have given to habitat. In a village Yenikoy (“new village” in Turkish) the architecture is disconcertingly regular—the houses all have the same rigid rectangle shape with two floors and 12 windows and are painted one of three colors—only a small mosque upsets the homogeneity, with its rounded domes and pointed minaret, bringing a touch of fantasy to the scene. Given its proximity to the Georgian border, this impersonal community area recently built at the base of an unwelcoming mountain is both soothing and worrying.
Mutation and tradition coexist the same way consumer habits progress along with increased precariousness , in a complex relationship that would be hazardous to simplify. An intense complexity emanates from Georgiou’s photographs, sometimes shockingly like on the image of a project recently built at the crest of a bare hilltop. The eight colored towers look like an inanimate and incongruous structure settled on wasteland. Life activity is only suggested by the presence of street seller leaving the area.
The photographer examines the relationship between the citizens and their changing surroundings.
Back in Istanbul the way in which Georgiou photographed his latest series of portraits, with individual silhouettes shot with a low-angle against an overexposed blue sky, highlights the faceless character of modernity. Every single subject appears to be all alone although the series was taken in bustling Taksim Square, crowded day and night with pedestrians and vehicles, a chaos of jostling bodies body, a cacophony of street vendors lost in the fanfare of horns, an outburst of colors and urban life.
Laurence Cornet
« Fault Lines : Turkey/East/West »: George Georgiou
From February 22nd to April 13st, 2013
Jackson Fine Art
3115 East Shadowlawn Avenue
Atlanta, GA 30305
USA
Tél. : +1 404 233 3739
