The title of the exhibition describes how Civan Ozkanoglu works. Photography and personal involvement echo each other in these surprising compositions. His presence is palpable in the angles he chooses, letting the viewer imagine what contorted positions he had to take in order to capture these slightly surrealist scenes. He is the observer, never the voyeur, playing with symbols and having fun with the situations.
The metal gate of a storefront, poorly drawn shut, creates a centimeters-wide sliver of light in the dark of night. Ozkanoglu lies down on the sidewalk to photograph what the opening reveals: martial artists in uniform, standing on their heads, training on a floor littered with sandals. Another odd scene also takes place in front of a metal gate. Four bathtubs sit in a parking lot as if they were waiting for their owners to pick them up and drive them away. The sky is tinted pink, the hour when we doze off dreaming, when it’s hard to separate real life from imaginary life. With the warm light enhanced by the color of the bricks, this image calls to mind the celebrated traveling bed sequence in Pierre Etaix’s Le Grand Amour.
Ozkanoglu’s photographs make you smile as they move you, like this one of a Christmas tree strangely suspended at the end of a rope above three other trees, decapitated and carelessly abandoned on the pavement. In the sensitive theatre he composes, nature is just as large a character as mankind, if not larger. It’s a metaphor for the human condition, like the tree hanging off the edge of a cliff, which contrasts with the massive billiards table sitting imposingly in a cold room overlooking the sea.
Place and time matters little; what counts is the emotion that emerges from the patterns and incidents that present themselves to the curious, avid eyes of the photographer. Garden hoses and other tubes meander through many of Ozkanoglu’s images, inviting the viewer to follow their paths and share the road the photographer took over days.
In Person
Civan Ozkanoglu
Until April 26 2014
Elipsis gallery
Hoca Tahsin Sokak, No:16, Karaköy, Karaköy
34425 Istanbul
Turkey
