The hunger to learn, share and make great photography is great in Turkey and the second International Bursa FotoFest has been a rich, dynamic experience. The main Organizers, Utku Kaynar and Jason Eskenazi have set the bar high featuring Ara Güler, Mary Ellen Mark, Antonin Kratochvil, Charles Harbutt and Li Zhensheng for the master photographer lecture and exhibition series. But the entire festival is full of amazing men and women: Maggie Steber, dubbed the Portfolio Queen, Ken Schles, Arjen Zwart, Samuel Bollendorf, Ken Light, Fred Ritchen, Selahattin Sevi, Gülben Özdamar Akarçay and Shahidul Alam, plus many more. All the usual wonderful things of any photo festival are happening here, but the real story for me is that this festival is happening in Turkey outside of Istanbul.
While Turkey has made astonishing progress economically and has the world’s 15th largest GDP, the country has still not really been exposed to international arts and culture in the same way that the citizens of Istanbul have been. So, the fact that this festival is in Bursa, the fourth largest city and a giant manufacturing hub is significant. In many ways, this city is provincial and conservative. This was no more evident than in the opening ceremony for the festival. The people of Bursa welcomed the international community of photographers and photography lovers with a parade that included men dressed in ancient and traditional Turkish costumes, a band played traditional drum music, all the local military veterans and a section of wheelchair bound people and able bodied people held up framed photographs from the exhibitions. We knew this was not an ordinary photo festival. We knew we were witnessing a tremendous and unique moment in Turkey as if the Pandora’s box was opened and the contained, but somewhat isolated and closed culture of Turkey cracked open.
The clash between the open nature of the arts and a conservative government was evident both last year and this year when the Bursa City Council requested that no photographer exhibit any nudity or other images deemed offensive to them. On the whole these issues were worked out one way or another. It reminded me that art is by nature subversive either intentionally or unintentionally and that, again, we, who have lived in very open cultures find very little to be subversive about. In fact, artists must constantly raise the bar in order to make a statement. We are bored, and cynical while there are still huge areas of Turkey hungry to know, experiment and participate in a rich artistic dialogue through their photography. I was very sorry to see that the organizers of this festival did not invite many of the many very accomplished photographers and creatives from Latin America, India or other parts of the world. Rather, they seemed to stick with the tried and true European and American photographers.
A pivotal figure in the process of opening Turkey to the international arts is Huseyin Yılmaz, a former political prisoner who was sentenced to prison for seven years. During that time, he decided to dedicate his life to art because he knows art can be a powerful, nonviolent, changing agent. He and his good friend, Hurü Kaya, a professor at a local art university, started Espas, a visual cultures book store two and a half years ago in Istanbul which has become THE place for photographers from around the globe to stop. There, people can simply flip through book, look at each other’s portfolios and connect with each other. To keep the business going, he has started to publish photo books. In addition to publishing some of the best work in Turkey, he is also translating and publishing key photo books like Fred Ritchin’s After Photography, Ken Light’s Witness in Our Time, Victor Margolin’s Struggle for Utopia and the classic book, The Education of a Photographer. Huseyin says that this lack of education on photography is not unique to Turkey. In China and India as well, the photo schools are old fashioned and teach a strict adherence to a certain aesthetic and consider Henri Cartier Bresson the ultimate photographer.
Huseyin has a popup bookstore here at the Bursa FotoFest with book signings and all his books production. It is a gathering place for international photographers . There, I found really strong work by Turkish photographers, who are definitely making world-class bodies of work which should be seen outside of Turkey too. Özcan Ağaoğlu has just published Iranabak, a documentary about Iran that he made over four years. He was really able to obtain access to situations that are normally closed to outsiders and men.
The festival is hosting two prizes as well, an International Photography Contest with the theme “Traces of Humanity” and a Book Dummy contest. The winner from the 2011 Book Dummy contest, Yusuf Sevingcli returned this year with his newly published book, “Good Dog”, which is very strong work for an emerging photographer. In addition to many works by individual artists, the Turkish newspaper Zaman Daily, is showing a group project they hosted called “Turkey from a Global perspective” which has work by Paolo Pellegrin, Ed Kashi, and many other wonderful visual storytellers.
The mix in Turkey is fascinating. We have had intense conversations with our guides about what it is like to live in a society that is becoming increasingly conservative, their very real issues with censorship and the struggle to move toward a more open and more true democracy. I really hope this festival continues for many years and look forward to returning to watch the fascinating process of Turkey integrating the global arts community.
Melanie Light
FESTIVAL Bursa FotoFest 2012 September 15 – 21, 2012 Bursa Turkey
