From January 11 through March 5, Le Château d’Eau in Toulouse presents the Dérive series by young Turkish photographer Yusuf Sevincli, whose almost compulsive photography practice of daily life is how he stays connected to things and beings.
What makes up the soul of a city? The straightness of the narrow sidewalks, smoothed over by time? Children’s freckles revealed by winter weather? Night owls who roam under the merging lampposts? A city gives up its secrets to those who survey it without end, pushing open bar doors, eating lunch at the corner of a counter and dinner at the corner of another, passing street urchins on the way to school and retirees in the afternoon, napping on benches.
While agreeing to lead a residency in Vichy last spring, Yusuf Sevincli assumed the role of a walking photographer, a wayward loafer who keeps an eye out for daily offerings and the soft illuminations of sunset. A croupier in the pale moonlight here, a wet dog summoning the last of the night’s phantoms there. You would have to be clever to point out, in this young Turkish photographer’s tightrope-walking images, the coquetry of French Vichy, bourgeois Vichy, buttressed by its art nouveau facades, its neoclassical villas, and the splendors of the river Allier. The spa town, which is the birthplace of travel writer Albert Londres, became a land of meetings and adventures, a mental projection, a visual poem born from the pipe dreams of an artist from Istanbul who practiced movement in every sense of the word, physical and mental. Thanks to him, Vichy awoke from a strange dream in which strings of light and clench-fisted children pass.
Customary of existential shifts, an enthusiast of dark contrasts, Yusuf Sevincli is one of these alchemist artists who surrender, where ever they are, to the strange workings of transfiguration. They do not premeditate their shots, instinctively framing and moving lines. They are witnesses and players at the same time, keeping one foot in the image and one foot out. They flicker with the wind, stumble with the drunkards, mingle with the beauty queens. They are much more than photographers because their photos deliver sounds and scents, as if their noticeable presence in the world were causing a type of synesthesia. Through the nomadic eye of Yusuf Sevincli, Vichy is withdrawn from its history and geography. It floats in a time space that is a waking dream. It sways and rocks, illuminated by brilliant flashes, shadowed by fog, lined with coal blacks and incandescent whites which render it, at the same time, more intense, more anxious, and more elusive.
Natacha Wolinski
Natacha Wolinski is a journalist and author specialized in photography. She lives and works in Paris.
Yusuf Sevinçli, Dérive
From January 11 through March 5, 2017
Le Château d’Eau
1, Place Laganne
31300 Toulouse
France
