 |
 |
|
The 'Turkey: Northern outskirts' project is dedicated to the place of origin - the country of my childhood. I have used some old and some new photographs. The selection of images is not strict, I show a lot of work material.
The location of my childhood: the area in the north of Moscow near the high-speed motorway rings which surrounding the city. There are the city outskirts, factories, landfills, villages, channel and reservoir in a radius of several kilometers. Location of shooting in Turkey is a narrow curving line - the travel route from Europe to Europe. It comes from the EU’s borders to Istanbul, moving to Asia and comes along the Gulf of the Sea of Marmara, turns north to the Black sea coast, and on the bank is nearly a thousand kilometers to the border with Georgia. Here I find industrial areas, coasts and a sense of the country of my childhood. I deviated from the route and traveled thousands of kilometers on the western, central and southern Turkey but could not find this feeling. I shot between the outskirts of towns and cities, sometimes in the middle of a big city, if there I feel the sense of outskirts. Outskirts is a place where even kept disappearing XX century. I was born in the 1970s on the northern outskirts of Moscow, which was preparing to become a model communist city. The huge stone house was surrounded by wooden houses. There were plants and landfills in the north, behind the ring road. Near the school there was young technicians base, where I made models of airplanes and rockets. Then it seemed that the future is in this. Turkey of XX century disappears, many houses are presented only on the film, at the site of a village where I was shooting during the summer to autumn, there are only a field leveled by a bulldozer. In the eyes of the people you can see “hyuzun”, Turkish melancholy, but it is possible that it is my own grief. This story is an attempt to find a country of my childhood with a series of prefabricated homes, engulfed by debris, industrial areas, with good people and the future, which would be quite different.
Michael Regnier about this assignment This is excellent work! So many really powerful, hugely engaging images. I would love to see these larger since the resolution on the website and the size of the thumbnails is just not big enough to appreciate everything that's going on in your images. Really - great work. You have photographed so widely - and really captures so many different moods/situations/objects/people! I like all the different sections - the waterside and industrial terrain images in particular! I think the point you make about the changing face of the outskirts of cities which are coming into a new/different age is excellent and a very good subject to try and photograph in the context of this assignment! It's a very solid concept and you've done a great job showing it. I like the idea of taking your own personal environment - Moscow - and 'finding again' this same idea and mood somewhere else - I guess this is connecting to the whole subject of memory which is very complex but a fascinating thing to explore in photography. I can see that you are fully engrossed in this subject so there's not really that much I can say in addition to saying that it's really well done, I think this is on the route to becoming a book or really should be a book or an exhibition! |
 Alexey Melia
Родился в Москве. В 2006 году посещал семинары Александра Иосифовича Лапина – на этих занятиях начал узнавать о существовании Фотографии. В 2007-2008 годах участвовал в мастерклассах Сергея Максимишина. Люблю фотографировать. ...
More stories from this author: |