Chaning conventions of landscape photography in Turkey: from Ara Güler to Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Seçil Yersel

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the conventions of contemporary landscape photography in Turkey by analyzing selected work by three artists, Ara Güler, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Seçil Yersel and discussing them in the context of the canon of the landscape image, and landscape photography in the international contemporary art scene. A historical account of the landscape image, its historically and culturally specific conditions of emergence in the West, and its relationship with traveling and tourism is provided. Landscape is studied as a specific kind of relationship between humans and the physical world, which entails a distant viewer, looking and visually framing a physical environment rather than participating in it; and the transformation of a physical environment composed of multiple multi-sensory elements into a coherent, aesthetic object to be visually consumed. Ceylan’s and Yersel’s photographs make the distance and alienation intrinsic both to the notion of landscape and the practice of photography visible. Ara Güler’s proximity to his subjects, his engagement with documenting the contingent experiences of people specific to places and times and capturing fleeting moments result in fragmentary compositions of dynamic and inhabited landscapes transformed by and with people. Ceylan and Yersel’s distance to their subjects resulting in wide and exhaustive views that resemble paintings more than photographs because they are static and closed compositions resist appropriation and presenting ready meanings.