SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/IV)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr

We live in a world where the most banal things can be instaneously snapped by almost any piece of technology lying around. This is an age where we share selfies just because we’re bored. Photography, rather than being a rare and valuable privilege, has become so mundane that it is barely even noteworthy. So what is it that maintains its status as an art form?

Ever since cave drawings, people have always found a way to capture the moment. Back then, it was a form of communication that predated language. Want to hunt a mammoth? You could simply draw a mammoth and arrows and point to them.

As language developed over time, so did art. We began to look for more sophisticated ways to trap reality in a frame. Moments are precious, and it became more and more important to preserve them as we came to realize how fleeting they were. Beauty fades—as does wealth, joy or life. Sadness too. What remains is memory, which dies with the person holding it. So to convince ourselves that we were not mere blinks in time, we externalized our memories. We gave dimension to them. We put them on canvas and embodied them in marble so that others might forever see what we remembered.

Because of this, artists tried to create realistic works, as in the Renaissance. There was an idea that a work of art should be as credible as possible. Except, of course, on those occasions when a lady wanted her house to seem just a little richer than it actually was. Or when a husband wanted to carry his wife’s beauty with him into old age, but without the minor flaws and blemishes. Art became a chance to inconspicuously improve upon truth. In our doing so, this truth that we wanted to see—that we wanted others to see—became eternal.

As the techniques of photography developed, these “white lies” became more and more difficult to implement. The first photographic images were of low quality and could hide many annoying details, but once it became more widely practiced, this method of depiction evolved so fast that soon nothing could be hidden. It became so important to have your photo taken: to create just the right scene and wear just the right clothes. And never smile. It makes a statement, doesn’t it, that people back then would never smile in a photo, whereas a similar pose today is a distinguishing feature of mugshots? It’s a commentary on how serious it was to have to go to a photographer’s studio, all dressed up, just to have a family snapshot taken.

Any kind of occasion in our day involves an attempt at taking at least one photograph to remember it by. This habit has reached such a point that it has now become just as important to capture the moment as to live it. I imagine that there was once a time when at concerts, people in the back of the pit would squint to see the act. Now, even an avid enthusiast such as myself who commits to getting there early to be in one of the front rows cannot see the musicians because of the gadgets being held up. The view you see in the photo below is not uncommon. I was recently at a concert where I was in the fourth row and could not see the singer because the very sweet teenager in front of me kept trying to take videos with her iPad. And kept failing. Had I asked her to stop, there still would have been two others in front of her who were doing the same thing.

There is a beautiful scene in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” that illustrates just this. The wise, famous photographer, when asked by a fan why he wasn’t taking a picture of the leopard he had been trying to find for days, says that sometimes he likes to experience a moment rather than ruining it by seeing it through a lens. The lens puts a barrier between us and what we see, and the digital click sound completely ruins the moment. It is no longer an event in time, but a captured frame. It can be taken out of context.

Of course, photography is also one of the most powerful tools we have for capturing…well, life. A picture can tell a thousand words, and a good photograph can take even the most uninterested person to a different place and time. Everyone gets emotional when they see a photo of their loved ones or their first home, but it takes an artist to recognize a photographable moment that can produce an emotional reaction in someone living across the world.

That is what Steve McCurry does. He is the photographer who changed the history of the art with that photo of the Afghan girl with the amazing eyes. His works are being exhibited at CerModern right now, and I would encourage everyone to go and see them. We cannot all travel the world and photograph moments in the USA, India and Afghanistan. But artists like him can give us the freedom to teleport to those places, to see the movement of the ball, to feel the breath that an African woman is about to draw. Painters and sculptors, after the invention of photography, were liberated from the obligation to portray reality, so that they might interpret truth instead. What makes photography an art form, however, is that it can “[take] an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” The kind of photograph that the likes of McCurry, Ansel Adams and Ara Güler take is not merely a frame on the mantelpiece, but the cross-section of a whole universe, frozen in time.