By Tibor Zsikla DPVA level 6
08-09TYAAART002-3 Student number:0512485
The beginning-Why Iskander? The way to Iskander through the Bechers and Burtynsky
The project was an on-going project started with industrial photography in Summer 2008. The research of industrial photography began with the German industrial photographer couple, The Bechers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. They took photographs of barns, water towers, storage silos, and warehouses which have been built with a great deal of attention toward design. The Bechers used large format camera and photographed these wooden or steel ‘monsters’ buildings from a number of different angles, although always with a straightforward "objective" point of view. The series of images with similar objects were displayed next to each other to make the viewers to compare their forms and designs.
Image:http://art-service.de/article/bernd_und_hilla_becher_getreidesilos.html
Image source: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm
Beside the Bechers research was made on Edward Burtynsky as well, a Canadian photographer, who takes pictures of industrial sites and factories.
“Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.
These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear.”
Images:Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4,Yangtze River, China 2002 Old Factories #1,Fushun Aluminum Smelter, Fushun City,Liaoning Province, 2005 source: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
They were recommended to me by Eva Stenram. As the research reached silo theme I remembered that the silo business was my father job. As my father worked as a mechanical engineer for the Hungarian silo company (Agrikon) I was familiar with silos. I also saw images of silo complexes in Algeria at the age of 5 taken by Bahget Iskander. Therefore this background led me to start a silo project. Additionally, 4 years before the project his photographs were exhibited at the Cultural Centre House in Kecskemet, which is my home town. Thus I visited the exhibition to see beside silo and other pictures Bahget Iskander’s another photo series called, “Dollar earning Hungarians” (Dollárt kereső magyarok). This project depicted the daily life of the Hungarian silo workers in Algeria. Iskander, was the official interpreter of the Hungarian Silo company, Agrikon (formerly called, Mezogep) between 1980-1982. As Iskander worked beside my father and other colleagues, he was able to develop this project as a witness, photographer and storyteller. Although since I had seen his photographs first time at the age of 5 and met him in person it took 28 years. ’Uncle’ Iskander, according he and my father were colleagues he let me call him ‘Uncle‘Iskander, advised me about beginning industrial photography project. Mainly it were about photo techniques as angles, fragments, details of the subject. The project was made on one of Europe’s biggest silo complex in Martfu, Hungary in Summer 2008.
Image: by myself, Interview with ‘Uncle’ Iskander for the Final Project (2009)
Bahget Iskander born in Syria, El Barizin 14 August 1943.He lives in Hungary since 1967.In 2008 he was awarded The order of merit of the Hungarian Republic - Knight Cross
Images: by myself:Interview with the Artist at his studio (2009)
Interview with Bahget Iskander-
My first meeting was in June 2008,that time I met him at evening to discuss Silo Photography as I was heading off on the following early morning to the scene to a silo complex in Martfu, Hungary.
Then for the next one I had to wait for a while as I asked for an appointment four times until I got one at end of January.
Bahget Iskander a Syrian born artist photographer, literary man a sort of cosmopolitan who made lot of efforts for the culture, building a bridge between Hungarian and Arabic culture beside his many other projects.
Between 1980-82 official interpreter for Agrikon (Mezogep) Silo Building Company in Algeria.
Iskander was a colleague of my father, an interpreter for the company, a witness and last but not least a photographer in 1980.
The another man helped me arranged the appointment to him, he was ‘Uncle’ Bela Bibok who called up him to arrange our meeting after 28years when I heard about Iskander and saw his pictures about silos which could not interested me so much that time ,at the age of 5.Bela Bibok was just ‘Uncle Bela’ for me as we had known each other since my childhood, we were allotment neighbours, we grew up together with his sons and finally he was former colleague of my father. He died in the middle of the project, in November 2008 due series of brain strokes. His death effected me so much and by that time I got lot of information about others ,about my father’s former colleagues who died already, half of the old silo building brigade as they were called, ’the big team’. Then I could get Janos Strenner’s corporative help over my project we were driving off to the silo complex in Martfu in the early morning. The silo complex was 70km away from my hometown and that is one of the biggest one in Europe nowadays still. The heading off was planned by 06:00 am so I That is why I wanted to see Bahget Iskander beforehand my photoshooting. He told me he had been busy about setting up a collection for a photography camp visiting then he called me up finally he could spend a little time on me and we met 09:00 pm to talk about silo photo shooting, it was the first time to meet him up, after hearing about him in my childhood it was quite interesting meeting. After 28 years as I saw his silo pictures and my father was telling about him we finally met.
Artist talk with Ben Roberts
Artist talk :Ben Roberts 17/11/08
We had an artist talk by Ben Roberts.
Biography
Ben was born in Birmingham.
Studied in Edinborough Art College
Bournemouth- 2 years photography course
Working in London as a Freelance photographer
His main project’s :
Over Dark Waters- which is a sequence of pictures
His family lives in Canada and he took a series called Canada in Winter –I remember that I really liked those pictures.The Canadian pictures were taken between -8C grade and -25C grade.
Another series of him is Weekenders.
He was talking about his first steps efforts to become employed photographer as a freelancer. He made a registration for agencies in London and Paris as well.
He mentioned that several times how important the role of agencies to get a job.
He was hardworking at beginning his career-wake up at 5:00 am leaving to work at 6 o’clock
His portfolio is a book, a photo book with his projects and his best works in a nice ,good quality book. He mentioned that his reason for making a book instead of a usual portfolio is nobody throw away a book, they put on the shelf and sometimes take it to flip through it. This is how we can get commissions.
He was talking about Superpit which is the biggest gold mine of the world in Australia.
He took the pictures in a barter system. They needed a few pictures for internal use and he was fed and he was able to take many pictures for himself beside he took pictures for them too. This point he pointed it out the importance of making barter deals sometimes beside earning money.
So make a few BARTER deals too!
Another significant work of him is Higher Lands , which was taken in Edinborough in Scotland.
His personal work on film and his commercial work in digital which makes sense for me.
The following work he mentioned was : One More Night
One more night, which is a book, he had been working on it for 30nights which gave him 300-400 pictures
The final selection were 80 pictures
He took a project about Carnival too.
Commissions: PR images he gave assistance work for Zed Nelson he is a brilliant photographer, therefore I checked out the www.zednelson.com and I was amazed by his pictures.
Ben also mentioned a warning piece of advice:
‘Don’t just be a navel gazer with a 5D’.
Which means a good camera without a pair of creative good eyes worth nothing we need to think first then take the shots.
‘Learn Tech stuff’!- I found it personal message to me as I am not good at using softwares such as Photoshop, Bridge, Lightroom or another Adobe products, but if I spend time to play around it with doing a few tutorials I can learn them.
He told us another things too such as ‘Eliminate excess Drama from your life’
Live beneath your means. Keep this simple. About the right attitude and spend the money wisely.
And the last was ‘Go Beyond the Call of Duty ’which refers back to the PC game a little bit too but the message is lot more different, do some extra work and be updated, be ready with the work forehand not postpone it to the last days. I really enjoyed his talk and I found it terribly useful especially for myself.
Seminars with Dr. Alec Charles and John Stephens
We had many useful seminars about preparing for our professional career such as E- portfolio and marketing package, applying for a job and CV development, critical valuation of our work and start freelance career. Although these are very useful things but these are just tools and these are useless without the right artist mentality and attitude that I could absorbed into myself from John Stephens’, Dr. Alec Charles’ seminars. I became influenced by their artistic viewpoints, auras. John Stephens head of the fine art course in the School of Media, Art and Design
John Stephens was influenced due his Berlin spent years (Bauhaus style and design) and with this background he seems to me a cosmopolitan artist who has seen and experienced a lot.
On the seminars with Dr. Alec Charles we had an insight to professionalism, how we should writing a formal letter, make an interview using our creativity to ask the right questions and using the time wisely to prepare for it, and other etiquettes such as dress code etc. Alec Charles’ tools are the pen and his pen that he uses perfectly as a journalist and litterateur.He speaks so clearly and swimmingly that he is grabbing all students’ attention with his speech. Dr Alec Charles is a Senior Lecturer in Media at the University, where he also serves as Field Chair in Art & Design and Chair of the Ethics Committee for Creative Arts, Technologies and Science. He also leads the Journalism & Communication Research Group, and serves as a member of the University’s Research Degree Committee. He took a BA degree and MA degree in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, on the relationship between Modernism and Postmodernism in twentieth century cultural history, literature and philosophy. He has taught literature, cultural studies and media studies in the UK, in Japan and in Estonia as well.
Group critiques and tutorials with Eva, Zoe, Paul and Ben
When we had a group critique and I show my current stage of the final project I was advised to make a research on Mitch Epstein whose work Family business, taking pictures about family members. As I had too many portrait pictures during the interviews they wanted me to use more archive pictures to scan in, which was slightly confusing as I was doing it and I collected a huge collection of old negatives to scan in, but that time I was told not to use them, just only one of them. I really think the problem was they met me in different times and just twice-three times during the academic year this could lead they didn’t have an unified opinion which would have been a great help for me. Although these difficulties we agreed in taking more images about relics which refer back to the person or belongs to those countries that they visited formerly during their abroad spent years. For presenting my work I found useful their suggestions to have a look on
Christian Boltanski, Iosif Kiraly, Fatih Akin, Kutlug Ataman and Emily Jacir who affected me a lot with her works and ideas, methods of presenting a project.
Research on artists
Kutlug Ataman was born in 1961.Ataman lives and works in London and Istanbul. In Kutlug Ataman’s films he combines documentary filmmaking with intimacy of the home-movie style. In his films he allows the main character, who did not get direction or just a little, to drive the movie. He shoots in domestic scene, where Kutlug shows the character’s daily life and experiences in the past. His work is presented one or multi-screen video projection either that allows viewers to move rapidly through a particular medium taking place at any one time. He chooses his characters often by acceptability of sociality such as Semiha Berksoy, the legendary Turkish diva in Ataman’s 456-minutes video kutlug ataman’s semiha b.unplugged 1997.Semiha rebelled as a femme fatale and a bohemian artist against male-dominated society. Ataman’s other work which is a multi screen installation Women Who Wear Wigs 1999 introduces for varying four women who wear hairpieces for varying reason. A deeply religious Muslim university student, a political activist, a well-known Turkish journalist and a transsexual prostitute. Each person has different reason to wear the wig. For comparison Ataman’s works and my project Ataman gives a huge freedom to his characters to drive the film. That was my goal to find out how should I lead an interview or I can let it flow in its own way as Kutlug does it.
As I am a beginner interviewer with not that many experiences I tried to let them talk what they wanted to say just setting up at least one story and a frame for their story, for their life that time. Sometimes I recorded more 60-minutes interviews but I knew that I was successful to make him tell his favourite story beside other stories as well, which I was not sure to use. In order to get a interesting story out of my interviews that I made and making a meaningful, interesting extract of quotes of interviews I researched Fatih Akin famous storyteller.
Fatih Akin was born in 1973 in Hamburg. Son of Turkish parents, he studied Visual Communications at Hamburg’s College of Fine Arts. His first short film in 1995: Sensin – You’re The One (SENSIN - DU BIST ES!), which won the Audience Award at the Hamburg International Short Film Festival. The following was Weed (GETUERKT, 1996). His first feature, Short Sharp Shock (KURZ UND SCHMERZLOS, 1998), received Locarno’s Bronze Leopard and the Bavarian Film Award for Best Young Director. The Edge of Heaven (AUF DER ANDEREN SEITE) is Fatih Akin’s movie in Competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. 2005’s Crossing The Bridge – The Sound of Istanbul, presented the variety of music found in contemporary Turkey.In 2003 Head-on (GEGEN DIE WAND) won the Berlinale Golden Bear and Best Film at the German and European Film Awards.
Fatih Akin a classical storyteller. The storytelling in The Edge of Heaven is similar to the structure of One Thousand and One Nights the classic old Eastern tale. As he said in one of his interview it was his first desire account of his childhood was really like One Thousand and One Nights. His parents used to tell him fairy tales and other folk tales, which gave him extra ordinary experience in a later part of his life. Therefore whatever can be linked to stories like One Thousand and One Nights is really comes deep inside of him. It’s a part of his childhood. His movies have circling patterns as he believes that history is repeating itself in circles .As he said in an interview:
“When you see the history of human beings, you don’t only see certain mistakes that they made. They make a number of mistakes over again but they end up learning. It’s the same with a story in a way; once a “circle” has been completed, people go back to where they are coming from, but it’s not their ending point. It’s the ending point of the film. I wanted my film constantly interact with the audience so that when they leave the theater , my film moves out with them and help them to keep the story alive.”
An another research was made about installation methods on Emily Jacir and Christian Boltanski.
Emily Jacir works in a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, writing and sound. Emily Jacir is a Palestinian artist. Born in Bethlehem,in 1970. Jacir spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia, studied in Italy. Through her installations she tells a life story by photo-montage, personal memorabilia, film and newspaper clips and pages from notebooks, archive photos, even a used bus ticket which helps her to recall the recent past and getting involved the viewers. Emily, by her installation exhibition, tells a life story of Wael Zuaiter, the Palestinian translator, activist and intellectual. Zuaiter studied Arabic literature and philosophy in Iraq, then Libya and afterwards to Rome, where he was a translator for the Libyan embassy. In addition to his native Arabic, Zuaiter spoke French, Italian, and English. During his time in Italy Zuaiter translated One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into Italian. He was killed by Israeli agents in Rome in 1972 in Operation Wrath of God campaign for the massacre by Palestinian militants of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games considered Zwaiter a terrorist Emily shows to the viewers at her exhibition two copies of Thousand and One Nights. Which Zuaiter was carrying on Monday October 16, 1972,when he was fired by twelve bullets The spine of the book with its bullet hole is displayed at her exhibition Jacir with this installation won her place for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, 2009.
Christian Boltanski, is a French contemporary painter who likes applying film, performance, photography and video in his artworks. He uses old photos, clothing and personal belongings for his installations to represent individual lives. Boltanski often uses passport photos, school portraits, family albums, found photos to present a memorial to the unknown children killed in the Holocaust or the citizens of a Swiss town. He creates theatrical spaces with inconstant lights and shadows to set up a continuously changing installation.
As Boltanski stated about his carrier and life: ”I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child. I remember the Little Christian that is dead inside me…
…We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone.”
The question of passing time is applying in Boltanski’s art statement already; there is another artist who related to the question of time, Iosif Kiraly.
Iosif Kiraly’s subject matter is relation between perception, time and memory. He is a Romanian visual artist and architect. Kiraly works in photography, installation and performance. Kiraly was born in 1957.He is an artist and member of the subREAL art duo. Since 1992 tutor at the National University of Arts Bucharest. Iosif Kiraly started a lifelong photographic series, called Indirect in 1990.He uses his camera to create a photographic diary
Taking images about small details, fragments of his surroundings, while waiting in an airport, or moving train. Every images help to set up our memory yet no single image has function alone. Therefore Kiraly uses citations to add meanings to them. As he examines time itself more carefully only small part is common in his work and mine to reconstruct the past time, memories with photographs and additional citations.
He uses four different methods to link time and space:
“a) identical time and identical space different photos taken in the same time and the same place by different people
b) identical space and different time (photos of the same space taken at different moments; the idea of Kiraly ’s “reconstructions” can be inserted here);
c) different space and identical time (photos taken in different places but at the same time in order to catch the fragrance of a time that never comes back);
d) different space and different time (photos with no connection whatsoever).“
The question of time in my project is important as well as in Kiraly’s works. I researched life stories of employees of a same company and making interviews with people from same age group, collecting photos, memorabilia, taking photos about their daily life to give a picture about them then and now
Conclusion
Through three academic years I had on this course and especially this year was very useful to prepare for an artist and professional career. We had many artist talks, visiting lecturers who helped our step to become an artist who can see the things different way, who thinks different from others. During my one year long final project I met several different person, artist photographer and cosmopolitan Bahget Iskander, who respected artist in the Arabic world and in Hungary as well. My project’s way led to Iskander through my research which was made on industrial photography such as the German industrial photographer couple, The Bechers, Bernd and Hilla Becher. They took photographs of barns, water towers, storage silos, and warehouses which have been built with a great deal of attention toward design. As I remembered I had seen Iskander’s silo images at early age of 5, I got the idea to ask for his advice about the topic.
Secondly, we had many useful seminars about preparing for our professional career such as E- portfolio and marketing package, applying for a job and CV development, critical valuation of our work and start freelance career. Although these are very useful things but these are just tools and these are useless without the right artist mentality and attitude that I could absorbed into myself from John Stephens’, Dr. Alec Charles’ seminars. I became influenced by their artistic viewpoints, auras. John Stephens was influenced due his Berlin spent years and with this background he seems to me a cosmopolitan artist who has seen and experienced a lot.
On the seminars with Dr. Alec Charles we had an insight to professionalism, how we should writing a formal letter, make an interview using our creativity to ask the right questions and using the time wisely to prepare for it, and other etiquettes such as dress code etc. Alec Charles’ tools are the pen and his pen that he uses perfectly as a journalist and litterateur.He speaks so clearly and swimmingly that he is grabbing all students’ attention with his speech. These things somebody feels it absorbs it or do not we need to taste these things but it cannot be learnt I really believe that. The rest of that I listed they are useful tools but without this mentality, artistic atmosphere does not work out an artistic career I guess so.
This year tutorials with Eva, Zoe and Ben were useful to get directions to continue the major project, sometimes it was even confusing as I got an idea about the progress then I was stopped by one of them then they wanted me to continue again that I started,I did it, I stopped it by their suggestions therefore I found my project very challenging I was confused and not finding my way to progress it. All in all I learnt something by it, which is never give up something that I feel about it well, do it everything by my heart that I feel about it, the rest of it can be my directive ideas but they can lead my work instead of mines. I found relief when I had a tutorial with Ben Roberts and we agreed about my outcomes of the project when we decided it should be a book. I made a huge research on the following artists. Christian Boltanski, Iosif Kiraly, Fatih Akin, Kutlug Ataman and Emily Jacir who affected me a lot with her works and ideas, methods of presenting their work.
