Atlas
February 25, 2024
I. North
It was likely the spring of 2012. Though the university entrance exam loomed near, and I knew I had to solve even more practice tests after last year’s setback, I remember the pull of the spring in streets after a brutal winter, as if nothing could hold me back. With comrades in the neighborhood, after an indeterminate number of teas and cigarettes, and as nightfall signaled the time to disperse to our homes… A new comrade, unmistakably from the city center, was to be hosted among us. While waiting for his friend to arrive, he joined us for tea. With an age that lent him authority, he spoke of politics with an almost pedagogical tone, the details of which I can’t recall now. His eloquence, his masterful rhetoric, his command of words, and his theoretical depth captivated me in moments. I listened in admiration… And when the conversation turned to university exams and the studies we’d chosen, I confessed that I didn’t yet know what I would do —though, being in the verbal category, journalism seemed likely. I don’t know why, but at one point he recommended a film (1) to me, a film I hadn’t heard of, by a director I didn’t know. I wasn’t much of a moviegoer back then. But as we left and I walked home, the film lingered in my mind. I wanted to watch it right away. That night, I searched online, found it after some effort, and watched. I didn’t fully understand it; it wasn’t like anything I’d seen before, and it was so, so long. But…
I was enchanted. Was it the moving images, each like a photograph, or those scenes seemingly created to let us feel the piano notes, or the unbroken one shots that flowed like a dream, the negative spaces in the frames, the sorrow pulling me in, or perhaps the fact that it had been recommended by a comrade like him? I don’t know. What I do know today is that time had stopped, and I was caught in that film’s spell. Still, it was the photographic visuals that left the deepest mark; the next morning, I told myselfI’d create images like that. If only the film program required a lower score than journalism, if only I had prepared better, if only I knew how to make films. If I knew, I’d have made such magical images at once… After days of trawling the dark corridors of the internet, I watched every film in the director’s oeuvre one by one. Then came the films of directors who left an indelible mark on cinema history, films unlike any I’d ever seen… The beginning of my film archive, my early practice on the road to cinephilia.
Cinema didn’t happen; journalism did. As university began, I bought a camera and started working as an intern at a news agency. Those were the days I learned journalism and photography in the field, not in university… I told myself I had to learn photography first to eventually learn film, and the rest would somehow follow. After all, that thing of moving images was what we called film. Or did we?
I’ll return here later.
First came the storm. Then victory, followed by fractures. Many comrades and I were separated by broken hearts, exile, prisons, death. There were farewells, sorrows, anguish, but an unyielding faith in socialism. That was what made us who we were… With the years, my active role in the struggle faded, and I found myself documenting street protests this time as a photojournalist. These demonstrations were like a real education for my generation of young photographers and photojournalists. We took photos constantly, learned from each other shoulder to shoulder, sometimes even competed for the best shot, but later gathered in tea houses to engage in heated discussions about the future of Turkish documentary photography —a future we felt unable to embody as unprivileged working-class children. Photography, which I had turned to as a path to learn cinema, had consumed me, and I’d devoted all my energy to becoming a good photographer. Filmmaking no longer mattered to me.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes suggests that approaching photography through two elements can help us understand the relationship we establish with it: Studium and Punctum. Barthes, finding French inadequate in creating these terms, turns to Latin: “Studium means a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment, of course, but without special acuity.”
That is, studium, as an output of the knowledge and culture we bring as viewers of photographs, always refers to information. A war photograph: here are soldiers, a man in anguish, weapons, blood. We know the photograph exists to show us the bare reality of war; we look and learn/understand the scale of brutality. It’s a kind of informational connection. Along with spot news photos, Barthes says, all studium photographs employ surprise elements to shock the viewer: photographs of rare moments, an image frozen at a point beyond the reach of the naked eye, technical flourishes, games of light/shadow/framing, a curious scene captured by chance. All these surprises, Barthes says, “Obey a principle of defiance (which is why they are alien to me): the photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility…”
I rewind.
The spot news photos I took, the street shots, my journalism, the photographer I wanted to be —all of it belonged to the realm of studium. At the time, I hadn’t yet read Barthes; even if I had, not much would have changed. I write this not as a retrospective critique or shortcoming (because it had to be that way as a historical consequence of given circumstances), but simply to follow the linear flow of the writing (at least for now).
“The luminosity of the deep sea,
tough mornings
sky and tulip
we enter life like a clenched fist”
II. West
I’m on an old Soviet train from Yerevan to Gyumri. Outside, there’s a snowstorm, and inside the unheated cars, people continue their everyday conversations as though this intense cold were nothing unusual. Fogged windows I can’t take my eyes off of, and there I am. We journey as these elements… I think to myself, what a winter disaster, my feet nearly frozen. There’s still a long way to Gyumri. Will this journey ever end? With the clatter of the train, it’s impossible to hear anyone, let alone communicate through words. How are these people hearing each other? Not that I need to say much —I only know a few basic Armenian phrases. I quietly raise my camera now and then to take photos. My foreignness is obvious, but it doesn’t pose a problem. With those who see my camera, there’s an unspoken agreement: you may take my photo. Others say, don’t take mine, and I understand. I know it’s not possible to ask everyone on the train, “May I take your photo?” (even if I knew Armenian); it’s as though people understand this. This is how our silent pact becomes real.
Bored of sitting, I start taking small tours between cars. Each one is connected to the next in an old-fashioned way. Between them is a thin metal platform, doors on either side slamming open with the storm’s wind —getting to the next car takes considerable caution. These spaces between cars are used as smoking areas too. I see two young men smoking and approach them. After a few sentences in Armenian, the conversation abruptly halts. One of them smiles, waves his hand to mean “it’s alright, it’s alright.” I look at their hands, seeing tattoos of symbols tied to Apostolic Christianity. I photograph them. These are improvised photos, part of the spontaneous moment. I’m cold; I think of going back inside, then suddenly, through a small window, I spot another car and see a woman sitting alone in the otherwise empty space. She’s wearing a coat in brown tones and a green scarf around her neck. At the window, unbothered by the cold (I think the shared breath and body warmth in my car provide some comfort), she sits by herself. What a magnificent moment! This is truly a good photograph. I wait until the men leave before taking the shot. If I take it with them around, they might interfere, my focus might waver, and of course, for the sake of ‘being ghost’—one of the hallmarks of a good photograph. Luckily, they finish their cigarettes and return inside. The woman continues looking outside, and I am alone. Am I ready? My first few attempts aren’t successful; I’m either too far or too close, pressing the shutter at the wrong moment or still trying to find the right frame.
"The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole and also a cast of the dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."
This is how Barthes describes punctum, something that leaps from the image and pierces the viewer. I wish I could add this sentence as well: “And, like a spark in the night, it burns and burns…” In this form, punctum becomes a concept or effect that transcends a photographic detail, an unexpected element that emerges on its own, something that the photographer did not intend, and develops between the viewer and the photograph, defying analysis, undefinable, and thus truly piercing. Barthes expresses it beautifully in my favorite words: “The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. Odd contradiction: a floating flash.”
Many things I’ve learned through my years with photography, and I am still learning. But one thing has remained both my greatest love and my greatest enemy from the first day to today. I chased it out of love; chasing it, I became attached. Like a tragedy leading to my demise, it was neither wit hit nor without it:
The frame.
It seems to me that framing has more to do with removing than adding something. As we extract elements from a photograph and simplify the frame, photography, by nature of its ontology, can somewhat transcend its inherent tautology and become abstract (this tautology, whether documentary or conceptual, refers to the fact that photography ultimately records reality, though I also add that not every photograph or semiotic reading can be reduced to a tautological evaluation). In Barthesian terms, punctum gradually rises from the depths to become a flash on the surface. Crowded frames, with numerous elements, could indeed be examples of punctum photographs; one might travel from one element to another within the frame, from one layer created by depth of field to another, or become lost in a spontaneously occurring detail. All of these can be examples of punctum photos that pierce the viewer like an arrow. In my own photos or those I look at, I too want to wander, waiting to be wounded. I look for this wound, especially in images that, at first glance, seem to have nothing urgent and, at the last glance, are in no hurry to show anything. It’s as if the photograph says to me: “We’ll embark on a journey together; it might take some time.”
Now I must rewind a bit.
My days in Armenia, already deeply removed from my photojournalism back in Istanbul, were spent searching for simple, piercing images I called poetic photography at the time. In principle, not much had changed —I was still taking documentary photos; real, not fiction. Capturing raw reality as a photojournalist and presenting it as news was no longer enough for me. To be honest, I was starting to find it a bit dull. I wondered if a photo could free itself from the burden of words and in-frame information used to explain itself, whether it could simplify and abstract, standing alone with the savagery or grandeur of a single sentence, and drag the viewer into a stomachache or a dizzy spell. It was hard to explain to others: “I don’t know how to put it exactly. Imagine photos that at first glance might seem very simple but, as you look longer, will carry you somewhere else. And these poetic photographs will also have an ethnographic quality,” I would say. Now, it’s hard to recall the reasons for this transformation, nor is it necessary. I call it the soul of the time. Still, to be honest, I was reading a lot of poetry and seeking ways to look at the world as one looks at a poem. Cinema might have been a path, but I still didn’t fully know how to make films. I had watched a considerable number of films, read about cinema, worked on a few film sets, and formed some opinions on film. Even the idea of making a film had become like an old friend who visited me every now and then from a far.
A little further back.
We called that thing made of moving photographs a film. Or didn't we?
We did, of course. How hard could it be to make a film? Applying moving photographs with well-designed mise-en-scène (which were essentially copies of the scenes that had impressed me) shouldn’t have been too difficult. I liked long shots anyway, so I didn’t really need to know much about découpage or editing. I could run a scene from beginning to end and combine it with a Bazinian montage. All I needed was a story, and the rest was a matter of place and framing.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple, even though I thought it was at the time. Besides, while pondering the technical details of making a film, I never considered the material conditions. Expected and romantic for someone who wants to look at the world like a poem, but quite unexpected for someone who believes that everything (art included) is conditioned by capital under the rules of capitalist exploitation. Romantic—is that the right word here?
Now forward.
Having come to the country through an artist residence program, I was living solely to take photographs. Could anything be more beautiful! I wanted to look at what remained from the great triumph of humanity, the Soviets, and in this small country, familiar to us but burdened with the memory of genocide, I was searching for myself, photography, and cinema. While the older generation mostly remembered the Soviets with gratitude and nostalgia, the younger generation had a response to it that had become normalized, even bordering on resentment at times. As a young person from an old generation, I was trying to find the right balance. Cognac had taken the place of tea. With a flask of cognac in the inside pocket of my coat, I tried to make the bone-chilling nights bearable. In the city center, villages, underground parties, abandoned buildings, Domiks, train stations, wagons, Marshrutkas, in short, wherever I went, I was searching for that poetic photograph that would pierce the viewer like an arrow. Perhaps I wasn’t certain, but I was sharp.
"rastsvetali yabloni i gruşi
paplıli tumanı nad rekoy
vıhodila na bereg katyuşa
na vısokii bereg na krutoy"
III. South
Istanbul. The city of our struggles, our madness, our fated destinies. Dark days, difficult days. I am in disarray, worse yet, the city seems scattered as well. However, I hadn’t come on a hazel day.
I fast forward a bit here.
“A warm evening in Selimiye. I shot my first short film in April 2019. I didn’t become a good photographer; I don’t know if I’ll become a filmmaker. I’ve grown a bit more; there is still much to learn. I don’t know if we’ll win. The poetry continues.”
I wrote this in July 2019. It was on the last page of the notebook I kept while in Armenia. On the previous page, I had talked about my search in photography, ending with the question “Will we win?” Evidently, much later (during the depressive days when I was surviving with montage of the film), I somehow came across the notebook and felt the need to answer that question. Ignoring the harmony and continuity between the two pages, I briefly and “simply” ended the notebook.
Now, back in time.
Once again, farewells, some regrets, and heartbreaks conclude an adventure. It’s time to move on. I pull myself together…Photography, like an unforgettable old darling, occasionally comes and goes in my life. As for cinema, I’m more enthusiastic about it than ever, and slowly, I start to believe I can actually make films. In the social turmoil of difficult days, a news story I read shakes me. This should be a film, I tell myself. Months of screenwriting begin, followed by the reality of the financial conditions required for filmmaking, and inevitably, a long period of trying to find funding. I’m about to complete a year with these thoughts and efforts when I watch a film (2).
And bam!
My world stops again. This feeling is familiar from somewhere, much like the upheaval I experienced after watching the film recommended by my comrade years ago. Only this time it’s more serious; I think my feet are firmly planted on the ground… Knowing doesn’t help; I’m left shattered once more. It feels like a magical film that defies my every attempt to understand or analyze it.
“The effect is certain but unlocatable; it does not find its sign…”
Its understated magnificence (yet not fitting into minimalism), its strange fluidity of storytelling (yet not as a primary element), its characters who effortlessly roam from death to life (yet not in a fifth dimension), its frames that disregard blind spaces (yet not retreating to photography), its unexpected cuts (yet not for shock value), its sounds that seek no owner (yet not surprises).
The film settles over me like a ghost from beyond, and I don’t recover for a long time. As days pass, the film unfolds layer by layer before me. Most of all, it brings back memories of my childhood. Mystical stories my grandfather told my mother when she was a child, and which my mother told me, stories only the faithful could believe —people who roamed freely from death to life, worlds where time and space twisted, and ancient Anatolian belief encompassing return to life, rebellion, and everything else. It's like the film seems to piece together fragments buried in my memory. What follows is predictable: days, weeks, months spent on the director’s filmography… and some other ‘other’ filmmakers.
Now forward.
My dear screenwriter friend, unaware of the troubles ahead, who had taken on the production of my film, lifting a weight heavier than herself, though she didn’t know much about these things either, but who finally, after years of standing together, said, “Let’s make this film!” We’re talking production matters one evening before the set. I don’t remember exactly what, but a conversation related to those mystical stories I mentioned above arises.What follows are talks, debates, ideas stretching till morning… We decide to write a screenplay; a modern family curse story rooted in ancient Anatolian beliefs. In the fervor of creating a new idea and story, we act quickly. Just days before, I’d learned of a ritual taking place in a small Anatolian village. I’ll go, talk to the elders there, and find answers to questions crucial for the story’s development. The plan is clear; first we’ll shoot the film, then work on the new script.
"At the time (at the beginning of this book: already far away) when I was inquiring into my attachment to certain photographs, I thought I could distinguish a field of cultural interest (the studium) from that unexpected flash which sometimes crosses this field and which I called the punctum. I now know that there exists another punctum (another "stigmatum") than the "detail." This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme ("that-has-been"), its pure representation."
This is how Barthes describes the second punctum. Unlike the form discussions in the first part, Camera Lucida’s second section begins with death. Perhaps due to the weight of death, he speaks little of frames, details within the frame, gaps, and messiness. The birth moment of the pose (past tense), the absolute past of the pose (imperfect tense), and the encounter of gaze with the photograph (present tense) weave new stitches, but this time from beneath the fabric.
"In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W. H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake."
The following lines strike me as the punctum of the text itself, piercing me like an arrow: “The vertigo of defeat by Time.” How else could it be said?
I arrive at the snow-covered village before noon. It is customary to host a distant guest in a spacious room (whose window faces the village road and reminds me of other roads). After warming myself by the stove for a few hours, I set out for the first of the three day ceremonies. Again, the bone-chilling cold, again the harshness of the steppe… With my camera, my notebook, and my effort to be a ghost, I sit in a corner, waiting for the ritual to begin. Night falls, the gathering grows, and the water begins to flow. I witness scenes reminiscent of my childhood —things that do not align with the tangible reality of the material world but that reach a transcendent, almost ecstatic state if one lets oneself go to the rhythm with a third eye. Questions, the script, the thought of making a film… All of it slips away, and I take photos. It’s as if that’s the only reason I came here… as if only by taking photos can I let myself go to the flow. The more I try to perceive and understand, the more I realize I cannot. “I must shoot while I still can,” I tell myself, without really knowing what I’m shooting.
"Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant. The past is but a prefiguration of the future. No event is irreversible and no transformation is final. In a certain sense, it is even possible to say that nothing new happens in the world, for everything is but the repetition of the same primordial archetypes; this repetition, by actualizing the mythical moment when the archetypal gesture was revealed, constantly maintains the world in the same auroral instant of the beginnings. Time but makes possible the appearance and existence of things. It has no final influence upon their existence, since it is itself constantly regenerated."
This is what Mircea Eliade says in The Myth of the Eternal Return, explaining modern societies’ need for mythology, and how people in modern society give a cyclical direction to time through rituals, ceremonies, gatherings that refer to the cosmogonic creation, where the modern is replaced by the archaic, and time is suspended. Rituals, he says, are repetitions of the mythical time in the present. Is this really so? If it is, was the time I was in a mythical time? And was I, as a photographer, capturing photos of a mythical time? In that case, did thousands of years not enter between the moment the photos were taken and the moment of encountering them? Wasn’t the vertigo of defeat by time just that?
My heart resists saying I don’t know; I choose the side of poetry.
At noon, I ask my questions by the stove. Just as I am warmed by the excitement of my questions and the stove’s fire, I am met with an unexpected response: “How could it be like that… We’re in the 21st century; it’s a very conservative approach. First belief, then human…”
The family curse, the script, childhood memories, realms of life and death, returning to roots, vertigo, suspended time… Everything crumbles. It hits like a solid slap across my face. I immediately pick up the phone: “The story’s structure has collapsed. The film won’t work this way, and pretending it would isn’t right for us.” My screenwriter friend is very calm: “It’s okay. While you’re there, make the most of the time, don’t think about the script anymore,” she says. A subtle disappointment, a form of modern times defeat. Luckily, it doesn’t last long; photography holds my hand.
Life is sometimes like that. An unexpected encounter, or a long-anticipated meeting that never quite happens. I believe that I’ve grown a bit more.
“I've traveled in devotion for fourteen thousand years
I've heard the name of truth in madness
I've drunk the wine in the state of ecstasy
I was called to account in the assembly of the Forty Saints.”
IV. From the East
Cold again. But not the kind that chills to the bone this time. In contrast to this indecisive cold, the film(3) opens with a self-assured sun. People walking along a broad avenue’s sidewalk, observed by a camera. Cut. People enjoying themselves at a concert, observed by a camera. Cut. A typical village scene; a man passing by an ancient tree with a horse-drawn cart, observed by a camera. Cut.
Right at the beginning of the film, these long, non dialogue shots that calmly capture the ordinariness of daily life draw me in. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such films, I think, and thoughts of my own projects come to mind; sleepiness begins to set in… Somewhere between drifting off and following the film… I notice that the sun has disappeared, snow has begun, and the film’s season has aligned with mine. Then, slowly, my eyes open wide, sleep vanishes along with the sun. City to city, country to country, the camera’s eye becomes my eye. My life blends into the film…
Here, I rewind one last time. Every step forward will now be a step toward the beginning.
I thought about this for a while before starting this piece. Partly because I no longer write outside my own projects (not as a matter of principle, but simply because writing in public spaces has grown distant to me) and partly because discussing the film that prompted me to write this would be in complete without recounting the long periods described above —and if I did recount them, I wasn’t sure how to handle the length. When my attempts not to write began to hurt, I decided to start. This is neither a film critic, nor a conceptual discussion, nor a comprehensive life story. It is, humbly, the pouring out of connections, places, people, emotions, films, and photographs I’ve made along my journey, intertwined with this film.
Now time for forward; to the beginning.
The illusion of light ends, and I throw myself into the cold streets. My mind is both full of so many things and yet, in a definitive sense, empty.
Again, once more. Bam!
How to explain the essence of the film, I ask myself (now, in here). The frames, the photographs, the long takes, the silences, those who look straight into my eyes, the defeats, the victories, the exiles, returning to roots, winter chaos, the Soviets, snow-covered roads, fur hats, coats, Pa-russki, trains, stations, and so many other things… One way or another, I feel compelled to express this vertigo I’ve experienced. I share a story on Instagram. I receive a message saying, “It’s the best film in the world.” She’s exaggerating, I think, but no, she’s right. What can a film do to a person, other than what I’ve felt?
Step by step, I go.
Documentary photographs are mostly studium. They freeze the moment of exposure, speak of time, place, and people, and their signs pertain to information. Looking at such photos, you gain knowledge. Just like this film.
Some documentary photographs, however, are punctum. A detail within the frame escapes and pierces you like an arrow. The effect is certain but unlocatable. You might say it’s because of a certain detail, but it’s hard to know exactly what part of you it has struck. Just like this film.
Some documentary photographs have this punctum in a simple frame, while others in a crowded one. Sometimes you look for it in the empty spaces, sometimes in the details. In either case, the effect is sure. Just like this film.
Some photographs liberate themselves from the burden of words written to explain them and the information contained within the frame; they simplify, abstract, but remain documentary photos nonetheless. They stand before you, with either grandeur or savagery, pulling you into a vertigo or a stomach ache. At this point, poetry may be mentioned. Just like this film.
Creating moving images with a well-designed mise-en-scène, or with the natural mise-en-scène of raw reality, in long takes is no easy feat. Whether documentary or fiction, only good films achieve good mise-en-scène. Just like this film.
Looking at certain photographs, you can tell the photographer was standing in the wrong spot. They might be either too distant, perhaps due to hesitation, or too close, disrespecting the intimate space. The same applies to documentary film. Being both respectful and close is something only good films manage. Just like this film.
In the 90s, as capitalism declared victory, many films looked at the fallen Soviets as a defeated socialist idea. But some films simply wish to understand, to see what remains, not out of partisanship but out of respect for history. Just like this film.
You can watch many films that stand out due to their story, regie, cinematography, montage, performances, or music (this list can go on). Most films can be good because of one or more of these elements. Some may even be great because all these elements are excellent; you call them a perfect film. But certain films resist such evaluation through these elements. Not because they play tricks to prevent it, but because even if you wanted to, you couldn’t do it. They don’t fit anywhere; they don’t take shape. Just like this film.
It’s rare in fiction films to see characters looking directly at the camera; in documentaries, however, it’s common. But very few films resist avoiding piercing stares, continuing to stay there despite knowing it will wound both themselves and their viewers. With standing piercing stares without flinching is a trait only good films possess. Just like this film.
In certain documentary photographs and documentaries, you simultaneously consider the moment the shot was taken and the time of your own gaze. For those you see, you think, “They have died, and they will die.” You think of others’ lives, their daily lifes, loves, and deaths. Just like this film.
Verbal communication can be challenging; non-verbal communication is even harder —it requires patience, understanding, and finesse. You may watch many films without dialogue (except silent cinema). But very few films refrain from presenting the lack of dialogue as a merit. Just like this film.
A photograph or a film can hit you right where it hurts. It becomes a burden you carry, a shadow larger than itself, and in the end, you seek ways to reconcile with it. Not because you think you’ll be freed from it, but because you want to keep going. But then again, only a unique film can make you write about it. Just like this film.
The poetry
continues.
Films
1) Eternity and a Day (1998) by Theodoros Angelopoulos
2) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
3) From the East (1993) by Chantal Akerman