Fault Lines Turkey

For our final visit to Turkey, another mention for George Georgiou's excellent Fault Lines, now available as a book. I like the way that Georgiou tries to unravel the idealised Turk to reveal the ethnic mix that makes up the supposedly monocultural, secular (but 99% Islam, which is being a bit uninclusive to the atheists of Turkey) nation which was once something quite different. How it moved from that different place to what it is today, Georgiou answers through the places he photographs and the strategies he chooses along the way.

George Georgiou

I interviewed George Georgiou for the BJP last month. Below is the text and you can see the images in a pdf George made of the piece here

‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk’

“When you first arrive in a place, you are so informed by images you have already seen that it is a burden you have to lose,” says George Georgiou, the London-based photographer who has recently returned from 8 years working in Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. “The next thing you do is look for difference, which is something else you need time to get over. Once you have done that, you start to look at what is familiar and then, and only, then can you appreciate what is different - because only then can you appreciate that it is really different.”

The differences of Turkey became apparent to Georgiou from the start of his four year residency in the country. Whilst working on a feature on where Europe ends and Asia begins. Georgiou quickly discovered the diversity of a country where the secular and religious, the military and the civil, the traditional and the modern coexist in an uneasy harmony. “To start to understand a place, you need to stay a long time,” says Georgiou. “So I started working on this idea of Turkey being the meeting point of east and west.”

The result of that work is Fault Lines, a book (to be published later in the year) that reveals the complexities of a country that is struggling to reconcile its multiple personalities. Taking centre stage in that work is the Turkish landscape. “We are used to seeing Istanbul or the Mediterranean resorts,” says Georgiou, “but most of Turkey is on a huge plateau above 1,000 m. I wanted to get this non-romantic version of Turkey where the landscape represents the harshness of its geography and its topographical place in the east.”

Continue reading here.

George Georgiou again

Last month, I had the pleasure to talk with George Georgiou for a story in this week's BJP. Like Jeffrey Silverthorne, Georgiou also touches on going beyond the familiar, something that has relevance both for his Turkish work and his images from public transport in the UK and Ukraine. Georgiou photographed from trams and buses in the Ukraine to get the idea of transition across, joining a long line of great photographers to work in the public transport field - Walker Evans, TomWood, Bill Sullivan, Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama and Luc Delahaye just a few who spring to mind.

Below Georgiou talks about the importance of finding, and losing, the familiar.

“When you first arrive in a place, you are so informed by images you have already seen that it is a burden you have to lose,” says George Georgiou, the London-based photographer who has recently returned from 8 years working in Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. “The next thing you do is look for difference, which is something else you need time to get over. Once you have done that, you start to look at what is familiar and then, and only, then can you appreciate what is different - because only then can you appreciate that it is really different.”

I'll put the full text up later. In the meantime, read more on Curious George Georgiou in this week's BJP.