13 12 viewer. Yet Suner’s choice of locations, his framing decisions, and the conspicuous presence of modern elements that visibly disrupt any stable sense of historicity in many images — contemporary urban specters seeping in from the edges of the frame, or technological infrastructures overtly dominating the composition — imply that When resists such easy readings. The relationship to historicity here is too layered and complex to be contained within familiar nostalgic patterns. Suner’s photographs, while engaging openly with nineteenth-century urban views produced for commercial purposes as well as with photographic tradition, technology, and archival memory, nonetheless demand a more critical and questioning gaze from the viewer through their temporal ambiguities, contradictions, and dissonances. Of course, such a demand presupposes that the works achieve a level of technical mastery capable of standing in dialogue with their nineteenth-century counterparts. At this point, it is important to acknowledge the craftsmanship and labor of Kerim Suner and the 1851.studio team (in particular Hande Varsat and Duygu Duymazlar), and to recognize their sensitivity to the medium and their dedication to its material processes. The photographs in the When series are the joint product of Kerim Suner, the initiator of this artistic endeavor, and the liquid intelligence of the ambrotype process, along with a range of variable techno-material conditions that actively shape the process. It is possible to trace on the surface of these works the specific constraints of photography, a medium that has long claimed to offer a direct and faithful representation of reality, while never fully succeeding in doing so. These traces are especially evident in the conditions particular to the wet ambrotype process: the shimmering, iridescent fluidity of the ambrotype, which recalls the Ottoman observers’ description of the daguerreotype as a “flirtatious mirror”,10 the inversion of the image when captured on black glass,11 the irregularity of the image’s edges; the ragged contours formed by the collodion layer coating the glass; the deep darkness beyond the limits of the lens; the neutral whiteness of unretouched skies; and, finally, a pervasive sense of desolation, emptiness, and timelessness produced by a technology insensitive to speed and movement. These are among the defining marks of the process. Some of these constraints directly determine the texture and content of the final image; some are related to the threshold of detectability of the apparatus itself, while others stem from the chemical nature of the process, with its inherent surprises, mode of temporal organization, rhythm, and patterns.12 10 The description “flirtatious mirror” (cilvegîr mir’at) was used in 1839 in the Ottoman official gazette Takvim-i Vekayi to describe the daguerreotype at the time of its invention. See Takvim-i Vekayi (19 Sha‘ban 1266 [28 October 1839]). For a modern Turkish transcription of the text, see Alberto Modiano, Basında Fotoğraf Yazıları Kılavuzu (Istanbul, 1991), 13–15. 11 Ambrotype images made on black glass appear inverted; however, some of Suner’s photographs in this series are made on clear glass whose emulsion side is coated with asphaltum. In these cases, because the viewer sees the image from the back side, the image appears in its correct orientation. The result is that, due to differing finishing techniques, some photographs appear mirrored while others do not. 12 For the temporal dynamics of technical media and the concept of “machinic time,” see Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis, 2013). In the When series, the liquid production technique of photography generates a pronounced sense of historicity, rendering everyday cityscapes that are in some cases highly familiar suddenly dubious and unknown. Recorded landscapes and monuments are displaced from contemporary perception through history’s estranging effect. Streets emptied of crowds, city walls aligned with the romantic tradition of ruins, a still Bosphorus devoid of maritime traffic (and perhaps a single seagull captured only because it happened to fly against the wind), and many other familiar corners of the city are portrayed through photography’s immobilizing and desolating force, and turned into objects of inquiry with uncertain temporal attributes (Figure 3, see p. 31). In some images, this estrangement even pushes the landscape toward the edges of the uncanny and the unsettling. For example, the panoramic view from Karlıtepe, with its encompassing perspective, the deep, near-black vegetation in the right-hand corner, and the silvery surface of the Bosphorus extending inward, draws on visual elements we readily associate with historical panoramic photography (Figure 4, see pp. 96–98). Yet this Bosphorus view, conventionally expected to be pastoral, acquires a darker and more sinister character through the blurring effect of air pollution and the overwhelming presence of modern urban development crowding the horizon. In fact, “When” is a vital inquiry which encapsulates the fundamental temporal tension inherent to photography itself, one that touches its very essence. Even if we have grown accustomed to it, we know well that the “magic” of photography lies in its ability to freeze and suspend time. Beyond this, however, as Roland Barthes famously observed, one of photography’s defining features is the temporal overlap it produces: each photograph has the ability to fuse a vanished instant, when light reflected off an object and adhered to a chemical surface, with the present moment of viewing, creating a layered, laminated temporal structure.13 In Suner’s work, this layering becomes even more complex, as it incorporates both the historicity of monuments that have accumulated and preserved material traces of time, and the historicity of nineteenthcentury photographic technology itself, discernible in its dominant visual codes. Taken as a whole, the When series interweaves the sense of atemporality (or temporal indeterminacy) mentioned above, with a rich layering of temporal references, drawing the viewer into a reflective and ambivalent experience of time. In this experience, the deep Paleolithic time of the Yarımburgaz Cave merges with the near time of Levent skyscrapers, the Bosphorus Bridge, traffic lights, and bodies of scrap minibuses, which all merge with the fluid time of wet collodion. If we consider the word “When” as a question, any definitive answer would disrupt the very enchantment of the workings of photography. Perhaps one can only say this much as an answer: when the fluid time of photography meets its liquid intelligence. 13 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Fotoğraf Üzerine Düşünceler (trans. Reha Akçakaya) (Istanbul, 2014). Figure 3 Fissured Tower #14 2023 28 x 35 cm Ambrotype Figure 4 Panorama from Karlıtepe #01 2022 15 x 35 cm each Ambrotype
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzQ3NDc=