"Nostalgia and memory... are two things that somehow feed into each other… I started feeling under my skin that things have changed too much, too fast. And it brings a strange anxiety, a sense of loss… photography itself is a two-sided blade where you always have to deal with an event which you transform and make part of a history via transformation, so it is always subjective, it is always a construction… I [also] have another kind of memory which doesn’t belong to me, when I close my eyes I try to render how this place was 50 or 100 years ago.
I have a certain longing for the past, but I have to represent or capture this without romanticizing it. I can’t do this with singular images. With a constellation of images, I try to relate certain situations about particular places, and also to connect all these different urban areas to each other."
—Ali Taptık
Excerpt from Places of Memory / Hafıza Mekanları (Istanbul: İKSV, 2014): 33
I have a certain longing for the past, but I have to represent or capture this without romanticizing it. I can’t do this with singular images. With a constellation of images, I try to relate certain situations about particular places, and also to connect all these different urban areas to each other."
—Ali Taptık
Excerpt from Places of Memory / Hafıza Mekanları (Istanbul: İKSV, 2014): 33
Ali Taptık
Reform-Reset-Revisit, 2014
Lambda prints acrylic face-mount on aluminum composite panels
Each 60 x 60 cm
Reform-Reset-Revisit consists of a constellation of images. These are images of significant building details, works of architecture and urban areas, produced in a time interval from 1890 to the present day. A set of 60 buildings were documented for this project, presented here are 36 of those buildings.
