2014 | Landskrona Foto – Focus: Turkey

This past exhibit can be a starting point to look more into the photos of the exhibited artists.

Press release Landskrona Foto – Focus: Turkey

“Focus: Turkey” is part of a long-term venture in which Landskrona Foto will present a different country’s photography to the Swedish public each year. This summer’s photo exhibition in Landskrona – “Focus: Turkey” (26 June–26 August, 2014) – offers an exciting meeting with a country that is rich in photography but unknown to many people, located on the boundary between Europe and Asia, and with room for both classical documentary photography and innovative contemporary art … 

Ara Güler (1928–) is Turkey’s internationally best known twentieth-century photographer. He has belonged to the respected photographers’ collective Magnum, and as a photo journalist he has made countless reportage trips around the world for publications including Life, Paris Match and The Sunday Times. But it is the pictures of the city where he was born that make him one of today’s most important “ramblers with a camera” and given him the nickname he bears with pride – “The Eye of Istanbul”. Ara Güler’s pictures have never before been shown in Scandinavia. 

Yildiz Moran (1932–1995) was Turkey’s first academically trained female photographer. Despite the fact that she has only been active for a decade, she is among the most important names in the history of Turkish photography, with her unique and lyrical way of taking photographs. Old meets new in Landskrona. 

Fifteen present-day Turkish photographers – including Gözde Türkkan (1984–), Kerem Ozan Bayraktar (1984–), Sevim Sancaktar (1983–) and Ali Alışır (1978–) – challenge the limits of photography in an exciting collaboration with the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, which is reckoned today as perhaps the most important art scene in the new Turkey. 

The Swede Vilhelm Berggren (1835–1920) represents the first century of photography. He sought his fortune abroad, came to Constantinople in 1866 and quickly established himself as one of the city’s great photographers, changing his name to Guillaume Berggren. He documented Turkey in a time of change, and he is reckoned today as one of the pioneers of Turkish photography. Pictures from the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul, which rescued much of Berggren’s treasury of photographs in the 1920s, shed new light on a Swede who is little known today. 

Lütfi Özkök (1923–) also has his roots in Istanbul, but since the early 1950s he has been working in Stockholm. He is best known for his portraits of authors and for a photographic idiom that is close to poetry. With his sensitive camera, he has taken portraits of more than 30 Nobel laureates in literature. 

Finn Larsen (1956–) is a Danish photographer based in Malmö, who has taken photographs in Turkey since the early 1980s. He seeks to engage in an open dialogue with the surrounding world and how it is understood – while at the same time he indirectly challenges our common beliefs. His work in Turkey has resulted in several books and a number of exhibitions. “Artist in residence.” Landskrona Foto also invites a photographer from the highlighted country to work as artist in residence for a period in Landskrona. The result will be presented in connection with next year’s festival. 

This year’s artist in residence is Coskun Aral, who is a well-known Turkish photo journalist with assignments all over the world and who has worked for magazines like Time, Newsweek, Paris Match and Stern. “Artistic Meeting Young Photographers from Turkey and Sweden.” With the support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and in collaboration with Galleri Breadfield in Malmö, a meeting will also be held between four Turkish photographers and Swedish photographers during the festival week, followed by participation in the seminar and the festival. 

“Focus: Turkey” will take place in a 200-year-old building with an area of 600 square metres a stone’s throw from Landskrona Museum, Landskrona Art Gallery and the Citadel. It will also be possible here to enjoy Turkish coffee and buy and browse among Turkish and Swedish photo books. The exhibition will be crowned with a seminar on 21 August about Turkish photography, with participants from Istanbul Modern and elsewhere, and the following day sees the start of Landskrona Photo Festival (22–24 August), which will mark the end of the summer’s photographic events in Skåne’s new “photo city”. 

For more information contact Janne Jönsson exhibition manager at Landskrona Museum and curator of the exhibition 0418 47 05 75 janne.jonsson(at)landskrona(dot)se