Ali Taptik (TR)

The image of Istanbul has long relied on a practice of nostalgia. Although a vital
contemporary city with a population of over ten million, its image is suff used with
its unusually long and glorious past as the seat of two empires for one and a half
millennia.
Unlike photographers of earlier generations, it is not this glamour which Ali Taptık
is after in his work. Like them, he looks at the city as a series of ruins, discovering
sublime moments in the urban maelstrom which surrounds us. Unlike the classical
notion of the sublime, in which the spectator seemingly disappears in the awe
experienced before a scene generally of nature or of grand ruins, here the urban
sublime is one which each participant in a contemporary megapolis potentially
faces: that of disappearing before the mundane machinations of traffi c and
crowds, poverty and lack of direction. The contemporary individual has lost control
of the world, even the world built by humans, and faces the city as one once faced
a chasm. The only remedy for this, perhaps, is one of representation, whether it be
political, or where that is lacking, in the image.