Çamdibi Project:
A Long Term Visual Exploration

Photography Series, Photobook
2015

Self Published, 120 Pages, Edition of 3
16×22CM

Çamdibi Project is a photo book of a visual exploration between 2014 and 2015 of my neighborhood; Çamdibi, İzmir.

The last several years I was pondering to understand where I am coming from, where my roots are, and how to tell them as a visual story. It was as much important as anything else in my life. Comprehending the idea of storytelling for me begins parallel to understand my neighborhood visually. The neighborhood is called Çamdibi, on the Turkish side of the beautiful coastal line of the Aegean Sea, İzmir.

Çamdibi Project Series
Çamdibi Project Series

Çamdibi Project is about the possibility of a critic for the new neo-liberal world. The idea of the world stuck in 'vertical and horizontal unhappiness of space and time,' as the Turkish poet Turgut Uyar said. That may be about losing the idea of the world itself. It could contains gravity, nature, or like the basic human fundamentals; joy, anger, and sadness in common sense.

Çamdibi Project Series

In Marc Augé's text, 'Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity', it is discussed that places like shopping malls, airports, or underground metro stations are not 'place' anymore. They must be called a 'non-place.' From that perspective, a neighborhood may be 'the place' with all of the possibilities and the anti-space for the city or the negative, and the unseen for it. From this context, although Çamdibi still has this idea and connections with the center, highly unlikely becoming the city center itself. That atmosphere creates some kind of confusion in people's minds about the idea of the new one with the politics of gentrification which is the same pattern easily to be found in the rest of 2015's Turkey.

For me, Çamdibi is standing there like an observable model that slowly changes each day like a never ending visual story either will turn into a dystopia or an utopia.

Çamdibi Project Series
Çamdibi Project Series
Çamdibi Project Series
Çamdibi Project Series

© BURAK DİKİLİTAŞ — 2023