Photography Series, New Normal

Part I: 2014-2016
Part II: 2017-2019
Part III: 2020-2022

Another crucial image from the series is ‘New Normal #2755. A retaining wall with reinforced concrete panels used in the construction of intersections under Ankara Street. İzmir. (2017)’ This image shows a retaining wall pattern and one of the basic elements for the infrastructure. This pattern can be seen everywhere around Turkey in the last decade.

I practiced captioning as a strategy in my work. The photographs are titled with the meta information in terms of position of the object and its relations with the background. It is a counterfeit meta data, which includes information from various places, such as GPS coordinates, exact time information, and other EXIF data, which is taken from the camera. It is not the same captioning system for each image. Some images contain information of the background, while the other ones are only pointing out the characteristics of the object itself. By doing that, I am not only describing the image with a cold scientific tone, but I am trying to keep the definition as a note for myself.

I started the ‘New Normal’ project six years ago for a personal demand for an exploration of the urban environment from the eyes of inhabitants. Over time, the project evolved exponentially. It contains research on urban politics, visual anthropology, and politics of spatial relations.

My personal experience with my project was to build up a right perspective to the reality of the world I was living in, which is advertised otherwise. In the first place, I was thinking of practicing a plain urban exploration, but eventually, I realized it might be something bigger than I thought. It is already 5000 images in the archive and it is constantly growing as well as constructing itself in the context of different subjects around urban regeneration. From the recent political situations, I started to think these images might be a manifestation that announces the end of an era, which we are living in right now.

References:

- Davis, M. (2007). Planet of slums. London: Verso, 11-19. Stallabrass, J. (2004).
- Art incorporated: the story of contemporary art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 94-95.

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