In an earlier abstract on the topic, i mentioned a quote from Orhan Pamuk in which he describes Huzun as a ‘collective’ feeling of melancholy experienced and shared by all Istanbullus. What i neglected to mention, however, is that in the same book, ‘Istanbul: memories and the city”, Orhan dedicates an entire chapter to the interpretation of Istanbul and its numerous dialectics in black and white. According to Orhan, this exercise performs a distillation of sorts on istanbul and produces an interpretation which is the very essence of istanbul.
On carrying out this exercise i came to realize that this was insightful on several levels.
It tries to lay the inner contradictions of a notion bare, and, in turn, build a different meaning from that. It is at once a process of destruction and construction.
It brings about the possibility of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. Here that heritage being the original images of representation of istanbul.
The images to start with were an Istanbullus interpretation of Istanbul and by carrying out this exercise, i created my interpretation of that interpretation. Hence, producing something very different from what i had at the start.
Yet one cannot deny the multiplicity of dialectics present in Istanbul, so much so they are often described as innumerable. I thus selected a set of these images to each of which i ascribed one of these dialectics which i felt was vividly present in the image.
The result was an intriguing situation in which the resultant image could easily be perceived as one opposite or the other of this dialectic based on the interpretation of the viewer, almost like a rorschach, ink blot test.
Not entirely dissimilar from the Heideggerian notion of ‘under erasure’. To write 'Under erasure' is to write a word, cross it out, and then print both word and deletion. The word is inaccurate, hence the cross, yet the word is necessary.
By allowing the viewer interpret these images for himself, there is an added layer of dissociation which resulted in a richer material for me to translate into cryengine.
The sequence is;
Istanbul : Photographers interpretation : My interpretation : Viewers interpretation
