* Geniş Açı – Photography Art Magazine, Subject of the file: Self-portrait, September-October 2000 Issue: 13, pg. 70-71, Istanbul
Before touching on the significance and importance for me of the self-portrait – or forward orientation – I should emphasize this point for those who do not know in which narrative language framework I use photography. By this I mean, if we are to assume that photography has a role in creating an object of art, I am not one of those who believe that art is the one-to-one production of objective reality and cannot be anything else. Instead of limiting the moment the photography presents technologically to the users, I have always aimed to view that moment, to make the photography that I have dreamed of as a fluid way of facing the other reality by combining the images of things that originate from the imagination, a dream or a subliminal impulse in the process, to create my own reality –just like in the theater-, and as Man Ray also said, to create an environment of freedom in which everything that is forbidden is made.
During my photography adventure, which started and is continuing in line with this viewpoint, sometimes the front facing orientation (the image facing the viewer) emerges in my work, as the dominant plastic element in the imaginary interpretation of a concept with a critical realistic attitude, as well as in subjective solutions. As is known, in general terms and when the display is evaluated from a scientific perspective, photography and all of the images forming it establish an indirect relationship with the viewer. In some of my work, I see and evaluate the forward orientation, which is seen as the dominant plastic element, as an effort of the image to establish a direct relationship with the viewer and on the other side as a cultural feature. This is because it is possible to encounter similar motifs and arrangements in other areas of our culture. The gaze of the image directly at the viewer, establishing direct contact with the viewer, is related to the use of space and spatial arrangement in our culture, and also symbolizes revealing the essence of the matter in the normal rhetoric of photography. That is why the work, including front facing orientation and those in which I use myself as an image, initiate collaboration; a dialogue established between the viewer and the subject or concept in its most vivid form and is one not based on words.