Last week I received this gorgeous book from Metehan Özcan. It is a truly inspiring book, well printed and a great selection of his work.
“In his exhibition named as “Vacuum”, Metehan Ozcan focuses on abandoned spaces. The houses, streets, and parks in Ozcan’s photographs are haunted by a subject who has left; in other words they are under the influence of a vacuum of the absent subject. Even if these images do not contain a single human figure, they tell various stories. Astoundingly, Ozcan’s photographs, do not give references to despair, melancholia or nostalgia. At first glance, these images where the traces of subjectivity are submitted to the mercy of silence, darkness, humidity and dust may appear as a requiem for the modern space; but then again, Ozcan’s perspective constructs a reality in which “the return of the repressed” and “the immanent uncanniness of the space” are embraced. An after hour darkness, silence and stillness of a fairground which can only exist with the light, joy and laughter; or the house which submits itself to the growing jungle that it had been externalizing since from its very foundation do not signify “the death of the space”, but celebrate an “other” kind of “rebirth” with a new face.”
