Ahmet Polat
Encyclopedia
Ahmet Polat is a Dutch-Turkish photographer living in Istanbul
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

. Polat has studied at the St. Joost Academy in Breda
Breda
Breda is a municipality and a city in the southern part of the Netherlands. The name Breda derived from brede Aa and refers to the confluence of the rivers Mark and Aa. As a fortified city, the city was of strategic military and political significance...

.
Ahmet Polat, recipient of ICP’s, International Center of Photography
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...

, “Young Photographer” award, is a photographer whose work questions preconceived notions.
His upbringing was the fusion of West and East. Born of a Dutch mother and Turkish father, he integrates both cultures. In the past 5 years he worked on commissions for cultural institutes and commercial companies, like the Istanbul Modern and MAVI jeans. Outside of Turkey his work is exhibited in France, Vienna, Germany, Malaysia, Holland and Belgium as well as published in French and Turkish Vogue, Paris Match, Marie Claire, Quest and Vice magazine. His latest work called "Kemal's Dream" is exhibited at FOAM
Foam
-Definition:A foam is a substance that is formed by trapping gas in a liquid or solid in a divided form, i.e. by forming gas regions inside liquid regions, leading to different kinds of dispersed media...

 museum in Amsterdam.

In 2006, Ahmet Polat won the ICP
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a photography museum, school, and research center in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States...

 Young Photographer Infinity Award.

Biography

Born of a Dutch mother and a Turkish father, growing up in a small village in the province of Brabant
North Brabant
North Brabant , sometimes called Brabant, is a province of the Netherlands, located in the south of the country, bordered by Belgium in the south, the Meuse River in the north, Limburg in the east and Zeeland in the west.- History :...

 (NL), Polat made photographing diversity his leitmotif. In 2005, shortly after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh
Theo van Gogh (film director)
Theodoor "Theo" van Gogh was a Dutch film director, film producer, columnist, author and actor.Van Gogh worked with the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the film Submission, which criticized the treatment of women in Islam and aroused controversy among Muslims...

, he decided to leave the Netherlands and settle in Istanbul.

To See The Invisible Man: by Orhan Cem Cetin.

One of the fundamental problems in photography is that to a very casual observer they all appear to be similar, their meaning and reasons for existence are subjected to the difficulty of visual clues. Thankfully the format, the show, the album in which images are collected and manage to breakthrough into the frame or the gallery wall makes ones job easier, it lifts the burden of sleuthing after such clues.

It is also a good idea to gather your evidence from the photographer’s full body of work. If one looks at each photograph as a letter, the exhibit as a word then the full archive should constitute a meaningful sentence.

Ahmet Polat regardless of his age and the short periods of time in which he composes his shows, is an amazingly accomplished photographer. Normally the work of an artist at his age would be messengers of things yet to come, hints to future accomplishments and signposts guiding one to a yet unknown body of work. They could very well be images which would latter be overlooked from a mature perspective as youthful indiscretions. But Ahmet Polat’s works for some time has not needed such patronizing niceties. If anything they are deserving of the respect of serious critique. One should overlook any matter of his age when confronted with these images, as this would be the greatest injustice. While viewing this exhibit, one should also be familiar with his earlier works, his brutal sincerity, his good natured interest in the human condition and social dynamics, but most important of all is that one should be aware of the obvious bond of trust that he creates between his subjects and his camera.

At the very least in Turkey, images of VIP’s are always subject to either a sort of truce or have mutually accepted rules of engagement. Maybe for the first time Ahmet Polat breaks this cease fire and moves through parties, private soirees and special occasions as an invisible man. He approaches his subjects with the same sensibility and candor as he always does. He does not attempt to either deify or pity his subjects nor to create an alternate reality. He just shares with sincerity. He shares with us peaks and plateaus, moments that one might pretend not to be familiar with. While doing this he skillfully avoids the pitfalls of sycophancy and keeps his distance, he seals himself off and not his subjects.

His snapshot esthetic, cuts through the carefully choreographed theatrical ambiance of these stages, while leaving behind enough clues to the true nature of the space. The raw, un-centered localized flash and his off the hip framing, creates an uncanny sense of the familiar which pulls the viewer in. Although the fact that there is no eye contact with the lens keeps us grounded in the reality of the environment and preserves the distance from the VIP section.

The select people that we see in the photographs are the primary target audience of this show, but these frames are very possibly the first honest witnesses of these candid moments. This seesaw of values is not standard in such subject matter. This is one reason why I would be very interested in hearing the commentary of the viewers and the debate that is sure to ensue between various people of diverse economic backgrounds.

A short time ago I had the opportunity to overhear an interview with Ahmet on the eve of his receiving the ICP, Infinity Award. The fundamental yet banal question he was asked was most likely along the lines of “What is photography?” After a short pause he answered “Photography is a very, very big thing for me”.

Yes “Ars longa, vita brevis ” and photography is truly a very big thing. We can also say that Ahmet Polat is already a very big photographer even though he may not achieve the photographers utopia “To change the world” he manages to transform irreversibly those that meet him and his works.

Orhan Cem Çetin
Photographer, Lecturer
Istanbul Bilgi University
Istanbul Bilgi University
Istanbul Bilgi University is a private, non-profit university in Istanbul, Turkey. It was actually established in 1994 under the name ISIS , but its name was changed to Istanbul Bilgi University with the foundation of the school on June 7, 1996...


Work

Rebound of the Gaze: the Photographs of Ahmet Polat ; by Dr. Wendy M.K. Shaw

I often notice that all forms of nationalism seem to have passed me by: whether supporting a team, feeling part of a nation, or declaring a religion, I find myself with no desire to pick a side. I used to see this as a product of birth compounded by experience: half this and half that nationally and religiously, people have always seemed eager to either tell me I was foreign or, if accepting me, let me know that this was a signal of their own broad mindedness. I particularly resented the repetition of Noah’s ark when it came to dating and marriage, since so many of my friends ultimately chose to mate with their own ethnic, religious, and class species. However, as I’ve grown older, if not wiser, I have discovered that the state of being in between is not only one that one is born into, but which one can also grow into through experience: through education, immigration, or simply individualism. So many people are foreign, or feel foreign, when one scratches the superficial practices which produce collective identity. The difference for those of us of mixed heritage, even more for those of mixed race, is that we wear our foreignness where it is readily visible, and where people often feel compelled to confront it immediately upon meeting. The fulcrum between hiding and revelation of identity sits in a different place than for those who are more clearly part of defined communities. And yet we all produce our communities, including those of us who are mixed, either double or in-between, both local and always foreign in every community to which we belong.
The photographs of Ahmet Polat, a Dutch photographer born in 1978 to a Turkish father and a Dutch mother, capture this space between belonging and being foreign, the simultaneous act of going and coming. This seemingly contradictory activity takes place both in the production of the photographs and in the images themselves. Like many photographers, Ahmet is a wanderer, attempting to understand the world by capturing it in instantaneous glimpses. Yet at the same time, his photographs refuse this curiosity. They turn back on him as well as on us, the viewers; they look not only back at us, but also in many other different directions, asking more questions than they answer.
His early body of work documents his return to the Turkish village of Çakal Koy near the city of Gaziantep, where his grandfather was born, and to the city of Yalova, where his relatives were among tens of thousands who suffered through the devastating earthquake of 1999. This work reflects a quest for lost identity, a recuperation of an unknown past. It is as though his father – who left the family when he was a teenager - was one of those who walked away along the road portrayed in one of his photographs. [Figure 1] However, his father’s experience is not his own and they he cannot partake of another’s memories. The gaze of someone from two cultures is always double: at once foreign yet comprehending of the myriad cultural signs around him; at once understood as foreign, rejected, yet simultaneously taken in, embraced. Unlike a casual traveler, when Ahmet returns to Turkey, he knows what he sees: the villagers of Gaziantep, as well as the people he stays with in Yalova, are relatives. Yet just as he does not bear the calloused hands of a farmer or suffer the crashing concrete of a home lost in a devastating earthquake, his relatives share neither his Dutch home nor language, nor his ambivalent sense of being foreign at home - wherever he lives. EXAMPLES Both the relatives and the photographer seem familiar to each other yet they are also ciphers. They magnify the uncanny relationship between those we know but cannot always understand, as well as the surprising familiarity and comfort we can sometimes find in the casual glance of a stranger.
His photographs approach the status of documents, promising added knowledge of the unknown. It almost seems as if they could fill in the blank wooden map of Turkey shown in one of his photographs, a map which both the foreigner and the child born abroad share. But like the stranger whom we gradually come to know, his images ultimately present increasingly complex questions which photographs cannot help always leaving unanswered. These are not simply anthropological questions of “who?” and “why?” which might be explained away by stories or customs, but more profound issues structured by the photographs themselves. In one of his earliest photographs, openings along a street – dark doorways and windows – become frames for odd moments of life: a woman examining the bottom of her shoe, a man smoking and looking out of a basement window, rolled carpets out of place, sitting on a chair on the sidewalk and, amidst it all, a girl holding a ball and looking at the camera, as though playing catch with the photographer. Here the gaze itself becomes like a ball which the subject catches and, in the next instant, will throw back. With it, she threatens to shatter the lens and the power through which it produces knowledge for the viewer. Similarly, sitting in the back of a car, the photographer looks out the front window, ignored by the driver captured in profile in the rear-view mirror, but caught in the act of peeking by the child who, rather than sitting properly in the car looking forward, instead looks back at the camera. As in the image of the shadow of a child and a ball between two shuttered windows, the photograph captures the instant of the rebound. This rebound is caught repeatedly in numerous images: by walls which point to a winding tree and the embrace of two men; by the outstretched arms of a proud man holding a cigar and wearing a cowboy hat; by the lines of a football field which point towards and away from a boy sitting at their corner, out of focus and eyes closed; and by the walls of a building which bend away from the shadow of a tree.
Not limited by these simple compositional devices, this rebound reappears in Polat’s frequent use of mirrors and lights which confuse the direction in which we, the viewer, are supposed to look, sending our own gaze elsewhere. A mirror positioned over a bending child reflects the sky, as if it were laundry hung to dry, or as if it were a broken window, threatening to crash down, or as if it were her freedom, if only she turned around and looked up. Yet it is the photographer’s mirror which plays with our understanding, forcing us to imagine beyond the frame of the image. Through the mirror, a wall becomes a window, enabling us to gaze at a small coffee house without being seen. Boys become caught in their own vanity as they evaluate a haircut. Men surround a television which shines forth without an image, like a flash bulb popping as a picture is taken of us, the viewers, catching us as unaware as the subjects in his photographs. Like the people in many of Polat’s group photographs, we begin to look every which way, and in doing so, begin to look beyond the limits of the frame of the photograph.
The photographer arrives, sees, but does not conquer. Instead, he wanders away, having interacted with the world both for himself and on our behalf. He leaves the scene as he entered, neither a blank slate nor a scholar. He has paused to capture not what he sees, but to capture other people engaged in looking: engaged, actually, in life. We may empathize with these lives, but they remain outside our experience, rendering the photograph as opaque as it is transparent, a door as much as a window. It is good to remember this lest we expect photographs to reveal so much about their subjects that they give us as viewers a sense of command over the lives of others. As Ahmet Polat shifts from an examination of his personal history towards multiple arenas ranging from fashion to environment - both inside and beyond his homelands -he is no longer limited by the dilemma of identity. Rather he has been empowered by its placement of him on a boundary between empathy and exclusion – wherever he may wander.

In 2008, he was portraited for the Dutch cultural television-magazine, Van Hier Tot Tokyo.

Both in his autonomous and commercial work, Polat's signature is evident: meticulous in composition, enigmatic in content, and expressing an overall warm-hearted curiosity for human relations.

Motivated to show the traditional and the modern life of his father's country, Polat can be found working both in the outskirts of Turkey and among the high-society of Istanbul. In October 2008, the French edition of Vogue
Vogue (magazine)
Vogue is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that is published monthly in 18 national and one regional edition by Condé Nast.-History:In 1892 Arthur Turnure founded Vogue as a weekly publication in the United States. When he died in 1909, Condé Montrose Nast picked up the magazine and slowly began...

magazine published an article with Polat's view of Istanbul.

Since 1999, Polat has participated in more than 20 exhibitions, at galleries including Stroom (The Hague), RAM (Rotterdam), Karsi Sanat (Istanbul) and Galeri X-ist (Istanbul). In 2007, he had his first solo exhibition at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum.

Polat's book "...Neither Here Nor There..." (Mets & Schilt), a personal journey for identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...

, was released at Breda Photo 2008. This annual international photo festival also included a solo exhibition under the same title at the Nieuwe Brabantse Kunst Stichting (NBKS). The photo book was co-published with "Managing Diversity", and is initiated by the European Cultural Fund.

He's currently working together with Award winning designer, Sybren Kuiper on a new Book publication coming out by the end of 2011.
His Exhibition at the FOAM
Foam
-Definition:A foam is a substance that is formed by trapping gas in a liquid or solid in a divided form, i.e. by forming gas regions inside liquid regions, leading to different kinds of dispersed media...

 museum in Amsterdam, October 2010 will travel to DEPO
Depo
Depo may refer to:* Depo-Provera, a birth control injection* Depo , a British rock band formerly known as DEPOPROVERA* Deposition , evidence given under oath for later use in court-See also:* Depo Hostivař, a station on the Prague Metro...

Istanbul in 2012.

External links

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