When Nuri Bilge Ceylan portrays people by staging them inside a perfectly ordered, panoramic environment, they seem to look back into his camera – still it’s him who decides how their look looks. Sometimes they seem curious, sometimes proud, sometimes sad or resignated. But it’s always their look back at the camera that forces us to keep them in mind, to wonder who they might be, what they might think. But we will never know, for the expression on their face is ambivalent, a mixture of different moods and feelings – the human soul consists of many levels.
Art is all ‘about looking’, as John Berger wrote in his famous book, with the same title. So is photography. Ceylan celebrates the complexity of life and layers of meaning in his photographs -as well as his films- and his strong narrative in capturing his protagonists reveals his talent in being beyond any specific environment, culture or history. The selection in the exhibition depicts how Ceylan within a “frozen moment” looks at the world.
