Introduction
Crisis on infinite heart
“The great migration crisis”
The Independent, April 2008
“Crisis of the quiet tones”
Der Spiegel, November 2009
“Energy crisis needs exceptional means”
Tal Cual, October 2009
“No crisis in the fire department”
Dagens Nyheter, August 2009
“Towards a real way out of the crisis?”
Courrier International, October 2009
Crisis: the communicable disease of our times.
Everywhere, the “XXI’st Century Fox” is in the
front pages. “She has the world locked inside
a plastic box*”. Opening Pandora’s Box with a
click, Ali Taptik dismisses aesthetic conventions.
Doubting the medium, he puts himself in danger,
confirming his own language with his new approach
of photography. A personal and contemporary
definition, paradoxically closer to what it is in
essence: Immobility.
Wooden, clotted, fixed, rooted, frozen…
People or buildings, his subjects are as unchanging
as the world. Hidden behind a curtain, a shutter,
a scaffolding, a t-shirt or thick black hair, characters
and architecture bear the weight of this metaphoric
cover. A flag seems to coagulate upon the entire
square of the photograph with its bloody light;
an iron cross tears the sky by drawing a
motionless letter evocative of the SOS of mariners…
A dog sleeping deeply in the middle of a hectic
crazy crowd, stands as evidence that actually
none of this is surprising. Something appears
and we are inevitably led to think about
what Hesiod wrote in regards to the Pandora myth:
“Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house,
she remained under the lip of the jar, and did not fly away.”
Origin of the pain as much as symbol of
change, the fire comes out in imagination
in many of Ali Taptik’s pictures.
Laurence Cornet, Istanbul 2009
* Excerpt from the song
“Twentieth Century Fox”, The Doors, 1967
