Apr 19

“” — Philosophy is the ungainly attempt to tackle questions that come naturally to children, using methods that come naturally to lawyers. Historians of philosophy accordingly divide into those who are forever asking “Where is he coming from?” and those who are forever asking “Where does he get off?” — David Hills

Apr 16

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov (via melodysblog)

(via picaresquity)

Apr 11

FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2011

1879 (From The Lost Painting Series) by Taner Ceylan

TANER CEYLAN B. 1967 1879 (FROM THE LOST PAINTING SERIES) signed; signed, titled and dated 2011 on the reverse oil on canvas 170 by 180cm.; 66 7/8 by 70 7/8 in. Executed in 2011. 

In this recent piece from his Lost Painting Series, following 1881 (2010) and 1923 (2010), the photorealist painter Taner Ceylan engages with the questions of history and Orientalism by creating yet another visual allegory. The mischievous gaze of the smoking Ottoman boy in 1881 and the homoerotic farewell scene in 1923 are followed this time by an ingenious montage of Pascal Sébah’s photograph from the 1880s and Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866). 

In this intricately crafted oil painting, Ceylan juxtaposes different yet related histories of artistic style and connoisseurship to trigger a rethinking of Orientalism, femininity, the veil and the gaze. Recovering and drawing together forgotten legacies and silenced voices in a brilliantly imagined new setting, Ceylan invites the viewer to look behind the veil of Orientalism and the politics of representation. Rather than offering a corrective, the artist amalgamates irony, playfulness and realism to recast Orientalism as heterogeneous and susceptible to negotiation, contestation and even subversion. 

Standing in front of L’Origine du monde, a now well-renowned oil on canvas painted by the French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866, the veiled lady wearing a transparent white yashmak and a wrapper (ferace) embellished by a rather elegant stole is actually reproduced from an albumen photograph, which Ceylan relocates within his own painting. The photograph entitled Dame turque voilée (Veiled Turkish Lady) was taken by Pascal Sébah (1823-1886), the nineteenth-century Ottoman pioneer of photography, who photographed models for Osman Hamdi Bey’s ambivalently Orientalist paintings, as well as for the photographic album of traditional Ottoman dress entitled the Elbise-i Osmaniyye: Les costumes populaires de la Turquie en 1873. Sébah was also well-known for his depictions of order, prosperity and progress within a framework of Ottoman modernity as a unique, indigenous project.

Ceylan’s intriguingly novel setting in which the veiled Ottoman lady poses in front of Courbet’s blatantly realistic depiction of female genitalia further unsettles the politics of representation if one remembers the often neglected fact that it was Khalil Bey (1831-1879), the Egypt-born Ottoman diplomat and art collector, who commissioned from Courbet L’Origine du monde. Theart historian Francis Haskell has shown that Khalil Bey, from the perspective of his French contemporaries, was no more than a profligate and frivolous art collector, “a prince from an Oriental tale…who remained Turkish through his lavish generosity and taste for women and gambling, but became Parisian through his wit, his elegance, his love of the theatre and the arts…” (Francis Haskell, “A Turk and His Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Paris”, in: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 5:1, 1982, p. 41) Khalil Bey’s collection of more than a hundred paintings included such confrontationally realist works like L’Origine du monde and Les Dormeuses (The Sleepers), as well as a considerable number of works by those French painters (Chassériau, Marilhat, Gérôme, Ingres and Delacroix) who painted ‘Oriental’ subjects. 

Revisiting Khalil Bey’s complex legacy, Taner Ceylan presents a seemingly stark contrast between the two female embodiments on canvas without necessarily reproducing a rigid gendered distinction between the East and the West. In doing so, he challenges the representational status of the two bodies, as well as of the Orient and the Occident, by invoking the very multiplicity of desire in terms of both artistic gaze and taste in art patronage. 

The painterly rigour and eroticism in Ceylan’s art-practice have hitherto drawn on many contemporary figures of inspiration not necessarily limited to photorealists and hyperrealists. The baroque art of Caravaggio, the portraiture of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, and the intermedial artistic practice of David Hockney can easily be addressed in appreciating the artist’s engagement with photographic embodiment. Ceylan treats the medium as tableau vivant: he creates a fiction, documents it as an actual photographic image and translates that fictive document onto canvas. Compared to his early homoerotic works, however, precision and mimicry in Ceylan’s paintings gain a further dramatic meaning in the present work. Reframing Sébah and Courbet in such a peculiar mise-en-scène, the artist designs a new photograph and speculates on its documentary status as historical evidence. Thus, Taner Ceylan’s brilliant masterpiece enacts an imagined photograph which could have been possibly taken but has never been. 

This catalogue note is written by Cuneyt Cakirlar (University College London) and Serkan Delice (University of the Arts London).

(Source: nathaliedayan, via ileftmyheartinistanbul)

Apr 08

via somethingturkish: via spektakuler: Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics adlı başyapıttan (!) Kitabın tamamını burada okuyabilirsiniz

Apr 05

http://www.nisanyansozluk.com/?k=eşkiya

Apr 04

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 1.20:

That the separate philosophical ideas are not anything optional or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other, that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as the collective members of the fauna of a Continent—is betrayed in the end by the circumstance: how unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill in again a definite fundamental scheme of POSSIBLE philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit, however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in definite order the one after the other—to wit, the innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order. The wonderful family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is easily enough explained. In fact, where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world- interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the conception of the subject is least developed) look otherwise “into the world,” and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germans and Mussulmans, the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of PHYSIOLOGICAL valuations and racial conditions.—So much by way of rejecting Locke’s superficiality with regard to the origin of ideas.

Apr 02

(via Fatih Sultan Mehmet by ~cappadocia360tour)

via anthro:

180. Dame turque voilée (Veiled Turkish Lady) - 1880s Albumen Photograph by Pasqual Sébah (from Sunny Brook’s flickr photostream).

Pasqual Sébah was one of the most important professional photographers of his time in the Ottoman Empire. Today, his works are highly sought after by museums and collectors.

Of Syrian or Lebanese origins, Sébah (1823-1886) was a leading photographer in Constantinople, now the city of Istanbul. In 1857 he opened a studio, which he called “El Chark,” next to the Russian Embassy on the Grande Rue de Pera, the main shopping street of the European part of the city. He sold photographs of the city, ancient ruins in the surrounding area, portraits, and images of local people in traditional costumes to tourists. His prints are signed P. Sébah.

Sébah rose to international prominence because of his well-organized compositions, careful lighting, effective posing, attractive models, and great attention to detail. His career coincided with intense Western European interest in the “Orient,” which was viewed as exotic and fascinating.

In 1860, he secured the collaboration of the French photographer A. Laroche to direct his studio. As Sébah’s technician, Laroche turned out photographic prints of superior quality.

Sébah’s career was accelerated through his collaboration with the artist, Osman Hamdi Bey (1842-1910). Osman Hamdi Bey posed models, often dressed in elaborate costumes, for Sebah to photograph. The painter then used Sébah’s photographs for his celebrated Orientalist oil paintings.

In 1873, Osman Hamdi Bey was appointed by the Ottoman court to direct the Ottoman exhibition in Vienna and commissioned Sébah to produce large photographs of models wearing costumes for a sumptuous album, “Les Costumes Populaires de la Turquie.” The album earned Sébah a gold medal awarded by the Viennese organizers, and another medal from the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz.

In that same exceptional year of 1873, Sébah opened a branch in Cairo, Egypt, on the Esbekieh next to the French Embassy, where he installed his associate, Laroche. (The Cairo studio remained in business until 1898.)

In 1883, Sébah suffered a stroke. He died on June 15, 1886, and his brother Cosmi managed the business until Johannes (1872-1947), Pascal’s son, was old enough to take over.

Johannes (Jean) grew up to become a talented photographer in his own right, but to profit from his father’s fame, he signed his photographs J. Pascal Sébah. In 1888 he went into partnership with a French photographer resident in Istanbul, Polycarpe Joaillier. The firm of Sébah and Joaillier were named the official photographers of the Sultan, and at his command took photographs all over his empire.

Joaillier returned to Paris in the early 1900s, but Jean Sébah continued the studio, forming a partnership in 1910 with Hagop Iskender and Leo Perpignani. The latter left the firm in 1914. Jean Sébah and Hagop Iskender retired in 1934, leaving the business to Iskender’s son, Bedros Iskender and his partner, Ismail Insel. Ismail Insel eventually became sole partner and renamed the studio Foto Sabah, which remained in business until 1952. (Sabah means “morning” in Turkish.)

With all the changes, the studio that Pascal Sébah began in 1857 lasted 95 years.

Additional commentary from the Ottoman History Podcast caption to this photo:

Veiled Turkish Lady, Pascal Sébah, 1880s, Istanbul. Pascal Sébah (1823-1886) was born in Istanbul to a Christian family. His studio opened in 1857 on Grande Rue de Pera, Istanbul’s most “European” district. Sébah excelled at capturing images that interested European tourists and nurtured their Oriental fantasies. His photography gained international renown due to his knack for composition and effective use of light. Sébah worked with A. Laroche, who improved Sébah’s print quality. Artistically, he worked with Turkish artist Osman Hamdi Bey, who helped Sébah with composition and costume selection and used his images for Orientalist paintings. Sébah’s son Jean took over the business when he died and partnered with French photographer Polycarpe Joaillier. They became the official photographers of the Sultan and took pictures all over the empire on his behalf. The studio lasted 95 years until 1952. Today Sébah’s works are in high demand among collectors and museums.

Higher resolution here.

Apr 01

via istanbulover: To go to Istanbul in 1929 by balavenise on Flickr. Istanbul is not Constantinople

(via birdperchedonatree)

Mar 31

18,000 Russian women married to Turkish men living in Antalya
February 2, 2012 - 12:45 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Some 18,000 Russian women who are married to Turkish men reside in Turkey’s resort province of Antalya, Today’s Zaman reports.

According to a Russian Friendship and Culture Association study, about 18,000 Russian women live in Antalya. Of those, some 12,000 have been become Turkish citizens, and another 6,000 are in the process of becoming naturalized, the report says.

Mar 30

via lovekurdcouture: This how a kurd is born hehe so cute ready to fight for there country! 

Mar 29

[video]

Mar 28

via damlaozdemir: lifeonsundays: ppff: sublimespy: i want that scarf (and the face isn’t too shabby) (via thealwaysgentleman)

Mar 03

via anneyhall: Makeup, Central Park, 1955. Photo by Frank Paulin