A visit to the most Arab of Turkish cities

Our man formerly in Damascus, now Istanbul, John Wreford has a photo essay with words published in Your Middle East

Photographer John Wreford has been to a part of Turkey where the hotel manager only speaks Arabic.
I rapped the knocker a couple more times on the heavy wooden door of the hotel and waited, as I blew on my freezing fingers and my breath hung in the musty air like an ominous rain cloud. It was early evening but already the streets thick with the smell of wood smoke were deserted. It seemed much later when I rapped again, a little harder this time, and through the side window I could see an old man hobbling towards the door.

He welcomes me inside and as I am telling him I have a booking he interrupts to say he only speaks Arabic. Off the beaten track in Turkey it’s hardly a surprise to find English a struggle and anyone even remotely familiar with the country would know that the Kurds have their own language – but Arabic?

Well, yes – this is Antakya and according to Syrian maps it is still part of the Arab Republic. Culture and identity rarely recognizes borders and the Hatay province of Turkey merges seamlessly with that of its Arab neighbors. See more pictures and read more here

 

Abandoned Amongst The Olive Groves Of Idlib Syria

Our great friend John Wreford is now based in Istanbul having extricated himself from Damascus. As well as being a great photographer he is a writer and here is something from his blog

“The scene is messy and chaotic. Water carriers and foam mattresses are being unloaded, an ambulance screams past on its way to a Turkish hospital with a newborn child. A moment of panic and everyone scuttles for cover as a Syrian warplane is spotted.” John Wreford has visited the Atmeh refugee camp.

Atmeh camp clings to the side of a hill on the edge of the Syrian-Turkish border. Colored plastic bags flap like flags trapped in the rolls of razor wire that separate the two countries. Turkish soldiers watch from a guard post on the hill above. And just to be clear, Atmeh camp is on the Syrian side of the border, part of Idlib province now under the control of the opposition.

As we enter the camp the scene is messy and chaotic. Water carriers and foam mattresses are being unloaded from a couple of small trucks, an ambulance screams past on its way to a Turkish hospital with a newborn child. A moment of panic and everyone scuttles for cover as a Syrian warplane is spotted in the distance, a truck mounted Doshka swivels and scans the sky, the danger passes and people re-emerge, a black plume of smoke rises from across the valley.
As first impressions go, Atmeh does not feel like a place of refuge. More than twenty thousand Syrians are living here, the largest camp for the internally displaced in Syria, the decision to come would not have been taken lightly, driven by fear and desperation and with nowhere else to go.  READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE

ABANDONED IN SYRIA: Q&A WITH JOHN WREFORD

So if you follow us regularly you will know that our man in Damascus, John Wreford is now our man in Istanbul. In this article with NATHAN THORNBURGH he tells us something about his life in Damascus before he was able to leave and about where he needs to be now.

….[It started when] I was about to leave for a short trip for Cairo. I have residency in Syria, and to leave you have to get an exit visa. When I went to the immigration office to do it, I discovered my name was on the computer. In Syria, that’s a euphemism for being wanted by the secret police. I spent the next three months trying to leave.

Eventually, I got permission. It’s ridiculous, these lists. They didn’t tell me what it was. One suspects that they were worried I was working as an undercover journalist. They gave me permission to leave, and according to the stamp in my passport, it allows me to go back. But there’s a big risk. You need little excuse these days to lock someone up. The handful of foreigners still left in Damascus are all having trouble……..

R&K: And Istanbul is now full of your Syrian friends?

JW: Yes. It’s actually quite amusing. I lived in the old city of Damascus, and I had a small photo gallery, with a friend, in the touristy area. I knew everyone. As the war went on, a lot of them left, and it was all new faces in my neighborhood. But a lot of the people working in the tourist industry, selling carpets and so on, they’ve all come here to Istanbul. When I arrived here, it was just like walking around old Damascus, saying hi to all the old familiar faces……..

©John Wreford

…..JW: For the last two years I lived in Syria, I’ve not been able to photograph anything, and this of course is frustrating. As a photographer, as a journalist, Syria is something personal. If my situation had been different, I would’ve done it differently. I would’ve come in through the north and photographed the Free Syrian Army.

But I was already in Damascus, and I felt it important to stay, to understand what was going on, to be part of it. The media has often gotten it very wrong, or just not reported things. There’s a lack of attention paid to ordinary Syrian people living their lives.

As a photographer, the most natural thing would be to photograph the most dramatic fighting. But living there, I feel like it’s a small part of the story. It’s important and integral, but it’s not the whole story…..

©John Wreford

R&K: We’ve been reading a lot about the fall of Homs and the government’s new momentum. Are people worried they’ve lost?

JW: This is my issue with the media. It always needs a new headline. At the beginning of war, there was a lot of attention on refugees, and then it just stopped. It was the same at the beginning of the Iraq war: attention at first, but two years later nobody cared. But after two years of being a refugee, the story is considerably worse.

But of course the media needs to move on to something different. With Syria, you have the taking of a town, the back and forth of the opposition and the regime, the changing face of the opposition and so on. For the Syrians, though, it doesn’t really affect them……..

Read all of this interview with John Wreford here

 

British Journal of Photography Ones to Watch: Pari Dukovic

Pari Dukovic has been selected as one of BJP’s 20 photographers to watch in 2013

Image © Pari Dukovic.

Born in Istanbul in 1984, Pari Dukovic got into shooting stills through his father, who wasn’t a photographer but had worked in a portrait studio as a teenager, “pulling the glass plates and taking them to the printer to be enlarged for silver gelatin prints”. The excitement of that experience was passed on to his son.

 “He has always been my biggest inspiration and the strongest supporter of my journey to become a photographer, and was a big influence on me picking up a camera and starting to shoot,” says the 27-year-old, who now lives in New York. “I got my first camera as a birthday present when I was eight – an all-mechanical Zenit 122. It was a huge camera for me as a little boy, but my dad wanted to get me a real camera that would last a long time. At that age, I was just taking family pictures for fun, but things started to click when I was about 14, when I started looking at books by famous photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson. I loved his work. Growing up in Istanbul, a city with such old-world charm, made me connect with his work, especially the photographs of the streets of Paris.”.….MORE

From a series Fields of Glory, see more on the website here

www.paridukovic.com.

Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2233733/ones-to-watch-pari-dukovic#ixzz2IEbJzK7n
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John Wreford Photographer Damascus

In the 30 years that The Photographers Workshop has existed we have been lucky enough to meet many wonderful photographers, skillful, artistic professional photographers. For perhaps more than 20 years John Wreford has been a friend and colleague whose work we have greatly admired. In the recent times he has been based in Damascus and lives there with a house in the old city. Using this as a base he has traveled widely through the middle east and taken the opportunity to work for a number of the worlds great magazines and newspapers and to add to his stock of intelligent intimate, mature images. He is a man with great vision and empathy for his subjects. Do go and have a look at his excellent site here is the link

Galatasaray Football fans celebrate winning the Turksih domestic league, Galata Istanbul. ©John Wreford

Samia a Turkish transgender sex worker at home in Istanbul ©John Wreford

A Turkish boy plays on an abandoned car in the run down Fener neighborhood of Istanbul. ©John Wreford

The Maidens Tower at sunset, Uskudar on the Asian shore of Istanbul. ©John Wreford

Young Turkish Couple, Taksim Istanbul ©John Wreford

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, National hero regarded as founder of modern Turkey ©John Wreford

Do go and have a look at the rest of his pictures here

May Day Pictures from around the world

From the pages of The Atlantic come these 40 images of the world on May 1st

“In cities all around the world yesterday, people took to the streets for May Day demonstrations, protests, and rallies. Members of the Occupy movement, leftists, labor groups, students and more made their voices heard from Jakarta to Berlin, and from Lagos to Seattle. Frustration with financial institutions, sluggish economies, and harsh austerity measures were aired, and some rallies became violent, resulting in a number of arrests. Collected here are scenes from yesterday, May Day, as it happened cross the globe.”

Occupy Wall Street activists, one wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, rest on a sidewalk during a May Day demonstration in New York, on May 1, 2012. (Reuters/Allison Joyce)

Riot police use tear gas against demonstrators during a May Day rally in central Ankara, Turkey, on May 1, 2012. (Reuters/Umit Bektas)

Activists, maids and workers rally during a May Day protest in Hong Kong on May 1, 2012. About 5,000 workers, domestic helpers and activists held a noisy procession and marched through the city center to call for better working conditions and a raise of the minimum wage which was implemented in 2011. (Laurent Fievet/AFP/GettyImages)

Protestors sit with red flags during a May Day rally in central Istanbul, on May 1, 2012. Tens of thousands of workers gathered at Taksim square in the heart of Turkey’s biggest city Istanbul to celebrate May Day. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images) #

Militants and labour union members gather around a burning the effigy of Philippine President Benigno Aquino in Manila on May 1, 2012 as part of the May Day protests demanding higher wages and policies that would make it harder to fire workers. Aquino has said he is trying to help labour but has warned that giving too many benefits will make the country less competitive, costing more jobs. (Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images) #

See more here on The Atlantic site

Istanbul, Memory of Orhan Pamuk

http://www.photographyserved.com/gallery/Istanbul-Memory-of-Orhan-Pamuk/525400

By: dennis ziliotto