The City. Istanbul

I was born in a big city. And I’ve always had a very ambivalent relationship with the city. On the one hand, it’s a place of great opportunity. And at the same time, it’s a place of privacy. You can live in a city for a long time and nobody cares about you. Nobody knows your private life. There’s a downside. Individuality disappears in the city. You feel loneliness in the city more than anywhere else. You are helpless and defenseless in the city. The city can give a lot, but it can also be very cruel. It is known that the rate of depression and suicide is higher in cities. The expression “Moscow does not believe in tears” applies to any big city.

Recently, the negative aspects of city life have become predominant for me. I feel much better outside the city, in the mountains, by the sea, in small villages and hamlets. This time, however, I decided not to run away from my feelings, but to look at them closely, carefully. I tried to feel what frightens me in the city, what makes me uncomfortable. And in order to better deal with these feelings, I decided to do it with the help of a camera. I chose Istanbul as the city for my experiment. A huge city that has always frightened me more than it has delighted me.

At least the result of this work was a change in my negative attitude towards the urban environment. It was enough to look at frightening or unpleasant things through the camera viewfinder, calmly and consciously, without running away or hiding from them, for discomfort to give way to interest and joy. Creative looking at objects could change the perception of things. It showed that a thing is just a thing, but it is our attitude towards it that determines it. And this attitude can be changed, also with the help of the camera.

This is a very personal, somewhat therapeutic story.

7 o’clock.
The sun is still out.
Why is it so dark outside?
It’s winter, it will rise, it will surely rise, even though it’s cloudy today.
I want sunshine, I want the whole day to be sunny like yesterday.
And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and another day of snow, and then warm and sunny again.
Such interesting shadows.
The little houses, the streetlights, the trees, the wind and the seagulls.
Did you hear all those sounds? It’s so interesting.
When I woke up, probably around 6 o’clock, the first sound I heard was a scream, was the scream of seagulls.
They’re still screaming somewhere in the distance. They seem to come closer and then fly away. You can hear them better when they’re closer.
Where is that sound coming from?
The wind, the screaming of the seagulls.
Can you imagine, it’s the wind going through the seagulls' lungs.
They have lungs like people.
I guess they do, they breathe.
Some emotion, some feeling makes the gull make a special movement with its lungs to make the sound become a scream.
We can feel so different about seagulls, about their scream.
And what we allow ourselves to think about them will determine how we feel and react to the sound.
For some it is a pleasant sound, for others it is an unpleasant sound.
Then there was the call to prayer in a neighboring mosque.
Did you hear it?
Maybe it was 6:30, I don’t know.
It wasn’t very long ago. Very nice voice, very nice singing. I like it when it’s not just reading the words, when it’s singing, they don’t always sing.
I think it’s very important when there is prayer over the city several times a day.
It’s a very different life in such a city.
The cries of the seagulls and the words of the prayer, the first sounds you hear before you even wake up.
They’re both sounds.
Both are keys that can open doors within you.
If you get in tune.
With these sounds, with these waves, with these vibrations, and let these sounds open some locks within you.
Our whole life is made up of these keys.
This can open some doors.
When we travel it’s just easier because we can see these keys more easily.
And it’s easier to find the doors that they can open.
The more doors you can open, the richer your journey is, I think, because traveling outside is just an excuse to take another step inside yourself, although it is also an illusion inside, there is no outside, there is a whole world.
Words mean so little, so much less than words, prayers and the cries of seagulls.