ON THE GARDEN OF REMEMBER
Emin Önder Sertçelik
ON THE GARDEN OF REMEMBER PROJECT
He did a project work on elderly people with Alzheimer's disease. Name: Garden of Remembrance. This project was published in Kadıköy newspaper, Birgün newspaper by interviewing me and it was published on Kadıköy.mag on Instagram.
The idea for this project came about when a friend of mine who works as a hairdresser told me that he would cut the hair of elderly people with Alzheimer's in a nursing home. Since my grandfather passed away due to Alzheimer's disease, I wanted to recall my memories of him, even symbolically, and I also found the idea of a young female barber cutting the hair of elderly people with Alzheimer's and photographing the bond he would establish with them, which was interesting and exciting to me.
While the age we live in, daily life progresses very fast and we have difficulties keeping up with this speed, such speed was not in question in the memory of these elderly people with Alzheimer's.
They had completely lost their sense of time and space, and all their memories were almost erased. It was very frightening and frankly, as human beings, the comfort of our age did not allow us to face these facts.
While we were collecting good memories with our loved ones in our healthy lives, there were hardly any memories where they could feel better.
Here's to confronting the facts that I talked about through my grandfather during this project and that we usually don't want to realize or really don't realize; it was painful. But still, the bond I formed with them made me feel good.
The lives in the fabric of street and geometry
“Önder Sertçelik is a Turkish photographer who started his photographic journey in 2009. In 2018, he studied documentary photography at İfsak, the Istanbul Amateur Photography and Cinema Society. There, he completed two documentary projects, one of which was presented in a collective exhibition.
He began by taking photographs of architecture and buildings, and, while doing so, he realized that some details in the structures could blend well with passersby’s actions. The street textures and their connections with people started to draw his attention, and Istanbul was very inspiring in this regard since it has rich and vivid urban scenery. After some time, from the static and wide-ranging architectural photographs, he switched to a more active and narrow style, coming close to the people and shooting in the streets. As his perception of composition improved in learning from the masters, he began taking more layered and thought-provoking pictures. Lately, he has been shifting to framing human actions and complex situations on the street.
In the future, he wishes to develop a project in which human connections are mirrored by taking photographs of objects. Other than that, he is planning to make a documentary project reflecting on his view of social and cultural issues.” www.eyeshotstreetphotography.com
