PHOTOS: Alphan Yilmazmaden’s Glimpses Of Strangers
Alphan Yilmazmaden is a Turkish photographer who takes pictures of people. We all take pictures of people, of course, but they’re generally people we know: BORING. Because Alphan take pictures in lands I am unfamiliar with and of people I will never meet, it suddenly becomes much more interesting.
I can sit in front of Facebook and ogle at photos of my friends wearing lingerie on their faces and combing their dogs with a plastic mackerel all day long. But, staring at a photo of a person who doesn’t know you and can’t know you is much better. I call it the “Eastenders Effect”.
Eastenders has been going strong for almost 3,000 years now. No one has yet noticed that nothing actually ever happens on Eastenders. When I was at University I lived with an American fella for a short time. When we were explaining to him concept of soaps, he was flabbergasted. Two facets of the concept which we all now take for granted particularly bemused him:
a) It’s a programme about poor people. Why would you want to watch poor people? They’re ugly.
b) It’s a drama series that never ends. Dallas and the like had “seasons” with finales etc.
A bunch of people do a bunch of things. Then someone has to get over some suffering and another gets over some feelings of guilt, someone is occasionally happy. One dies, one is born.
We, collectively, can not resist watching people’s lives play out, whether or not they are of any importance or bear any meaning to our own.
These visual documents of fictional life and love don’t need to be muscle-encrusted action-fests, hell, they don’t even have to be interesting. If Pauline Fowler had released a DVD where her and Dot did an extended service wash and chatted about Sudoku and stomach cramps, people would have snapped up VHS / DVD / Blue-ray / Min-Disc / LP versions of the “drama” until the BBC became so dependent on Eastenders’ cash-making ability (the Pauline Pound or Dot Dollar as they would become known) that it only ever produced Eastenders themed programs from that day forth.
The BBC (or BeebEnders as they would become) would take over the world and enslave a nation. Everyone shall bow to the throne of Ethel and her little Willy.
Alphan Yilmazmaden takes photos of humans in Turkey, and I feel a lot less guilty about looking at these than I do Little Mo’s smalls. More from him here:
