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Although perhaps better known internationally as a filmmaker, Ismail Necmi has been one of the most influential and distinctive forces in underground Turkish photography since the 1990s. In a national tradition long dominated by photojournalistic realism, his edgy and often surreal work takes the most colloquial forms of still images and explores the layers of dream, fantasy and artifice that are really at play in the everyday in contemporary Turkey. Necmi has worked over prolonged periods of time with real individuals in Istanbul, offering people from diverse walks of life an aesthetic space in which they can visually express the aspirations and desires that animate their lives but which they can’t easily articulate in words – whether to transform into the person they want to be, or to show inner-selves they normally hide from everyone, or to live out their ultimate sexual fantasy. Moreover, given Necmi’s distinctive obsession with the blurred margins between life, art and fantasy, this exhibition enables viewers to explore the deep continuities between the critically acclaimed photojournalism of post-WWII Turkey and the resistant underground photography that has developed in its wake, as it struggles to capture more complex dimensions of ‘the real’ in Turkey, drawing on the visual traditions both of Europe and the Middle East.

Samuel Williams