Personal Storytelling with Arja Hyytiäinen
Participants: Arzu Aybat Yaşar, Begüm Akın, Cansu Korkmaz, Çağlar Tozluoğlu, Elçin Acun, İbrahim Karakütük, İpek Çınar, Julia Cooke, Ksenia Smyr, Simru Hazal Civan, Tolga Güleç, Tuğçe Ayerdoğan
Workshop assistant: İrem Sözen
Dates: 16-20 May 2015
As part of the photography programmes organised in collaboration between GAPO and SALT, Finnish photographer Arja Hyytiäinen was the first artist invited to Istanbul to lead a five-day discussion- and production-based photography workshop. Hyytiäinen’s work combines fiction, autobiography, and intellectual curiosity. Known for her distinctive cinematic approach to contemporary street photography, Hyytiäinen sees photography both as a means of entering into other people’s lives and as an echo of personal experience: “I believe in translating emotions into images, searching for and questioning life by experiencing and sensing it through photography, and trying to see what lies behind visible reality. Through the individual language of expression, I am interested in personal stories that allow photography to become not a style, but a testimony to our very existence.”
A total of 55 applications were received from Türkiye, Germany, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, Israel, Russia, and Greece. Following a portfolio-based selection process, 12 participants were selected for the workshop. After reviewing their portfolios, Hyytiäinen suggested an individual subject for each participant to focus on. Throughout the workshop, the participants produced, edited, and shaped their work for presentation. The resulting projects were shared with the public at a presentation held at SALT Galata on Wednesday, 20 May, and a limited-edition zine of 100 copies featuring the participants’ work was published.
On the first day of the workshop, Hyytiäinen also gave a public artist talk as part of 'Look Who’s Here?', discussing her work to date, her motivations, and the reasons behind her choices of different forms of visual storytelling. As the number of workshop participants was limited, Hyytiäinen also held a private portfolio review session with ten applicants whose work had reached a certain level but who could not be selected for the workshop due to the limited number of places.
