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Işık Kaya (TR), Thomas Georg Blank (DE),
Second Nature
(1) Please introduce yourself: What is your name, where are you from, what do you do?
We are İşık and Thomas, and we are visual artists working primarily with lens-based media. We currently live in Los Angeles, but neither of us is from the US. İşık is from Turkey, and Thomas is from Germany. We met at the University of California, San Diego, where İşık was a grad student in the Visual Arts Department, and Thomas was there as a visiting grad to participate in a qualification of the Center for Human Imagination.
(2) What is your relationship with photography and how did you get into it?
Photography is part of our profession and something like our home base as a medium. We both have a formal training background with cameras and have worked as professional photographers/videographers in the past. Over the years, our approach to photography opened up, and we implemented traces of other practices, started to collect and create objects, and experimented with alternative photographic processes.
(3) What do you think triggers you to photograph in a certain moment? Is it planned or solely driven by intuition?
It is probably always a little bit of both. We mostly work at night and usually already have an idea of a certain setting, infrastructure, or situation that we want to observe. However, while moving through the world, there is of course always something that might all of a sudden spark our interest and a desire to capture a scene. For the kind of work we do, a conceptual framework is important, and it sometimes dictates what we need to do, but without a certain amount of intuition, any project would lose its vitality.
(4) What is the story you want your pictures to tell?
We are not sure if there is one strong story or message that we hope to communicate, but we would like it if our work could make people question the world we all live in. Just a few years ago, for the first time in history, more than 50% of humans started to live in cities. That means the majority of us live in spaces that are entirely designed by humans. Unfortunately, rather rarely, they are created for humans. Instead, they are created to maximize the flow of goods and workforce. The relations we develop to these spaces are often ambiguous. We love the comfort of personal cars and the speed of highways, yet dependency on fossil fuel is causing our planet to heat up. We love a fast, wireless, and ubiquitous connection to the telecommunication networks through cell towers, yet, thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that governments are using it to collect data and surveil us. So what do we do about that? This is the kind of thought we would like to evoke.
(5) Which city would you like to visit the most, and why?
İşık would love to visit Saint Petersburg because of the many great Russian literature she read as a teenager, and most of them take place there. Furthermore, the White Nights are supposed to be beautiful there. Thomas would love to visit Ulaanbaatar because he knows so little about the city. Tokyo is very high on both of our bucket lists for many reasons.
(6) What is your personal relationship to cities and how do you perceive them as places in general?
İşık was living in Istanbul during the construction boom, and she participated in the Gezi protests, which started as an environmentalist sit-in contesting the construction of a shopping mall on one of the very few green spaces left in the center of the city. Experiencing how a city's authorities make decisions against the interests of its inhabitants changed her perception of cities in general. Most of the time, the form of a city is defined by neoliberal interests. But despite this fact, cities are fascinating systems with countless advantages. Especially if you work as an artist, being close to a dense art scene like the one here in Los Angeles provides a lot of opportunities in terms of jobs, exhibitions, audiences, and contacts. On the other hand, they are overwhelming. Los Angeles is a special case because it is a city that developed around the idea of private transportation, meaning the car. Everything is incredibly widespread, and the highways are always full.
(7) Regarding your project Second Nature: What was your intention, and how did you come up with the idea?
Seeing those strange structures gave us the idea. We both moved to California a couple of years ago and had never seen anything like it before. So when we first saw a cell tower tree, İşık just felt the urge to start taking photos as a way to observe them. The relation between humans, their environment, and nature had been a central topic in her work before, and it made perfect sense to explore those bizarre trees. Initially, we were taking photos of cell tower trees that we would see on the side of the road while driving. Soon after, we discovered that cell tower locations are publicly accessible, and some websites show them on a map. However, there was a huge drawback to this: They don't indicate which cell towers are concealed as trees, and there are tens of thousands of markers on those maps. So when the first pandemic lockdown happened in California in 2020, Thomas spent his days checking every single marker location from those maps with Google Street View. After doing that for several weeks, he found more than a thousand potential candidates in Southern California. We then started working our way through clusters on this map, and in 2022 we had visited pretty much every single cell tower tree between the Mexican border and Bakersfield. The result was an extensive series of several hundred photos that we condensed into the book Second Nature.
(8) Which project did you never finish?
We have been working on a project about fumigation tents and the way houses are built in California for a while now, but have not been able to finish it yet. It might happen someday, though. We are hopeful!
(9) What is that «one thing» you have never managed to photograph and is now gone for good?
While we were living in San Diego, a stadium was demolished. We learned about it just when it was done, and we would have loved to film the process or take photos of it. That chance has passed.
(10) If you could travel back / forth in time, what advice would you give your younger / older self?
Prepare yourself for the fact that back problems become a reality with age and a job that involves carrying a lot of equipment.
(11) What do you prefer saying: To «take a photograph» or to «make a photograph», and why?
We could try to get into an Erich Fromm-style discourse on modes of having vs. modes of being and how language affects them, but that might take us too far. We also both believe that it is great to be aware of how language affects our thinking, but if it does not translate to actions and attitudes, then what's the point? (Also, English is not our first language, and we randomly use both of them.)
(12) What is the most interesting experience you have had while photographing?
There is not one superlative experience, but we love it when we are out shooting at night and animals visit us. Here in LA, we often have raccoons, cats, and skunks that cross our path while working with a camera outside, and they are always great company.
(13) If it wasn’t for photography, what would you be interested in doing instead?
İşık would be a musician, and Thomas would cook for her.
(14) How would you describe one of your pictures to a visually impaired person?
We might end up listening to music with them to give an idea of the sound of our work. The playlist would definitely include tracks from Tool, Esbjörn Svenson Trio, and Yussef Kamaal. Dark, exciting, and complex. And then we would prepare and eat something tasty together because we are nice people and we love food.
(15) What are you currently working on, and—if there is—what is your next project or journey?
We recently started to film in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The giant ships and tens of thousands of containers that are being processed 24/7 make for quite the spectacle. We are not exactly sure what form the project will eventually take, maybe some kind of video installation. If you want to stay updated, you can follow us on Instagram. We will share our progress there from time to time.
Thank you, İşık and Thomas.
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Images
1–17 Işık Kaya, Thomas Georg Blank, Second Nature, 2020–2022.
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