book review istanbul by alex webb

Book review: Istanbul by Alex Webb

Book reviews are tricky things. They hinge upon any number of things

which can be potentially highly unreliable: the reviewer's background

knowledge and sensibility, what he had for breakfast that morning, or

even the lighting and conditions (such as screaming kids and renegade

cats) under which the book was viewed. As such, like any other form of

writing, they should be taken with a pinch of salt. And if they read

well, they may even dare to hope to complement the book like a cup of

hot chocolate.

I've been a fan of Alex Webb's photos in the last year or so for any

number of reasons. I was 6 years old when his first book Hot

Light/Half-Made Worlds came out in print, and it was only 20 years

later that I finally managed to gather the resources to own a copy of

my own (here is a good review elsewhere about his work which says a

lot in relatively few words).

I have seen 6 of his other books, and I own 4 of them now, including

Istanbul. Although this is a piece of writing about the Istanbul book,

it wouldn't do justice to the book without mentioning how it compares

(and often complements) his previous publications.

Istanbul is a ravishing volume. It is built to be savoured, tasted and

enjoyed through repeated visits over time. You could say the same

thing about Webb's other books, but somehow Istanbul contains a beauty

and gravitas of its own that sets it apart from the others.

It helps that picture print quality has become even better than

before, or at least looks it. Kodachrome grain looks extremely good in

the prints, particularly in low-light shots and those with areas of

motion blur. The colour is more vibrant and creamy and less like a

facsimile of the original photo. Maybe this has something to do with

better digital scanning/adjustment/printing techniques. Or maybe this

has also something to do with the fact that Istanbul is the first of

Webb's publications to be carried under the renowned Aperture

Foundation label.

Istanbul is the most conventionally 'street' of all of Webb's work. It

takes place in a highly urbanized landscape and doesn't veer from it,

nor does it concern itself with issues rooted in war and extreme

poverty as in some of his previous work. I was struck by a relatively

large number of shots of people juxtaposed against advertising

materials (all too-common fodder for street photographers) something

which I thought Webb wouldn't normally allow himself to do. In

addition multi-layered shots through glass panels abound. He also

seems to have hung out at more bus-stops than in any of his other

books. Lots of shots of people in buses, people hovering around bus

stops, people waiting morosely for their next ticket out of limbo.

Some of the shots even combine buses with advertisements as well. I

couldn't help but be reminded of Tom Wood's work on buses, which isn't

a bad thing at all. I just wished Webb had included at least one shot

of a bus and its denizens from the inside rather than outside.

It's interesting that Istanbul features advertisements as a

photographic element much more than Webb's book on Florida, the land

of sunshine and tacky capitalism (or any of his others), ever did.

Maybe the Istanbul pictures are supposed to convey a sense of tension

in an ancient city slowly embracing the pull of globalisation. But the

trick of juxtaposing people against advertisements does little for me

these days, nor should it for a veteran street photographer of

exceptional quality.

Aside from that, Webb's usual pictoral somersaults and delights are

out in full force once again in Istanbul: his use of colour, people

caught in unusual moments, compositional complexity, strong verticals,

attention to children at play, and of course his delight in playing

light against deep shadow. His style of shooting has been remarkably

stable for the last 25 years or so. There are many beautiful photos

which are bound to spark references to his previously published work,

not to mention additional fodder for those who like to play the game

of comparing these photos to those taken by other photographers in

other places and times (the current bible of this being Geoff Dyer's

Ongoing Moment).

But Istanbul might also be Webb's most confrontational work when it

comes to how he photographs people. A large number of his human

subjects in the city are seen head-on, without any use of clever

lighting or shadow cuts to mask out the eyes. Portraits rather than

candids. His work has always veered wildly between detachment and

intimacy, but here it's almost as if Webb is telling us that he has

gotten closer to home than he has ever been.

If home can be read in the faces of Istanbul's denizens, it is not

exactly a pleasant return. Exhaustion, boredom, fear, alienation and

traces of world-weariness abound, with occasional blips of laughter

and romance. Is this is the unique huzun - a complex form of shared

delicious melancholy embedded in Turkish culture - that Orhan Pamuk

speaks of, in his accompanying essay in the book? Or is it a sign of a

wider sense of alienation and tiredness that we see everyday etched on

the faces of people trying their best to live in cities everywhere

around the world? Clearly this book tries to say that these photos

capture a sense of that huzun. Yet, there has always been a strong

feeling of melancholy to be savoured in all of Webb's work, in varying

doses. A sensual longing for a lost mythology that never was quite

there in the first place.

Istanbul can be read in at least three ways, none of them mutually

exclusive to each other. The first way is to see it simply as a poetic

portrait of a unique city with a fractured sense of time and place.

The second is to see the book as the personal work of a maturing

artist who, in Istanbul, has become more comfortable than ever in his

own skin. A third way is to look at it is as the collaborative work of

multiple individuals: the denizens of the city who inhabit the book,

Webb himself, as well as the creative influence of his wife (who is

the photo editor of this book, and his previous one, Crossings). It

would take someone more experienced and intelligent than me to know