This Was…

Cemre Yeşil is another artist that incorporates text in a way that makes the work feel personal and diaristic. What I like about it is the handwritten nature of the text, as well as the consistency in the sentence starters. By starting the sentences with “This was…” and finishing them with a specific situation, it helps to draw all of the images in the series together. This reminds me of the importance of consistency in a series, as well as the effectiveness of repetition. The images and the writing don’t necessarily match in concept, but their juxtaposition forces the audience to create their own meaning, story, or relationship.

Below is a quote on Yeşil’s work, which is available on her website. I noticed that her work also deals with social media, and how we communicate or project our thoughts and perceptions into the online world.

“Cemre Yeşil’s “This Was” project with its specific focus on personal memory, exposes the cultural conditions of sharing photographs in social media and demands us to reconsider our conception, either professional or amateur, of the status of the “image”. This project also has a very intrinsic, very poetic characteristic, which is in fact extremely far from intellectualism, so to speak. A phrase pairing with each image, are like image/text haikus that describe the flux of our everyday lives. The interrelation between visuality and textuality is an interesting dimension of this project, and in a world that makes us think in indicators and visual codes it drives us to reflect on the ideological structure in the background of the image production. But her attempt is completely innocent. She raises the question that how an image is able to explain a feeling or a concept by unlocking the door to her own world (or maybe pretending to unlock).”  - Ahu Antmen

Also, her website is really funky. (above)

(1) Yesil, C 2014, This Was, photographic series, viewed 14 May 2020, <https://www.cemreyesil.com/this-was>