Famagusta: Contemporary images from an historic city (original) (raw)

2015

As odd as it may seem, the genesis of this project was 8000 kilometers from Famagusta, in Singapore, and the result of a collaboration between two professors with entirely different academic interests: Michael Walsh, who had spent over a decade living in, and working on, Famagusta; and Paul Kohl, who had built an international reputation based on black and white photographs, most recently in Japan, India and Portugal, but never been to Cyprus. A combination of the two, it was felt, might very well lead to something rather special in this charismatic Eastern Mediterranean location. Let us begin then by stating clearly what we set out not to do. In preparatory conversations for the project we agreed that perhaps too many artists and writers try to imbue their perceptions of, or feelings for, historic sites with knowledge of events which happened there. In Famagusta one hardly knows how to avoid this. This is, after all, the city of Dante’s warnings, St. Brigitte’s prophecies, Baragadino’s martyrdom, and Shakespeare’s Othello. Who would not be tempted to pontificate about what the stones would tell us, if only they could, about the various invasions, the exiled poets and politicians, the coronation ceremonies for the kings of Jerusalem, and ultimately, the rise and fall of great, global, empires? Could the lure of dreaming about the historic port, the magnificent walled city, and the wealthy merchants, courtesans and soldiers who frequented its streets, be resisted? And what about the instinct to close one’s eyes, to concentrate hard in an attempt to visualize the costumes, to hear the music, to imagine the pageantry – a utopia soon shattered by recalling the ghastly roar of siege cannon and drums, the cacophony of earthquakes which ravaged the city, and the moans of the dying in the plagues which followed? In time, don’t we allow ourselves to believe in the beauty, the respite, the tranquility and timelessness, brought about by the silence for which Famagusta was soon infamous? This is exactly the approach that we set out to avoid. In the same way that Monet retrospectively longed for blindness from birth so that in adulthood the return of sight could afford him a freshness of seeing; and in the same way that one can only hear Handel’s Messiah for the first time, once; so too, one’s first impression of Famagusta should be both fleeting and profound. We could not risk spoiling the freshness, neutrality and immediacy of the photographer’s artistic vision of Famagusta by acquainting him with the romantic stories, bitter longing or utopian dreaming normally associated with the city. Only later, back in Singapore, would any attempt be made to match words with images, and past with present, and even then, only when entirely necessary. Instead, our primary goal was to explore the concept of Still Life - a play on words we believed to be uniquely suited to Famagusta. On the one hand, there is ‘still life’ in the bustling university town; on the other, it has become a ‘still (static) life’ where little moves forward or progresses. Artistically, the arrangement of inanimate objects into a work of art (ie a ‘still life’ or nature morte) seemed not only feasible, but truly alluring, driven by the potential of creating an aesthetic unique to Famagusta. It is tempting to offer the reader a commentary on what is contained in the pages of this book, or to insist on explaining what the motivation was for each image / word association, but once again, we have resisted the temptation. The reason should be self-evident to those who know and love the city in all its imperfect beauty. Paul Kohl & Michael J K Walsh