I’m a Toronto-based photographer and a part-time PhD student studying environmental ethics and early-modern German philosophy. My background is Turkish, although my birthplace and first home is in Svishtov, Bulgaria, a small town on the Danube River. I was born during the Cold War, behind the “Iron Curtain”, at a time when state authorities sought to disavow and brutally repress my family’s collective identity, by erasing the reality of our ancestral Turkish ethnicity and by suppressing our right to practice our faith.
I was raised in a spiritually barren climate. This left me with a profound kind of emptiness, a void at my core. As I grow older, with the help of my family and our two young children ... and as I’ve been living with a difficult illness ... I've started to recover a sense of personal spirituality.
Since I can't quite see my way toward any kind of formal, organized religion, my best source of sustenance is in thoughtful engagement with art ... so that I might begin to approach the sublime through purposeful creative activity.
I was fortunate enough to have received a comprehensive education in photography at a very young age, while living with my parents as refugee expats in North Africa in the 80s. Starting in Grade 6, I was taught all the basics of film photography. Recently, I realized that I’ve been using my camera all these years not just as a way of documenting various surface aspects of our world but rather in the hope that, within this world, it might still be possible to encounter mystery and to capture intimations of the sacred.
My basic purpose in working on a personal artistic project, whatever particular theme I may choose, is to deepen and broaden this nascent spirituality ... and, bit by bit, to re-enchant the world around me.
Because he also saw photographic art as a route to the spiritual, Minor White is one of my all-time favourite photographers. For similar reasons, I admire Kandinsky … and I must also include my teacher and mentor at McGill University, the philosopher Charles Taylor.
