Murat Germen: Beauty out of ordinary
Under - Art, Inspiration, Photography
Murat Germen, based in Istanbul, Turkey, uses photography as an expression and research tool. He works as a professor of art, photography and new media at the Sabanci University in Istanbul. His work has been featured all over the world and can be found at institutions such as Istanbul Modern, Young & Rubicam, McCann Erickson, The Designory, Norman Foster & Partners, DDB, Rafineri, Swissôtel and Boyner to name a few.
Photography is an opportunity for me to find things people ignore and bring them forward to make people reconsider their ideas. I am not interested in extraordinary things since they are always covered and receive more attention due to mankind’s unending interest in celebrities, fame, sensation… I try to concentrate more on ordinary things and catch possible latent extraordinariness in regularity. It is easy to take ordinary photos of extraordinary things but more challenging to take extraordinary photos of ordinary things. It is possible to say I tend to concentrate on extracting beauty out of ordinary. I attempt to defamiliarize ordinariness, render it ambiguous by alienating it from its familiar context and finally make people to ‘see it afresh.’
Murat has an MArch degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he went as a Fulbright scholar and received AIA Henry Adams Gold Medal for academic excellence.
Photography records the surface information, where one can only depict the exterior features of objects (color, texture, shape, etc.) and the resulting visual representation cannot incorporate the internal condition / content / soul.
The combination of digital means and artistic practice is of prime importance. The computational dimension is indispensable and allows me to visualize anything that I perceive / conceive. The technological advances in imaging and its post-processing changed the way I observe, imagine, create and share my artworks.
WordPress 