Only You Are Close, When Everything Is Far Away

This series emerged during the pandemic, as travel stopped, studios closed, and physical proximity between people was restricted. A practice sustained for years in groups and shared spaces came to an abrupt halt. That break in the familiar routines of life opened a way to look again at the body's needs and its relationship with its surroundings.

The title comes from a line by the Turkish poet Oktay Rıfat: “Bir sen yakınsın, uzakta kalınca” (“Only you are close when you are far away”). Here, a human voice addresses nature. The separation brought by the pandemic makes a closeness forgotten in modern life felt again. Through the vulnerability of our bodies, we rediscover our need for nature and our place within it.

In modern life, nature is often imagined as a place outside the everyday, somewhere we visit and leave. The pandemic called that separation into question through the vulnerability of the body. Breathing, touch, and sharing an environment with other living beings took on a new significance. As we withdrew from one another to protect ourselves, we felt again how closely our lives are bound to nature. The series looks for this awareness in bodies at the water's edge.

In the photographs, bodies sit, crouch, or curl into themselves on the shore. In some frames, the figure occupies a small part of the landscape; in others, the framing is closer. Black-and-white tones bring the surface of the skin alongside the textures of sand, stone, water, and vegetation. Each posture takes on meaning through its relationship with the place.

The shore is where land and water meet and continually redraw each other's boundaries. Here the body is sensitive to the ground it touches, the movement of the water, and the open air. Its nakedness makes its openness to, and need for, its surroundings visible. The wave is close; the water is close; the earth is close. The words of the title emerge from this closeness: a recognition of the world to which we belong.