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Featured exhibit of the month | The ghosts of Buyukada

Northern Irish artist and photographer James Hughes explores the four-year retreat of Leon Trotsky in Trotsky’s Ghosts: The Lost Abodes of Exile exhibit. Self-taught, Hughes is known for his ethereal snapshots of a fading Ireland and stark glimpses of international cities. The artifacts left from Trotsky’s life haunt Hughes’ photo exhibit-a bookshelf exploding with paperback, peeling acanthus –motif ceilings,moss-covered chairs so closely that it is like actually being there. The accompanying book captures some of that essence, but the artistry and intensity of the work make this exhibit a must –see

Time Out Istanbul | August 2010

Radikal | Trotsky in town

Your photographs of Trotsky's old house on Buyukada. I really liked them a lot. My compliments for the way you managed to catch both the present atmosphere in the house and what it meant for Trotsky at the time. The picture on the exhibition’s poster is beautiful and full of symbolism. A lonely chair in an empty room with red walls in a house falling apart. The exhibition is called ‘Spectres of Trotsky. Lost Interiors of an Exile’ and can be seen in the small and sympathetic Istanbul Hatirasi Photography Centre in Moda. It shows pictures taken by Irish photographer James Hughes of the house on Buyukada in which Leon Trotsky stayed when he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.

Joost Lagendijk | Senior advisor at the Istanbul Policy Center and columnist for Radikal and Hurriyet Daily News

“James has produced some fascinating insights into Irish Visual Culture and has aimed to establish what is meant by the Irish ‘sense of place’. His PhD constitutes a unique blend of accomplished photographic practice and theoretical investigation.”

Professor Terence Wright of the University of Ulster

Nowhere but north

where tinlight bridled folk

yoked man & beast

and left the farmhouse netted In the rain;

where weather reports time and again

It’s darkest joke in doors or faces wintering in

the graveyard angel

carving snowsteps in the docks

Then, Hey! My freckle boy - face.

easy on

the clocks and goldilocks roll on

and fairground fair is dealing

frost soon enough

til the tree is beautifully blasted - easy on,

the child-ghost in the winding sheet

becomes tomorrow’s lammas trader

soon enough with Woodbine teeth

If nothings lost, then nothings lasted

And the image always recast

of the Jesus man climbing the hill of Gethsemane souvenirs

walks back down the years into the photograph and forwards into the past,

weathering well

a rock or salt surviving tree; becomes the basalt’s lightening,

constantly bent into a blind monument to old northlight or new weather.

poet | John Brown written for the exhibition Northlight

 

 

Frances Guerin | Photographic Memories of Istanbul

Hughes’ photos are about surfaces: the colors, the texture, materials and transience of those surfaces that Trotsky touched, looked through and at, the surfaces that protected him, embraced him when in exile from the Communists. I find this appropriate in Istanbul: a city whose surfaces the variety and density, the infinite materials of which — paint, ceramics, sculpture, marble, carpets, all pieced together, like a jigsaw puzzle — are its hallmark. It is a city whose great jewels are its intricately designed narratives envisioned on surfaces, made of many colors and materials, substances and patterns over many many years.

It is as though the complexity and impossibly co-existent transience of Istanbul’s surfaces are transposed to the surface of Hughes’ photographs, surfaces that before his photographs he found in this house, on this remote island. Hughes’ process is apparently distinguished by its brevity, taking the photographs in a matter of minutes. And yet, in these exquisitely rendered floors and windows, ceilings and walls, in varying stages of decay and decrepitude, we go deep into the past, into the memories of other eras, not just Trotsky’s sojourn at Buyukada. The infinite layers of history, color and texture are brought to the surface of the image, through variant exposures to tell stories of the walls and the floors, the windows and the ceilings, layer upon layer, arranged on the surface of the photographic image, three dimensional, and yet so obviously a surface. The world in the photographs is visibly that of the Pashas, home to the banished rivals of the Byzantine emperors and Ottoman sultans.

The house still bears the traces of the rambling villa it once was with room upon room, one space always leading to another. The RUM architecture, the opulence of the tiling, the delicacy of the glass windows, are the wealthy signs of the wealthy families who before Trotsky had wandered these same halls.And so the Sultans’ prisons became showcases for the Empire before they would become a haven, and since then have been transformed into the playground of tourists hoping to glimpse the depth of Istanbul’s history on its surfaces.

Hughes’ photographs are so laid out on the surface that the spaces imagined verge into the plastic, almost artificial as we recognize them to be spaces created for the camera. As we look longer at the living room ceiling, or a detail from the kitchen, the images can become abstract, or even a fantasy, of some far off mysterious world, that could never possibly exist, even though we see it before our eyes, just like the beauty of the Istanbul skyline.

There is also a stillness to the images: as we look out the back door, or through into the kitchen, we see the traces of a life left behind, abandoned. As such the photographs echo death, everything is gone, a time never to be recovered. And in the continued engagement with contradiction, the artificiality and abstraction effected by Hughes’ digital camera reveals his photographs are unashamedly contemporary, even as they also look old, of the 1950s and 60s. Given my friends’ disappointment at the fashion show on exhibition at the Istanbul Modern, together with the warm hospitality of Murat and his colleagues, even when Hughes’ exhibit is over, my vote for contemporary art in Istanbul has to be the unforgettable trip across the Bosphorous to the Istanbul Hatirasi Fotograf Merkezi.

Frances Guerin is a film historian and writer living in Paris for ARTslant worldwide the #1 contemporary art network

"Your way of looking is great "

Ferit | SIPA agency

" fuckin great "

James Gooding on seeing portfolio

" a special person indeed ! "

Platon | Photographer

"James Hughes is someone who has caught the essence of life through his camera ... I felt the sense of space and "openings " in his every square . His way of capturing the traditional is very impressing " .

Umran Topcu | Prof of Architecture Bahcesehir Univ Istanbul

"re-surrects human space"

Klaus - Henning Hansen

"Wonderful images of a world that is passing from sight - or at least which was , until now . Each of these pictures could be a novel in itself ".

Anthony Toner : singer | songwriter

"Sometimes when the dust settles and cobwebs slowly creep across walls, we are remined of how much the fragments of our lives can be reflected in objects . The dull and mute tones of several pieces in this collection are fascinating, because they show moments of nil reflection - the bike light no longer shines , the stove is matte and tarnished , jesus looks out through once - polished glass. these moments evoke in me a sense of hope - no longer can we see ourselfs in the shined and polished surfaces, but our lives can be immortalised and reconstruced through objects left behind . Thanks for taking me out of myself for brief , but meaningful and optomistic thought".

Niamh Madden

" wonderful ... and was very impressed "

Rita Duffy | Artist

Fragments of a civilisation on the edge of dying and the question lingering over memories modernity released us from all of this or trapped us in a world frantic with ephemira . This is the visual companion to John Montaque's 'Like Dolmens Round My Childhood' .

Rob Owens Gregory

"Images steeped in the history of the forgotten , abandoned spaces rich in texture and memory , poignancy and poeticism".

Don Miller

"Brilliant images , Such a sense of loss . Makes you think about how much beauty we waste on this place".

Seamus Fox

"Photography is like a mirror with a memory ... and the memory lives on because James Hughes took a picture"

Stanley Matchett . MBE

Thought they were fabulous then, and still think so today! They remind me of Robert Polidori's Havana, amongst others. You have been able to capture the same decaying decadence with a passion and sensitivity. Good that you were there to do so, as it clearly would have disappeared by now. They look entirely as if they are staged or set in support of a World of Interiors or Vogue feature. All of them benefit from the same soft quality of light. They succeed as architectural records.

Alan Marsh |  Photographer

Use of colour, light and composition are all first class throughout this series, well done. Great images.

Stephen Potts | Photographer

Wonderful series that is unique and fascinating and full of imagination: yours and the viewers'. Great!
Intriguing and fascinating... I love an image that makes us use our gray cells... thanks!

Marianna Armata |  Graphic Designer

 

Awesome composition/find/capture! Very professional!

Jackson Atwater Thomson

 

This is an incredible body of work.

Michael Macfeat

 

random would have it
and we tell the best stories
Life is full of fables,
all tales and recital are full of signs

beautiful title
beautiful flight of thought

[le hasard fait bien les choses
et nous racontent les plus belles histoires
la vie est pleine de fables,
tout conte et récits pleins de signes

très beau titre
très belle envolée de la pensée]

all places tell a story, it conceals a truth own, but we give them willingly, like dreams,

legends and memories, the interpretation we want.

Nouvementc - d'un cil

 

piece of art...!

Irma Haselberger

 

"PLACE is delighted to be able to show the work of one of the leading photographers of his generation.James Hughes is from Ballymena and this exhibition charts 30 years of the capture of hidden spaces through photography.Decaying textures and fragmented remains of private lives are exposed to us. This examination of the remnants of private space helps us to revisit the lives of those who lived here in Northern Ireland in recent decades.

There is much current discussion of public space and transition of public to private space and that debate can only truly be developed in the context of the full knowledge of the nature of private spaces.This is a timely examination of the most private spaces, the interior transition spaces such as stairs and circulation hallways.

This exhibition allows local audiences to see a collection of works that examine people without the people forming part of the image , in doing so James is composing stories as much as images. James work is influenced through a personal examination of photography and literature. The image as story is clear in the work in this exhibition. His photographic essays capture life and past lifes as he finds these around the world.".

Michael Hegarty, PLACE Director

in the foreword to Spectres of Place : Three Decades of Ulster Interiors

 

Jesus! Your works phenomenal !

J. Harry Edmiston

 

Your images remind me of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky

Socorro Gonzalez Barajas

 

Those are amazing and thoughtful images, Like all your images they very much bring to mind the passage of time.

Dennis McCambridge on the 'Hands Series'