The Representation of Subjective Space in Turkey After Tanzimat Reform Era up to Today

Subjectivity and the Destruction of Linear Perspective

After Tanzimat Reform Era, the influence of western art and linear perspectival representation forms were increased in paintings due to the emerge of the French-oriented education of the artists.
A distinctive representation form of space was developed with the combination of linear perspective and the effects of the former perspective view of miniature. To make references i will chronologically start with a painting of Şeker Ahmet Paşa; Woodcutter in The Forest and end up with Murat Germen's Muta-morphosis and Ahmet Elhan's Diptychs to search out why and how a this kind of destruction of linear perspective is used to express subjectivity.

 

Keywords: Subjectivity, Painting, Photography, Reality, Representation, Landscape, Linear Perspective

 

Landscape and Linear Perspective

 

I always find much more interesting the visual works that have a unique subjectivity that is based on specifically the individual creative language of the creator. In this text I will focus especially on subjectivity in landscape paintings and photographs. However the lexical meaning of landscape is; a section or expanse of rural scenery, usually extensive, that can be seen from a single viewpoint, in this text i will use the term also including city scenery. Using natural landscape and cultural landscape terms may help to distinguish them from each other.

 The landscape, as it understood from its lexical meaning, has generally accepted as a picture of a scene depicted from one-point linear perspective. Linear perspective, is a mathematical system to draw a three-dimensional physical space on a two dimensional surface, with using lines and a vanishing point to show how the apparent size of an object diminishes with distance.

 

The pictures with linear perspectival point of view mimicks the scene that is seen from a 'stable' eye position. In 15th century, this eye located on a particular position on the ground and freezed in a particular time was accepted as the main tool for creating a 'realist' representation of space[1]. As Denis Cosgrove (1984, 5) confirms, this pictorial form and its relation with reality was not questioned until the nineteenth century:

             
             The artist, through perspective, establishes the arrangement or composition, and thus thespecific   time, of the   events described, determines in both senses the 'point of view' to be taken by the observer, and controls through framing the scope of reality revealed. Perspective technique was so effective that the realist conventions which it underlay were not fundamentally challenged until the nineteenth century.

 

                 

 

 

References and Notes

 

1. Denis Cosgrove, "Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea", Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1985): 45-62. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 15th century, with the rise of humanism, the concept of reality shifted towards the physical reality that is seen to human eye rather than

 

 

I will compare and contrast two artworks to question how individual perception and so the creative language changes from culture to culture and from time to time. One is a painting from Tanzimat Reform Era and the other one is series of photograph from today.