IZ Magazine 1

IZ is a Bi monthly Photographic magazine published in Istanbul by Fotografevi, mostly presenting documentary portfolios, both historical to the contemporary. Over the last 3 years IZ has featured and introduced to a Turkish audience a number of photographers from VII, Magnum, Panos,
and other.
For the March/April issue, Vanessa Winship and myself were invited to guest edit IZ and produce a Portrait issue. We wanted to emphasis work that doesn't attempt to sit in one genre but moves between documentary, portraiture and fine art. Unfortunately the magazine doesn't have a website and is only available in Turkey. I will show a few of the page layouts here in the next week. On this post we have August Sander, (above), who needs no introduction.

A great discovery during our time in the Balkans was the photography of Leonidas Papazoglou (below). Born in Kastoria, Greece during the final years of the Ottoman empire, Papazoglou worked as a photographer in Kastoria and the surrounding region from the late 1890's until his untimely death in 1918 at the age of 46. His stunning portraits capture the centuries-old multiethnic and multicultural character of an area where Greeks, Turks, Jews, Turks and Albanians coexist with Slav-speaking native people, as the Ottoman Empire goes through the last phase of its existence. I would like to thank Mr George Golobias, who discovered, restored and owns the collection and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography for publishing the book, Leonidas Papazoglou: Portraits from Kastoria at the time of the Macedonian struggle.
More images here.

The Second photographer is Pierre Gonnord, we saw his work for the first time, exhibited at Arles last year. Without a doubt this was one of the highlights of the festival. Here is a snippet from his own introduction of his work.
I choose my contemporaries in the anonymity of the big cities because their
faces, under the skin, narrate unique and remarkable stories about our era.
Sometimes hostile, almost always vulnerable and very often wounded behind
the opaqueness of their mask, they embody at once specific social realities
and a different concept of beauty.

I search for individuals that seem unclassifiable and timeless, suggesting that the play of human condition has been repeated over and over since the beginning of time. I would like to encourage the crossing of a mental border.