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"The Eyes of Mehmet Ünal"
Fakir Baykurt
Under photography I don't understand, as it is the meaning in many instances, that if someone takes a camera in his hand, clic, clic and a so-called photo is done. I don't see it as a job if with the modern and technically high developped cameras, the very sensitive films and the possibilities with paper and colour usage they can very easy be developed. I have the opinion, that since the first camera until today, not the camera shoots the photo, but the eye behind the camera, respectively the awareness and the mind, that hides behind the eye, takes the shot. The heart captures the complying love, the joy, the furore or the toiling pain of human beeings seen.
With this understanding photography is art, that at least is as complex as writing novels or even poetry. Therefore, despite all technical possibilities and all the needed materials, there are only a few photographers as there are only a few romanciers and poets or even poetry. Actually what is art? Is it not in some aspect like science, seeing and showing reality of the good and the beauty? As we can not see the bacteriums without a microscope, we cannot see the reality without help of the art, that is endless in front of us, in us and flooding out of us. What we think we have seen, is the surface and the obvious. Under this aspect we are coerced, through art, to see the invisible behind the obvious, showing the human beeing, looking beneath the surface of this ocean, that thousands of waves are stiring up, as far as our power is reaching, to think about it from the most difficult side and to understand.
When I met my friend Mehmet Ünal in Mainz 1979, I noticed, that he is one of the few "crackpots", meaning that he belongs to the art possessed people. He came from Turkey and worked as a social worker for the workers between Mainz and Koblenz. Photography seemed to be a minor matter. But I think it is his main job. "Whatever I do, however I put all my engery into it, it doesn't work out", he says all the time biting on his lips. The satisfaction, that we find easily at work, is very hard to find in arts. Since we have met I have spent a lot of time with him. We have met very often in the Ruhr-Area, Frankfurt, Duisburg, Köln and the area of Mainz talking for hours. All the years he did his job, his free time he dedicated to art. Endlessly he said "it doesn't work, whatever I do it doesn't work". Indeed, our friend Mehmet Ünal belongs to the few people that understand art as very complicated. He works very hard and is very exhausted. However, despite him saying it doesn't work, he still makes great improvements.
Whenever we meet we talk about photography. Until now we have not had a chance to move to novels. We look at his photographs. During the last years he has shot a lot of pictures at places he has visited, so may photos that would fill up albums and galeries. But if an exhibition opens he only can select 40 to 50 photos out of the lot that fills his collection. Again he says: "It does not work". And I want to tell him that in my opinion it does. But as most serious artists he sees art from the difficult side and becomes discontent. With his eyes in which the beaming sun of Anatolia is reflecting, he sees the reality and shows the human beeing. Endlessly being confronted with problems, with his Gorki-mustache and his camera around his neck, he has been shooting photos of foreign workers for many years.
Sometimes he sees photography as insufficient, then he writes poems, stories and reportages. When he has a chance for a half-an-hour-meeting with Jannis Ritsos, a grand child of Homer, he instantly travels to Greece. And to talk to Emil Carlebach he hurries immediately to Frankfurt. Emil Carlebach was one of the twenty people that stayed alive out of 2000 during the transport from concentration camp Dachau to Buchenwald. When the German press was reporting 40 years after the end of 2nd World War, about the defeat of Germany, the old revolutionist told my friend Mehmet, how they smuggled parts out of the weapon factories where they had to do forced labor, and produced weapons themselves. They rescued themselves out of the concentration camp before the allies arrived. He says: "It was us who won the war, the German resistance fighters". This is exactly realizing and showing the invisible behind the obvious.
Mehmet sees the Anatolian woman, of which millions live completely isolated since years, in a telephone booth and shows it to us. He tells abount the joy in the Turkish worker's shining eyes with the umbrella in his hand, which you are unable to put into words. He shoots photos of the youngsters, having no time to loose, the old ones on the park benches, who due to isolation and tedium almost fall out this world. Mehmet looks and shows the bird's desert life on the wire in the industry society. For us he takes photo shots of children that are unhappy in school, whose parents work in factories, leaving them alone at home. If I see how this tireless artist, this tireless fighter for freedom, with his camera around his neck is showing social evils, while he has success I feel very happy. Permanently I want to be witness of his numerous exhibitions and plenty of photobooks published in the future.