Composer Yuksek isn’t just passionate about his keyboards, he’s also passionate about his cameras; never leaving his side, he uses them to capture portraits of people and places. Happy to wander where his instincts take him, he embraces an artistic approach which lets him connect with the world in a free and relaxed way.
“Photography has always interested me. It’s a cliché to say so, but it makes me open my eyes and see things differently”, Yuksek admits. A successful musician and composer of several soundtracks for films and series, he travels year-round and takes advantage of this to create his images. He immortalises comical situations, original encounters and lively, colourful scenes. “I really like to photograph people when they are looking at something. That’s why I often take photos of people from behind or in profile, to add a convergence line to their gaze”.
“It’s true that I need to be travelling when I take photos. I wander for hours off of the beaten track, like in Lebanon, for example, where I went in October 2022”. A devotee of the country where he has many friends in the music industry, Yuksek decided to embark on a photography project as part of his support following the tragic explosion in Beirut in 2020. His work appeared in a book published by Le Bec en l’air and it reveals the bitter-sweet beauty of Lebanon’s landscapes, caught between the splendour of the Mediterranean and its mournful ruins.
It’s this kind of contradiction that Yuksek’s photographs like to explore. Sometimes his series are downright funny, like the one featuring a dog called Marguerite, sticking her head out of different windows, or more metaphysical, such as a reflection on the “almost world”; the kind of absurd situations we might sometimes come across in everyday life where nostalgia, paradoxes and idiosyncrasies intermingle. Other examples include an old man sitting on some exercise equipment in Paris or an airliner dramatically disappearing into the sky, giving way to the sharp edge of a huge building.
Towards the light
“I like the idea of moving, through photography, towards light and colour”, the artist reveals. In association with Process Editions, Yuksek is preparing to release a small book on a series of photos taken on ferries, for the Rencontres de la photographie festival in Arles. “I travelled on these boats between Korea and Japan, to Norway and lots of other places around the world”, he says. “I tried to capture life on these ferries which have something outdated about them and a certain poetic dimension. These are medium-term means of transport: people get settled in and stay, most often for a day or a night, in a place that isn’t really made for it. Travellers are both on the move and settled. It’s that state of suspension between two shores that I tried to capture”.
Yuksek can also draw on more personally sensitive material: nostalgia. That is the subject of another book to be published by Le Bec en l’air in November this year, at the Paris Photo fair. The work is created from family archives and it evokes, among other childhood recollections, the memory of his late mother. “Photography has a therapeutic dimension for me”, observes Yuksek, who says that he has devoted more time to it since the death of his parents.
“The difficulty lies in the concept of mixing music and photography, something I want to do in the near future with an exhibition at a music festival”, he replies when asked about the next steps in his artistic ambitions. He also likes to point out that his photos and his music have something in common: they are made up of lots of little moments which, juxtaposed, gradually form an interesting whole, a vibrant jigsaw puzzle to put together – testament to his insatiable appetite for the song the world sings.
