Michael Turek is a photographer based in NYC. He defines his photography as basically observational and open to experimentation. Sharing his intimate perception of this art form with Pellicola’s editorial staff, he depicts his photographic universe as extremely rich in external influences. The artist recalls the unforgettable play of light and colour which one finds in the somewhat “unnerving paintings of Giorgio De Chirico”. He mentions also the “arresting and surrealistic imagery” produced by the graphic artist Mike McQuade, who combines photography, illustration and typography in his “entertaining” work. So, in spite of the fact that photography is an inherently realistic medium, Michael is deeply captivated by the idea of exploring outside and beyond his normal boundaries and refers to specific sections of his personal body of work which bring out this curiosity. He is attracted and affected by that surrealistic vein which is a combination of the beautiful and the bizarre. Playing with different techniques and testing them as if in an inner laboratory, Michael attempts to produce imagery that is not simply literal. Indeed, as a freelance photographer, he combines both commissioned and independent projects.
But how did he arrive at this kind of freedom and find expression for his passion? We must return to 2004, when Michael graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and headed for the Big Apple where he started out as a photographer’s assistant. A few years later we find him taking on his own assignments.
Rochester is also the city of Kodak’s headquarter and Michael soon became its ambassador, running film photography workshops with the Kodak Camera Club. Shooting almost entirely digital for the first eight years of his career, the artist eventually returned to his first love, using film. And Kodak has kindly agreed to supply film for some of his projects.
Scrolling through Michael’s photo series, we discern the soul of a polyphonic photographer. Broken Glass, for example was the result of a daily exercise to work with some expired film that he wanted to use up. So doing, something unexpected happened, reminding Michael of a subject that he rarely shoots – still life. “It’s important for me”, he explains, “to play and experiment, and to remind myself of the possibilities of photography”. This creative background explains the wealth of insights which give rhythm to his work, which is roughly divided between personal projects and assignments. Not to forget his minor projects and series such as Contrail Project and Sleeping On The Job, that he works on when he is travelling.
But Siberia is quite another story. “It was immediately apparent on my first trip to Siberia that the scope of the project was of an order, of a magnitude, far larger than anything I had done before”, he says. In fact, the photographer would never have been able to complete this undertaking without turning down a number of commercial jobs that would have interfered with his trips to Russia. That is why he gave priority to Siberia over everything else for about three years beginning in 2016. This urges us ask where this interest in such a difficult and unlikely place came from. And the beginning of the story sounds like pages taken from of a romantic novel… Towards the end of 2015, a long-time collaborator and friend of Michael’s, the British writer Sophy Roberts, came up with the idea for a book about Russia, that he ironically describes as “a slightly mad search for a unique and historic piano somewhere in Siberia”. Overwhelmed by her huge enthusiasm for the quest, they made their first trip to Siberia together in the winter of 2016. Michael had not yet clearly defined his own guidelines – he had seen this as nothing more than an editorial travel story for a magazine or newspaper – or maybe not.
But when in May of 2016, Sophy proposed a second trip for later that summer, to Kolyma and the Russian Far East, to trace the length of the “Road of Bones”, Michael had to make a decision to embark upon a specific path. And so it was that he found himself with the choice of getting involved in an «uncertain project with spiralling costs or of stepping away» from it altogether. He decided to carry on.
At the beginning of their second trip, he saw an exhibition of black & white photographs by the Russian photographer, Emil Gataullin. This author reminded him of Josef Kudelka’s work and was a source of inspiration, throughout what later become the Siberia project. While packing for the second trip, with these two «masters of wide-angle composition and visual puns», to the forefront of his mind, Michael upgraded his video equipment with the intention to shift his emphasis to the moving image. However, he continued to shoot with his still cameras, simply using his iPhone for making videos. The outcome was a fantastic short film with a Chopin piano accompaniment that documents the adventure in sound and motion – a behind-the-scenes trailer for Sophy’s book and her quest for a magic piano.
After five separate trips to Siberia, and building up a large body of work to share with some respected photo editors, Michael was recommended to approach Damiani, the Italian art publisher – a lucky encounter that lead to the publication last April of a truly fantastic photo-book.
Siberia encounters with incredible delicacy this place steeped in history and, if the truth be told, also in prejudice. This publication gives a new authenticity to Siberia, touching that frail humanity that lives in a territory which is certainly frozen but not only by notorious historical events. Michael is conscious of his typical American assumptions about the place, fully aware of his preconceived notions of a remote land of prisons and exile. Self-conscious too about his particular American way of seeing things which was not easy to shed completely. Growing up near Washington, DC at the end of the Cold War, the artist wanted to photograph what he saw as objectively as possible, without judgment, to share his excitement and amazement. His focus was on “photographs that delved below the surface”.
Starting with a mind full of visions of frozen landscapes and snowy forests, Michael had to remind himself how similar the vast winter Siberian wildernesses are to the landscapes of Canada and Scandinavia. Many of his indoor shots capture warmth and coziness, sheltered from the harsh climate outside. They convey a kind of beauty, these worn-out interiors; convey a kind of sweetness in the eyes of the people, poor and weary though they might be, and reveal the poetry of these grey landscapes, filled with light and the sheer whiteness of the snow. Wrapped in this intimacy, Michael begins to see Siberia beyond the stereotypes, and with renewed eyes he sees a land of contradictions – a land that is «astonishing and sometimes absurd». The pages of this candid photo-book clearly present the discovery of a man with open ears and open eyes. Each photo of the series bids you share a new experience of a tragic yet vibrant reality, if you can but accept it as it is in all its hard reality. “It is a place of ravishing beauty, home to a deeply sensitive and intelligent people. It is also a traumatised place, with a society that still bears the scars of an unexamined past”.
Text by Costanza Francesconi
Images © Michael Turek
Honorable mentions: Sophy Roberts, Damiani Books, Kodak
