Meşe, 2011
Holding On
Hands are strong. As strong as trees that, in moments when one feels particularly powerful, one believes one could tear out of the ground. In Altan Eskin’s work, it is precisely this strength that is at stake when he repeatedly turns his gaze to hands: hands, hands, hands. Forty-two times in total. On closer inspection, it becomes apparent that the same hands appear in every photograph: not coarse, yet sturdy, with straight fingers but rounded forms. They are propped against a waist, holding a lady’s hand, folded together or hanging loosely at the sides; they wear a wedding ring and rest gently on the shoulder of a little boy dressed smartly in a bow tie and a light-colored shirt.
After the death of his father in 2006, Altan Eskin searched through the family photo albums to keep his memories alive and to work through his grief. In doing so, it seems that his father’s hands touched him more deeply than anything else. By focusing on this particular detail of the image, he is able to discover more about this close figure than in a conventional portrait that shows the face. Here, in what may be only a tiny fragment, the story of the person in question becomes condensed: Altan Eskin’s father was a carpenter, and his hands were his most important tools—the foundation of his existence when he immigrated from Turkey to Germany in the late 1960s. Uprooted from everything else, his hands were the only thing he had to build a new life for himself and his family: hands that knew their craft—at first even independent of a foreign language in a foreign land.
As a photographic motif, hands possess a particular fascination. This may be due in part to the fact that they themselves have something photographic about them, so that medium and subject intertwine in a certain way. The hand—tender in its caress or rough with weathered skin, with wrinkles and fine lines, calluses and marks and scars and nails and scratches and edges—tells the story of the life of the person to whom it belongs. They are covered all over with traces. Traces that are revealing and irrevocable, just like the imprints left by light on photosensitive material. Some say that what matters in life is leaving traces behind, so that something remains when they are no longer there.
In his work »Meşe«, Altan Eskin brings all of this together and traces a complex web of marks, rediscovering the traces of his memory in photographic details and extracting them from their original pictorial context. It is evident that the photograph, with its grainy surface, can hardly be more than a vague, slightly blurred aide-mémoire. All the more so, each individual enlargement can be viewed independently of the original image from the family album (those of us who do not know Altan Eskin’s family—or know them only through these photographs—have little alternative) and reveals itself additionally as a pictorial composition.
»Meşe« is Turkish for “oak,” thus referring to a tree typically associated with Germany. The oldest oaks in Turkey stand in the province of Bolu, where Altan’s father was born in 1944. It seems he was young enough—when, in his mid-twenties, he decided to relocate—to take root in another place. At least in the beginning, his hands were all he had.
Text by Jule Hillgärtner
