Photo Exhibition at the Atatürk Cultural Centre in Nicosia

By Heidi Trautmann

Prof. Dr. Uğurçan Akyüz is Dean at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Near East University. He was born in 1961 in Hopa in Turkey and came to Cyprus in 2006. He is a proud man and holds his head high. I have been following his endeavours to teach the NEU Fine Arts students the wide fields of art, with the latest being the ‘Academiada’ a sort of Spring University to which teachers and students of Turkish Universities were invited to work with the students here. The exhibition was on April 10 on which I reported on my website.

Uğurçan Akyüz  is a passionate photographer and for one week in April he showed us in what  good relationship he is with Master Nature. It takes a deep love to wait for the fog to rise up between the folds of mountains or over the waters of a calm morning lake, it takes patience to wait for the first rain drops to break this calmness.  He seeks light and shade, positive and negative spaces, contrast and harmony, encounter of man-made structures and inhabitants of nature, beauty and decay.

However, Uğurçan Akyüz also tries to manipulate his eyes’ experiences to make a different statement, to tell his own story of the world by merging two stories into one; manipulating by computer for a distinct message or by cutting away the superfluous to direct the view onto the essence underlined by clean composition. Balance of colour and values.

It makes a big difference to see such photographic works as large blow-ups, the raindrops disturbing the big blue thus become fascinating.

World stories well told.