The Garden of Earthly Delights
The passage of time, and particularly the transformation and decay that it engenders, is the main thematic thread running through the collaborative work of Barbara and Zafer Baran. The couple met in London in the early 1980s while studying at Goldsmiths College and have worked as photographers, both separately and together, ever since. There is a deceptive eclecticism in the variety of the work that they have produced during their long career. The visual difference between their last project exhibited at the Borusan Art Gallery and their latest display in the same space is a case in point. Atlas, which was part of the group show Roundtrip Istanbul III in 2000, featured monumental and earthy images of rocks and stones in both their natural setting and the studio (figs. 1 and 2). The inherent density of the subject matter contrasts greatly with the other-worldly fragility of the flowers pictured in Ephemera. The two series however seem to converge and reconcile themselves in Toxic Forest, the Barans' most recent collaborative effort, which is shown for the first time alongside Ephemera. The Garden of Earthly Delights is the Barans' first solo exhibition at the Borusan Art Gallery.
Ephemera
Strikingly beautiful and luminescent images of botanical specimens set against a black background make up Ephemera. As its title suggests, the series is primarily concerned with issues of change and degeneration and is thus very much in keeping with the Barans' previous work. In fact, the couple consider Ephemera to be an expansion of the questions of "transience and permanence as relating to the natural world, and our own place within it" explored in Atlas. The major source of inspiration for both series came from work they produced for Royal Mail. In 1998 they were commissioned by the postal company to create a stamp celebrating the invention of photography as part of its millennial theme: Inventors' Tales. The project enabled them to examine William Henry Fox Talbot's 'photogenic drawings', the cameraless photographs of small objects, such as flowers, leaves and lace, that led to his important discovery of the negative-positive process in the late 1830s (fig. 3). Ephemera's floral motif and ethereal quality are clearly in the spirit of Fox Talbot's ghostly impressions, but they also make reference to the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, his contemporary, whose experiments in photography also stemmed from a passion for botany. The Barans' vibrantly hued specimens looming out of a primordial darkness recall Atkins' silhouettes of algae, flowers and ferns floating in a sea of brilliant Prussian blue (fig. 4).
The making of Ephemera was also informed by the techniques of early photography, as it was done without the use of a camera. Although digital and exploiting modern imaging tools, the Barans' cameraless work adhered to the basic principles of photography and was akin to the photogram invented by Fox Talbot. The couple follow in the tradition of reviving this technique which began with Fox Talbot and Atkins in the 1830s, was rediscovered in 1918 by Christian Schad, to be carried on into the 1920s by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy and resumed in the late 1980s by a group of British photographers including Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges and Adam Fuss.i The Barans' use of digital technology is a modern extension of the photogram technique. Yet the fundamental presence of light, visible in the inner luminosity and hyper-reality of the flowers, binds Ephemera to the simple origins of the photographic medium.
In Ephemera, the hybrid of art and science photography produces a type of florilegium for the twenty-first century. Florilegia or 'flower books' emerged in the seventeenth century when it first became fashionable for flowering plants to be grown for their decorative rather than medicinal or alimentary qualities. The florilegium mainly consisted of plates of detailed, multi-coloured floral engravings, distinguishing it from its predecessor, the 'herbal', in which schematic, monochrome botanical drawings illustrated texts on the practical uses for plants. The prints of flora served as substitutes for plants unable to survive removal from their original habitat. Ephemera's images of cross-sections, close-ups and composites of cut flowers are reminiscent of the formal plant portraiture found in florilegia but, as many are in a state of decay, they differ from the perfect specimens depicted in that genre. In addition, the series' pervasive focus on the flowers' sexual parts seems to be influenced by the binomial system of plant classification that was established by the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and "depended on the flower and an enumeration of the stamens and pistils, and their relation to one another".ii The Barans' more classic floral images make reference to "sex, birth, growth, decay, death and regeneration".iii These issues are not only at the heart of Ephemera but also recall the original purpose of the florilegium.
In the 1960s Zafer's family lived in Izmir, Turkey where his father, then an engineer in the Turkish navy, had designed and constructed the dome for a new observatory for the Department of Astronomy at the Aegean University. As a child Zafer visited the observatory many times, sometimes passing the night there. He still remembers the quietness of its mountain-top location, its pendulum, an incredible sighting of Saturn, and the Milky Way spread over the entire night sky. Ephemera's other, more abstract images appear to be views of the cosmos seen through the telescope, bacteria through a microscope, or even both. The circular images are like the galaxy reflected in a Petri dish. The Barans feel that it is in these pieces "that the universality of all life and matter is best expressed".
Toxic Forest
The principal thematic link within their oeuvre continues to manifest itself in the Barans' latest body of collaborative work that was inspired by their flower collecting for Ephemera. Strictly speaking, a forest is "an extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth, sometimes intermingled with pasture".iv So it is telling that the Barans entitled the new series Toxic Forest, even though they created these unsettling images of tangled undergrowth in a park. The distinguishing characteristics of parks are generally their ornamental layout, enclosure in a town or attachment to a country house, as well as their use for public or private recreation. It might seem pedantic to point out such semantic niceties but language used often implies an individual's intentions or betrays their perceptions. In this case, the Barans' choice of title assumes particular significance when one considers the fact that the word 'forest' is cognate with 'foreign' since they are both derived from foris, the Latin for 'out of doors'. The presence of a foreign body in parkland inspired the series and perhaps is the reason for the transformation of the actual park into the imagined forest of its title.
The Barans live in the proximity of Richmond Park, the largest of London's Royal Parks, and have been visiting it for many years. Toxic Forest stemmed from their interest in and subsequent familiarity with a species of rhododendron that they encountered while walking in the park's plantations. The Rhododendron ponticum is a tall shrub native to South-East Europe and Western Asia that was introduced to Britain in the nineteenth century by explorers carrying home exotic plants with which to enliven the English country garden. A shrub that grows well in the shade and on almost any type of soil - quickly producing a verdant screen suitable for game cover and clusters of pretty flowers in the spring - it easily beguiled these plant collectors. Having been the darling of ornamental planting in the Victorian era, it eventually took its captor captive and earned the reputation for being the gardeners' best friend but foresters' worst enemy.
Today the Rhododendron ponticum is considered by many to be a weed, the attributes for which it was originally prized having proved noxious to British flora and fauna. Its capacity to adapt to most soil conditions, aided by its ability to regenerate both vegetatively and by seed dispersal, has enabled it to spread from country estates and invade large areas of the British countryside. The cover provided by its dense canopy literally puts native plants in the shade, inhibiting their growth. Once shed, its leaves, which are also toxic and unpalatable to herbivores, create an acidic mulch that increases the inhospitableness of the ground for competing plants. The nectar from its flowers produces a honey that, if ingested by humans, causes 'Mad Honey Disease'. Fortunately for Zafer's father, whom curiosity once dared to taste the plant's sweet poison, the intoxication tends to last for less than twenty-four hours, inducing symptoms such as vomiting, excessive perspiration, dizziness, shock and low blood pressure - but rarely fatalities.
The presence in the domestic landscape of a foreign body, which the Barans knew to be toxic and damaging to its adopted environment, led them to see a "dark beauty" in the undergrowth of the rhododendron plantings. Their awareness of the species' aggression, a manifestation of the superior force of nature - as well as a general metaphor for cultural and environmental issues - offers an explanation for their equation of the seemingly benign parkland with the sinister forest that has long disturbed the collective imagination. The Barans follow the popular view that the ubiquity of the theme of the malevolent and bewildering forest in fairy tales is symbolic of an aspect of the human psyche: namely, the examination of the unknown and feared elements of one's own character.v For many their photographic expression will immediately recall familiar folkloristic and literary traditions. One of the tales that speaks to them, and in particular Jean Cocteau's 1946 haunting cinematic adaptation of it, is Beauty and the Beast. The stereotypical forest that hides the Beast's castle heightens the atmosphere of the story and enhances its message of the deceptiveness of appearances, a theme that has resonance with the seductive yet poisonous qualities of the Rhododendron ponticum.
The Barans describe twilight as "the interface between day and night, neither one thing nor the other, where things are only ever half-seen, where subconscious, primeval fears emerge as darkness grows". To make Toxic Forest, they rejected using a traditional large-format camera with film and a tripod, having found that shooting at twilight with a small hand-held digital camera enabled them to create blurred images that suitably conveyed "a sense of oppression, mystery and claustrophobia". They faulted the former method for producing images that were "too sharp, too clear, too detailed - nothing to do with the way the eye perceives a landscape in those light conditions". In order to further enhance the impressionistic qualities of their work, they enlarged the images beyond the conventional capabilities of their simple, 4-megapixel digital files. The resulting images are close to what the Barans had seen, or rather had half-seen, in the dusk.
Different sources of light were crucial to the making of Toxic Forest. Twilight served to flatten the sculptural forms of the rhododendron plantings and obfuscate their colours, making it difficult for viewers to judge distance in the photographs of the dark undergrowth, thus increasing their sense of fear and unease. While broad daylight, the springtime sun acting as a backlight, enabled the Barans to produce the close-ups of illuminated rhododendron flowers that make up the DVD projection accompanying the Toxic Forest landscapes in the gallery. In these slowly flashing images there is an almost pornographic use of soft-focus on the exposed sexual organs of the plant, which was created by the lens being pushed right into the heart of the flower. The sensuality of the projected, vibrantly coloured petals contrasts greatly with the sombre autumnal landscapes in the prints. Their juxtaposition recalls the duplicitous nature of the species, reminding us of the cliché that looks can deceive. We are beguiled by the Rhododendron ponticum's seductive bloom and yet are in danger of being poisoned by its toxic honey. This duality is best described by the subtle nuances of the Ancient Greek word farmakon that means either medicine or poison depending on the dosage administered. You can imagine that being thus intoxicated might impair one's vision and cause one to see the world as the Barans half-saw it in the twilight.
The general title of the exhibition The Garden of Earthly Delights refers loosely to the early sixteenth-century painting by the Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch. The decaying flowers of Ephemera and deceptive blooms of Toxic Forest seem to share some of the symbolism of that triptych, which in an early inventory was also called The Vanity of the World. Like the Dutch still-life vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, they reflect "the fragility of man and his world of desires and pleasures in the face of the inevitable and finality of death",vi showing not only beauty but also the reverse of that seductive coin.
Anne-Marie Eze
Assistant Curator of Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
BARBARA & ZAFER BARAN
Barbara Baran Born 1956 UK. Studied University College London (BA Hons in French, 1974-78) and Goldsmiths College, London (1981-82).
Zafer Baran Born 1955 Turkey. Studied State Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul (1973-77) and Goldsmiths College, London (1979-81), where also took part in first holography course to be held in Europe.
Barbara and Zafer Baran met in 1981, and live and work in London.
Solo and two-person shows
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2005
Eight Portraits (as part of Fragments from the Past), Abney Hall,
London 2004
The Flower Cabinet, Blue Gallery, London 2004
Ephemera, Blue Gallery, London 2003
Atlas (as part of Roundtrip Istanbul III), Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2000
Zafer Baran: Blue, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
Barbara Baran, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
Turkish Portraits (concurrently with Roy DeCarava), Photographers' Gallery, London 1988
One Plus One, Upper Street Gallery, London 1985
Barbara Baran: Photographs, Impressions Gallery of Photography,
York 1983
Correspondences, Goldsmiths College, London 1982
Selected group shows
photo-london (with Blue Gallery), London 2005
Rose c'est la vie: On Flowers in Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum
of Art, Tel Aviv 2004
photo-london (with Blue Gallery), London 2004
Paris Photo (with Eric Franck Fine Art), Paris 2003
Art+ Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida 2003
Art Chicago (with Berkeley Square Gallery), Chicago 2003
Forgotten Places, Arcola Gallery, London 2002
Act One, Arcola Gallery, London 2001
Post Impressions, The British Library, London 1999
Signs of the Times, Association Gallery, London 1995
Special Photographers' Company Gallery, London 1995
Fashion Exposures, The Worx, London 1995
A Positive View, Saatchi Gallery, London 1994
Urart Gallery, Ankara 1994
Icons, Idols and Heroes, Association Gallery, London 1992
Association Gallery, London 1991
Special Photographers' Company Gallery, London 1988
The Roving Eye, Islington Arts Factory, London 1985
New Horizons, Royal Festival Hall, London 1985
Goldsmiths College, London 1981, 1982
Collections
Lindley Library, Royal Horticultural Society, London
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Private and corporate collections
Awards
Metropolitan University/European Union, 2004
British Council, 1997
London Boroughs Grants Scheme, 1988
Selected projects
Royal Mail: bicentenary stamps, Royal Horticultural Society, 2003
Royal Mail: millennium stamp (Fox Talbot and invention of photography), 1999
BBC Films: title sequence, The Designated Mourner, dir. David Hare, 1997
Phaidon Press: 1997
English National Opera: 1992-9
Exhibition catalogues and brochures
Rose c'est la vie: On Flowers in Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum
of Art, Tel Aviv 2004 (essay by Edna Moshenson)
Barbara and Zafer Baran: The Flower Cabinet, Blue Gallery, London 2004 (essays by Brent Elliott and Ian Jeffrey)
Barbara and Zafer Baran: Ephemera, Blue Gallery, London 2003 (essay by Ian Jeffrey)
Roundtrip Istanbul III, Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2000 (essay by Beral Madra)
Barbara Baran/Zafer Baran, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
A Positive View, Saatchi Gallery, London 1994
'Zafer & Barbara Baran: Turkish Portraits', Martin Caiger-Smith, Photographers' Gallery, London 1988 (January/February programme)
New Horizons, Royal Festival Hall, London 1985
Selected bibliography
'Turkish Artists Come in from the Cold', Maureen Freely, timesonline.co.uk, 21 March 2005
Royal Mail Special Stamps 21, Fay Sweet, Royal Mail, 2004
Interview, Milliyet, 5 June 2004
'When Photography, Flowers and Philately Collide', Katie Scott, British Journal of Photography, 26 May 2004
British Philatelic Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 8, April 2004
Maison Française, June 2003
'Bold Types', Richard Pinsent, pluk, No. 11, March/April 2003
'Barbara and Zafer Baran: Ephemera', Richard Pinsent, The Art Newspaper, No. 134, March 2003
'Deaf-Mute Harmony of Chaos and Confusion', Evrim Altug, gazetem.net, 19 March 2003
artnet magazine, 17 January 2003
'The Abstract Heart', Elizabeth Meath Baker, Cornucopia, Issue 25, 2002
'Act One', Arredamento, June 2001
Interview, XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, May/June 2001
'Zafer Baran: Photographic Work', XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, March/April 2001
'Roundtrip Istanbul 3: The Barans' Journey', Arredamento, November 2000
'Barbara Baran: To Horus, One-Time God of Light', XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, May/June 2000
Polaroid International Photography magazine, Issue 19, 2000
'Barbara & Zafer Baran: Portraits from the Fault Zone', Maureen Freely, A Concert for Turkey, Artists' Relief Trust, Barbican Centre, London 2000
Royal Mail Millennium Stamps 1999, Jim Davies, Royal Mail, 1999
'Barbara and Zafer Baran', Cüneyt Budak, Arredamento, April 1999
The Independent, 13 November 1998
'A History of Britain in 48 Stamps', Mark Henderson, The Times, 13 November 1998
Interview, Radikal, 15 April 1997
'Masters of Light Who Transform Everything', Memet Baydur, Cumhuriyet, 11 August 1996
'The Equivocal Image', Michael Evamy, Design magazine, December 1992
'Turkish Portraits', London Magazine, October 1986
Interviews
BBC World Service, May 2004
NTV, October 2000
Ephemera
Strikingly beautiful and luminescent images of botanical specimens set against a black background make up Ephemera. As its title suggests, the series is primarily concerned with issues of change and degeneration and is thus very much in keeping with the Barans' previous work. In fact, the couple consider Ephemera to be an expansion of the questions of "transience and permanence as relating to the natural world, and our own place within it" explored in Atlas. The major source of inspiration for both series came from work they produced for Royal Mail. In 1998 they were commissioned by the postal company to create a stamp celebrating the invention of photography as part of its millennial theme: Inventors' Tales. The project enabled them to examine William Henry Fox Talbot's 'photogenic drawings', the cameraless photographs of small objects, such as flowers, leaves and lace, that led to his important discovery of the negative-positive process in the late 1830s (fig. 3). Ephemera's floral motif and ethereal quality are clearly in the spirit of Fox Talbot's ghostly impressions, but they also make reference to the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, his contemporary, whose experiments in photography also stemmed from a passion for botany. The Barans' vibrantly hued specimens looming out of a primordial darkness recall Atkins' silhouettes of algae, flowers and ferns floating in a sea of brilliant Prussian blue (fig. 4).
The making of Ephemera was also informed by the techniques of early photography, as it was done without the use of a camera. Although digital and exploiting modern imaging tools, the Barans' cameraless work adhered to the basic principles of photography and was akin to the photogram invented by Fox Talbot. The couple follow in the tradition of reviving this technique which began with Fox Talbot and Atkins in the 1830s, was rediscovered in 1918 by Christian Schad, to be carried on into the 1920s by Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy and resumed in the late 1980s by a group of British photographers including Garry Fabian Miller, Susan Derges and Adam Fuss.i The Barans' use of digital technology is a modern extension of the photogram technique. Yet the fundamental presence of light, visible in the inner luminosity and hyper-reality of the flowers, binds Ephemera to the simple origins of the photographic medium.
In Ephemera, the hybrid of art and science photography produces a type of florilegium for the twenty-first century. Florilegia or 'flower books' emerged in the seventeenth century when it first became fashionable for flowering plants to be grown for their decorative rather than medicinal or alimentary qualities. The florilegium mainly consisted of plates of detailed, multi-coloured floral engravings, distinguishing it from its predecessor, the 'herbal', in which schematic, monochrome botanical drawings illustrated texts on the practical uses for plants. The prints of flora served as substitutes for plants unable to survive removal from their original habitat. Ephemera's images of cross-sections, close-ups and composites of cut flowers are reminiscent of the formal plant portraiture found in florilegia but, as many are in a state of decay, they differ from the perfect specimens depicted in that genre. In addition, the series' pervasive focus on the flowers' sexual parts seems to be influenced by the binomial system of plant classification that was established by the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and "depended on the flower and an enumeration of the stamens and pistils, and their relation to one another".ii The Barans' more classic floral images make reference to "sex, birth, growth, decay, death and regeneration".iii These issues are not only at the heart of Ephemera but also recall the original purpose of the florilegium.
In the 1960s Zafer's family lived in Izmir, Turkey where his father, then an engineer in the Turkish navy, had designed and constructed the dome for a new observatory for the Department of Astronomy at the Aegean University. As a child Zafer visited the observatory many times, sometimes passing the night there. He still remembers the quietness of its mountain-top location, its pendulum, an incredible sighting of Saturn, and the Milky Way spread over the entire night sky. Ephemera's other, more abstract images appear to be views of the cosmos seen through the telescope, bacteria through a microscope, or even both. The circular images are like the galaxy reflected in a Petri dish. The Barans feel that it is in these pieces "that the universality of all life and matter is best expressed".
Toxic Forest
The principal thematic link within their oeuvre continues to manifest itself in the Barans' latest body of collaborative work that was inspired by their flower collecting for Ephemera. Strictly speaking, a forest is "an extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth, sometimes intermingled with pasture".iv So it is telling that the Barans entitled the new series Toxic Forest, even though they created these unsettling images of tangled undergrowth in a park. The distinguishing characteristics of parks are generally their ornamental layout, enclosure in a town or attachment to a country house, as well as their use for public or private recreation. It might seem pedantic to point out such semantic niceties but language used often implies an individual's intentions or betrays their perceptions. In this case, the Barans' choice of title assumes particular significance when one considers the fact that the word 'forest' is cognate with 'foreign' since they are both derived from foris, the Latin for 'out of doors'. The presence of a foreign body in parkland inspired the series and perhaps is the reason for the transformation of the actual park into the imagined forest of its title.
The Barans live in the proximity of Richmond Park, the largest of London's Royal Parks, and have been visiting it for many years. Toxic Forest stemmed from their interest in and subsequent familiarity with a species of rhododendron that they encountered while walking in the park's plantations. The Rhododendron ponticum is a tall shrub native to South-East Europe and Western Asia that was introduced to Britain in the nineteenth century by explorers carrying home exotic plants with which to enliven the English country garden. A shrub that grows well in the shade and on almost any type of soil - quickly producing a verdant screen suitable for game cover and clusters of pretty flowers in the spring - it easily beguiled these plant collectors. Having been the darling of ornamental planting in the Victorian era, it eventually took its captor captive and earned the reputation for being the gardeners' best friend but foresters' worst enemy.
Today the Rhododendron ponticum is considered by many to be a weed, the attributes for which it was originally prized having proved noxious to British flora and fauna. Its capacity to adapt to most soil conditions, aided by its ability to regenerate both vegetatively and by seed dispersal, has enabled it to spread from country estates and invade large areas of the British countryside. The cover provided by its dense canopy literally puts native plants in the shade, inhibiting their growth. Once shed, its leaves, which are also toxic and unpalatable to herbivores, create an acidic mulch that increases the inhospitableness of the ground for competing plants. The nectar from its flowers produces a honey that, if ingested by humans, causes 'Mad Honey Disease'. Fortunately for Zafer's father, whom curiosity once dared to taste the plant's sweet poison, the intoxication tends to last for less than twenty-four hours, inducing symptoms such as vomiting, excessive perspiration, dizziness, shock and low blood pressure - but rarely fatalities.
The presence in the domestic landscape of a foreign body, which the Barans knew to be toxic and damaging to its adopted environment, led them to see a "dark beauty" in the undergrowth of the rhododendron plantings. Their awareness of the species' aggression, a manifestation of the superior force of nature - as well as a general metaphor for cultural and environmental issues - offers an explanation for their equation of the seemingly benign parkland with the sinister forest that has long disturbed the collective imagination. The Barans follow the popular view that the ubiquity of the theme of the malevolent and bewildering forest in fairy tales is symbolic of an aspect of the human psyche: namely, the examination of the unknown and feared elements of one's own character.v For many their photographic expression will immediately recall familiar folkloristic and literary traditions. One of the tales that speaks to them, and in particular Jean Cocteau's 1946 haunting cinematic adaptation of it, is Beauty and the Beast. The stereotypical forest that hides the Beast's castle heightens the atmosphere of the story and enhances its message of the deceptiveness of appearances, a theme that has resonance with the seductive yet poisonous qualities of the Rhododendron ponticum.
The Barans describe twilight as "the interface between day and night, neither one thing nor the other, where things are only ever half-seen, where subconscious, primeval fears emerge as darkness grows". To make Toxic Forest, they rejected using a traditional large-format camera with film and a tripod, having found that shooting at twilight with a small hand-held digital camera enabled them to create blurred images that suitably conveyed "a sense of oppression, mystery and claustrophobia". They faulted the former method for producing images that were "too sharp, too clear, too detailed - nothing to do with the way the eye perceives a landscape in those light conditions". In order to further enhance the impressionistic qualities of their work, they enlarged the images beyond the conventional capabilities of their simple, 4-megapixel digital files. The resulting images are close to what the Barans had seen, or rather had half-seen, in the dusk.
Different sources of light were crucial to the making of Toxic Forest. Twilight served to flatten the sculptural forms of the rhododendron plantings and obfuscate their colours, making it difficult for viewers to judge distance in the photographs of the dark undergrowth, thus increasing their sense of fear and unease. While broad daylight, the springtime sun acting as a backlight, enabled the Barans to produce the close-ups of illuminated rhododendron flowers that make up the DVD projection accompanying the Toxic Forest landscapes in the gallery. In these slowly flashing images there is an almost pornographic use of soft-focus on the exposed sexual organs of the plant, which was created by the lens being pushed right into the heart of the flower. The sensuality of the projected, vibrantly coloured petals contrasts greatly with the sombre autumnal landscapes in the prints. Their juxtaposition recalls the duplicitous nature of the species, reminding us of the cliché that looks can deceive. We are beguiled by the Rhododendron ponticum's seductive bloom and yet are in danger of being poisoned by its toxic honey. This duality is best described by the subtle nuances of the Ancient Greek word farmakon that means either medicine or poison depending on the dosage administered. You can imagine that being thus intoxicated might impair one's vision and cause one to see the world as the Barans half-saw it in the twilight.
The general title of the exhibition The Garden of Earthly Delights refers loosely to the early sixteenth-century painting by the Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch. The decaying flowers of Ephemera and deceptive blooms of Toxic Forest seem to share some of the symbolism of that triptych, which in an early inventory was also called The Vanity of the World. Like the Dutch still-life vanitas paintings of the seventeenth century, they reflect "the fragility of man and his world of desires and pleasures in the face of the inevitable and finality of death",vi showing not only beauty but also the reverse of that seductive coin.
Anne-Marie Eze
Assistant Curator of Photographs, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
- Barnes, Martin, Illumine: Photographs by Garry Fabian Miller,
Londra: Merrell, 2005, s. 109. - Saunders, Gill, Picturing Plants: An Analytical History of Botanical Illustration,
Londra: Zwemmer (Victoria & Albert Müzesi işbirliğiyle), 1995, s. 87. - Pinsent, Richard, 'Barbara & Zafer Baran: Ephemera, Blue Gallery',
The Art Newspaper, Mart 2003. - Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://dictionary.oed.com
- Konuyla ilgili örnekler için Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment:
The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1976. - Van Miegroet, Hans J., 'Vanitas', Grove Art Online, Oxford University Press,
www.groveart.com
BARBARA & ZAFER BARAN
Barbara Baran Born 1956 UK. Studied University College London (BA Hons in French, 1974-78) and Goldsmiths College, London (1981-82).
Zafer Baran Born 1955 Turkey. Studied State Academy of Fine Arts, Istanbul (1973-77) and Goldsmiths College, London (1979-81), where also took part in first holography course to be held in Europe.
Barbara and Zafer Baran met in 1981, and live and work in London.
Solo and two-person shows
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2005
Eight Portraits (as part of Fragments from the Past), Abney Hall,
London 2004
The Flower Cabinet, Blue Gallery, London 2004
Ephemera, Blue Gallery, London 2003
Atlas (as part of Roundtrip Istanbul III), Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2000
Zafer Baran: Blue, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
Barbara Baran, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
Turkish Portraits (concurrently with Roy DeCarava), Photographers' Gallery, London 1988
One Plus One, Upper Street Gallery, London 1985
Barbara Baran: Photographs, Impressions Gallery of Photography,
York 1983
Correspondences, Goldsmiths College, London 1982
Selected group shows
photo-london (with Blue Gallery), London 2005
Rose c'est la vie: On Flowers in Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum
of Art, Tel Aviv 2004
photo-london (with Blue Gallery), London 2004
Paris Photo (with Eric Franck Fine Art), Paris 2003
Art+ Gallery, Coral Gables, Florida 2003
Art Chicago (with Berkeley Square Gallery), Chicago 2003
Forgotten Places, Arcola Gallery, London 2002
Act One, Arcola Gallery, London 2001
Post Impressions, The British Library, London 1999
Signs of the Times, Association Gallery, London 1995
Special Photographers' Company Gallery, London 1995
Fashion Exposures, The Worx, London 1995
A Positive View, Saatchi Gallery, London 1994
Urart Gallery, Ankara 1994
Icons, Idols and Heroes, Association Gallery, London 1992
Association Gallery, London 1991
Special Photographers' Company Gallery, London 1988
The Roving Eye, Islington Arts Factory, London 1985
New Horizons, Royal Festival Hall, London 1985
Goldsmiths College, London 1981, 1982
Collections
Lindley Library, Royal Horticultural Society, London
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Private and corporate collections
Awards
Metropolitan University/European Union, 2004
British Council, 1997
London Boroughs Grants Scheme, 1988
Selected projects
Royal Mail: bicentenary stamps, Royal Horticultural Society, 2003
Royal Mail: millennium stamp (Fox Talbot and invention of photography), 1999
BBC Films: title sequence, The Designated Mourner, dir. David Hare, 1997
Phaidon Press: 1997
English National Opera: 1992-9
Exhibition catalogues and brochures
Rose c'est la vie: On Flowers in Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Museum
of Art, Tel Aviv 2004 (essay by Edna Moshenson)
Barbara and Zafer Baran: The Flower Cabinet, Blue Gallery, London 2004 (essays by Brent Elliott and Ian Jeffrey)
Barbara and Zafer Baran: Ephemera, Blue Gallery, London 2003 (essay by Ian Jeffrey)
Roundtrip Istanbul III, Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul 2000 (essay by Beral Madra)
Barbara Baran/Zafer Baran, Eklisia Arts Centre, Bodrum 1996
A Positive View, Saatchi Gallery, London 1994
'Zafer & Barbara Baran: Turkish Portraits', Martin Caiger-Smith, Photographers' Gallery, London 1988 (January/February programme)
New Horizons, Royal Festival Hall, London 1985
Selected bibliography
'Turkish Artists Come in from the Cold', Maureen Freely, timesonline.co.uk, 21 March 2005
Royal Mail Special Stamps 21, Fay Sweet, Royal Mail, 2004
Interview, Milliyet, 5 June 2004
'When Photography, Flowers and Philately Collide', Katie Scott, British Journal of Photography, 26 May 2004
British Philatelic Bulletin, Vol. 41, No. 8, April 2004
Maison Française, June 2003
'Bold Types', Richard Pinsent, pluk, No. 11, March/April 2003
'Barbara and Zafer Baran: Ephemera', Richard Pinsent, The Art Newspaper, No. 134, March 2003
'Deaf-Mute Harmony of Chaos and Confusion', Evrim Altug, gazetem.net, 19 March 2003
artnet magazine, 17 January 2003
'The Abstract Heart', Elizabeth Meath Baker, Cornucopia, Issue 25, 2002
'Act One', Arredamento, June 2001
Interview, XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, May/June 2001
'Zafer Baran: Photographic Work', XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, March/April 2001
'Roundtrip Istanbul 3: The Barans' Journey', Arredamento, November 2000
'Barbara Baran: To Horus, One-Time God of Light', XXI International Journal of Architectural Culture, May/June 2000
Polaroid International Photography magazine, Issue 19, 2000
'Barbara & Zafer Baran: Portraits from the Fault Zone', Maureen Freely, A Concert for Turkey, Artists' Relief Trust, Barbican Centre, London 2000
Royal Mail Millennium Stamps 1999, Jim Davies, Royal Mail, 1999
'Barbara and Zafer Baran', Cüneyt Budak, Arredamento, April 1999
The Independent, 13 November 1998
'A History of Britain in 48 Stamps', Mark Henderson, The Times, 13 November 1998
Interview, Radikal, 15 April 1997
'Masters of Light Who Transform Everything', Memet Baydur, Cumhuriyet, 11 August 1996
'The Equivocal Image', Michael Evamy, Design magazine, December 1992
'Turkish Portraits', London Magazine, October 1986
Interviews
BBC World Service, May 2004
NTV, October 2000
