PREFACE; FACES OF THE EARTH

Everything’s being standardized so fast that even the human beings are of the same type…
When I go out, besides what the people are wearing, I see that their faces, hair, dialogoues, behaviours and postures seem alike…
On the other side, maybe in the near future, people will be saying “how wonderful were the older people” for our present generation. Just like we said for 40-50 years ago…
These are the reasons why I wanted to look at the people and at the faces of today’s generation all around the world…
I followed the beautiful people of these rapidly vanishing local cultures with their own colors, clothes, jewelleries....
I remember how I saddened in India, when I first saw someone with a formal dress among the people in pink, yellow, blue, green, red, orange clothes…
Unfortunately, there is no way out…
I am afraid that after 40-50 years, all the people will be wearing the same clothes, eating hamburgers and drinking cokes and no one will have time or patience for cooking special and delicious local foods. Edip Cansever tells that “People look like the places they live in” in his poem called “The Sounds of Blood on My Handkerchief.” “He looks like the water, looks like the land / looks like the fish in his water / like the flower pushing her soil / like the smoky slopes of his mountains, hills…”
In fact, all the cultures are shapened in accordance to the geography they are born in. In Vietnam,they grow rice and people drink sake. Their food and drinking culture is formed by rice. On the other hand, there is cactus in Mexico and they drink tequila made of cactus and wear clothes made of cactus.
In short, in order to know and understand a culture, first of all you have to know and understand the geography it is nourished from. But no longer people look like the smoky slopes of mountains, hills, but rather to what they see on tv.
Even the definition of “beautiful woman” is made by fashion designers in global sense. For these reasons, before vanishing and still existing, I tried to see and show these people and their cultures trying to survive in remote places of the world…
The smoky slopes of the mountains, hills, the water, the earth; The people living on those mountains, drinking the water, cultivating the land…
The faces of that people…
The faces of the earth…
The true owners of the earth…
Truly, I am doing this with the concern of helping these cultures, too…
I will be happy if I could delay their vanishing process…
We would be happy if we could delay their vanishing process a bit…
August 2005, İstanbul