Tekerrür (Recurrence)

Eighty anonymous identity photographs, rephotographed and enlarged until the one thing an ID portrait exists to do (fix a person to a name) stops working.

Süme and Öğütcen took a set of found passport-style portraits, reproduced and resized them, and sequenced them with a text that reads the results against the function they were made for. Scaled up and stripped of their documents, the faces de-subjectify: the gaze detaches from the sitter and becomes the book’s real subject, an image passed from hand to hand and rewritten by whoever holds it. The title, Tekerrür, means recurrence. It names both the repetition of the format across eighty near-identical frames and the way history and memory get written over the same pictures. The book is a slim softcover from Reccollective, its dark board blind-embossed with the title and the two names.

Süme is an Istanbul photographer and a founding member of the collectives reccollective and bandrolsüz; Tekerrür sits between 289kd (2009) and Vesika (2019), the later book returning to the same eighty gazes and extending the enquiry into photography, power and memory.