Kicki Lundgren – Memories from the Faraway Mountains

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Time travel is possible via photos, at least time travel of the mental sort. Photographs from a specific time and place are still there, frozen where and when they were made. With a little imagination you can enter their world, especially when they are packaged as thoughtfully as those in Kicki Lundgren’s Memories from the Faraway Mountains.

The book presents views of villages in the Kurdish speaking parts of Turkey between 1991 and 2007. The villagers lived a simple life then, close to nature. They lacked electricity and running water and depended on the land to produce their own food, in much the same way that Lundgren’s grandparents did, but in Sweden and a generation or so earlier. If you went to Kurdish Turkey today, however, you may not find the innocence and close communal life that Lundgren shares in her photographs. For better or worse, as it does everywhere, life moves on.

Most of the photographs in the book show people, and there are more of women and girls than of men and boys. This may have been choice or perhaps because of social separation into traditional gender roles. In most photographs, the subjects are aware of the camera and pose for it, usually in a relaxed state of closeness, if not intimacy. We see children sleeping, playing, sitting quietly, standing in a basin for a sponge bath, and posing with their animals. We see men and women inside and outside, alone and in groups, working, relaxing, walking together, nursing, and smoking. We see events in village life as well: a wedding, a body being washed for burial.

Though not as destitute as in Walker Evans’ FSA photographs, the interiors are spare and utilitarian, with few comforts or modern conveniences. The villagers’ clothes are rustic and formal, their faces marked by the continual labors of a hard life. The children are like children everywhere, transparent and accessible and by turns shy, hopeful, playful, proud, trusting, and sweet.

Printed on heavy, uncoated black stock, the darker tones are rich and saturated and the lighter tones and highlights pop off the page. A number of the photos are blurred or slightly out of focus, but they fit seamlessly into the ensemble. The narrative is not driven by details and precision but by human connection. This is photography about the thing photographed, not about a photographic approach or style.

A sensitive and touching look at a place and its people, the photographs in Memories from the Faraway Mountains bridge time and distance and bring us closer to folks who in the end turn out to be a lot like us.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Kicki Lundgren – Memories from the Faraway Mountains

Photographer: Kicki Lundgren (born in 1961; lives in Sweden)

Language: English, Kurdish, Swedish

Text: Kicki Lundgren

Design: Patric Leo

Printing: Italgraf Media AB, Stockholm

Hardcover with printed dust jacket; 48 photographs; Swiss binding, 84 pages, unpaginated; 21 X 27 cm, ISBN 978-91-531-0899-3

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.