Looking Back at Me

The subject of a photograph is considered to be passive. Aylin Kızıl’s Looking Back At Me is an intervention to this assumption. From a photographer’s perspective. 

Screening date 12 May 2022, 19:00*
YouTube channel Altyazı Sinema Dergisi

* Following the online screening, there will be a live talk session with the director Aylin Kızıl at 19:30. 

“In this video, the photographer’s thoughts on the act of seeing accompany photos taken at social incidents. We watch the narrator’s attempt to create a dialogue with the photographs’ subjects. Looking Back At Me focuses on the agency of a photograph’s subject, intervening against the assumption of its passivity as the “observed”. Photographer invites the audience to think together on the more effective, inclusive and layered possibilities of a mutual gaze instead of one from above, looking down…” – Aylin Kızıl

Looking Back At Me
3 min. / 2022 / Turkish (with English subtitles) 
Director Aylin Kızıl
Editing Aylin Kızıl, M. Emin İsi
Sound mix Alper Çağan Arslan
Subtitle translation Deniz İnal

Aylin Kızıl

Born in Diyarbakır, 1988. After finishing her BA on Pharmacology at Eskişehir Anatolian University, she joined NarPhotos Photography Agency in 2012. Kızıl focuses on documentary photography and video production in fields such as gentrification, identity, gender, migration. Some of her works include Miraz (2017, co-directed with Serdar Bayram and Lezgin Kani), the short documentary A Tribune Story (2020, co-directed with Fatma Çelik), and the short film Fotoğraf Altı (2021), which she produced for BAK workshop.