Teen Drama

Teenagers are naturally prone to over-dramatising, but in Nazif Topcuoglu’s photographs they have the perfect excuse to do so. In order to visualise what he calls his ‘constant preoccupation with time, memory and loss’, Topcuoglu enlists affluent young girls from his native Turkey to indulge in some amateur dramatics. On his direction, they enact various stylised tableaux. And although they may look like glorified scenes from a posh school play, the ideas behind them run a little deeper. Each image is steeped in religious, literary or art-historical references - the artist cites Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann in particular as he attempts to recapture an ‘idealised past’ and manifest his fears of human transience.