The Amazon — Images by Kira Hagen

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Last month I did a shoot in Ankara with model Özge Can posing in a chiton, a dress common to women throughout the ancient Mediterranean, at the Roman Baths archaeological site. Özge is working on a master’s degree in environmental engineering and does modeling as a hobby, and we connected via Model Mayhem.

I’ve been thinking about writing more about where the ideas for these shoots come from, so here goes:

At the beginning of the2008 Summer Olympics, Greece hired some actresses to dress as ancient priestesses for the torch lighting ceremony. After I saw the photos, I wanted to do a similar shoot! (But with garb that didn’t look like it started life as curtains.) I’d actually done a Roman look shoot before, though it was in 2000 on a 1.3 megapixel camera (which cost $600 then…) and had a blast with it.

In January, when the school I work at was on winter break, I went down to the Mediterranean coast by Antalya with the intention of doing some shoots in the area’s ruined Greco-Roman cities. I was hoping to find a model to pose for me there and put the costume together before leaving. It didn’t work out but I did find Özge’s profile and instantly thought of Michael Whelan’s painting “Night’s Daughter”. She liked the shoot concept so we worked out meeting later in the spring.

The Roman Baths in Ankara are an open air museum with ruins dating from when ancient Ancyra was the capital of Galatia, then an ethnically Celtic part of Anatolia. (I was flabbergasted to learn the area had a Celtic history; for some reason I’d always thought Galatia was in ancient Gaul/ modern France, not — of all places — Turkey.) In addition to the foundations of the baths themselves, there are collections of tombs, marble pillars, and both Greek and Roman waystones dating from the ancient past. Since the site is on a sloping hill, shooting from a low angle allowed me to hide the modern city surrounding us.

Finally, allow me to recommend Özge to anyone needing a Gothic-look model. We did this shoot on a trade-for-images basis but she’s looking for commercial work and would be very happy to travel. Her English is excellent and she was delightful to work with. Contact her via Model Mayhem or DeviantArt.

Gallery of images from the shoot. Click any image for prints and pricing.

Ozge — Ancient Priestess shoot — Images by Kira Hagen

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One of the world’s best collections of ancient Roman sculpture is in the relatively small Antalya Archaeological Museum, on Turkey’s Southern coast. An ancient settlement itself, Antalya is within 90 minute’s drive of five ruined ancient cities, and the pick of the finds from them reside in the city’s museum. Not only do they have simply beautiful sculptures on display, the displays themselves are some of the most respectful and tasteful I’ve seen anywhere in the world; some of the rooms are almost temple-like.

One of my favorite pieces in the museum was a sculpture of the goddess Artemis of Perge. Her face had a strength and clarity I think captured the essence of her myth well. When I’m a little more settled, I’d like to put a large print of this image up on my wall — lacking the ability to afford actual replica statues, I think decorating with photographs of ancient art would be a tasteful second choice.

Another image I’d like to print is from the sculpture atop the Tomb of Ariadne — it had the same sort of lighting and color but was a gentler, more subdued piece of art, showing Ariadne waking from a dream. I think it’d look gorgeous printed about three feet wide and hanging on cream walls. Well, someday I’ll be in one country for more than 10 months, and able to have “things” again (fingers crossed)!

The museum’s collections also include some Byzantine finds and various ethnographic items showing Turkish life from a century ago. The entrance fee is a bit high — 15 TL as of January 2010 — but absolutely worth it if you are a fan of ancient sculpture. Antalya is Turkey’s fastest growing city and a major sea & sun tourism destination; it’s very easy to get to as it’s connected by budget airlines all over Europe. If you go, I recommend seeing the museum first and then taking a tour of the ruined cities in the surrounding area, especially Perge. We went through Mithra Travel for a tour and were very pleased with how extremely knowledgeable our guide was; I usually hate guided tours but would recommend this company without hesitation.

Full gallery of photos from the Antalya Archaeological Museum:

Turkey — Antalya Archaeological Museum — Images by Kira Hagen

As you can see on the map, the museum is a couple kilometers outside the Old City, which can be a nice walk along the coast in good weather, or more simply a quick ride on the tram (approximately every 20–25 minutes). We were there in January during a storm, and I can say from experience that the bus stop does not provide much shelter from sleet coming down sideways.

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Medieval Gate and Clock Tower in Sighisoara, Romania

I like to know as much as possible about places before I visit or move to them, and as I’ve been doing a lot of travel over the last few years I’ve worked some basic online research methods. Of course books are great and I love a good travel guide — Rough Guides are my favorite, generally — but most of the time I don’t have easy access to English language books.  Hence, most of my research is done online.

When I’m looking for work to support my travel habit, I generally look for English teaching jobs or nanny jobs for families that want their child to begin learning a foreign language early. The main sites I start looking on are TEFL.com, Dave’s ESL Cafe, and Craigslist. These are all very generalist sites, and competition for jobs in Western countries is quite fierce, while in developing countries less so. I generally keep Google Maps open while I’m searching, as many jobs are in places I’ve never heard of. I’ll also search on “Forums” or “Expat” plus the name of the country or city I’m interested in; those are often the best places to find local nanny agencies who are recruiting, as well as non-EFL jobs.

Next I’ll look up Wikipedia and Wikitravel for a general overview of the place and some history. While I’ll travel just about anywhere, I’ll only live places with lively coffeeshops (bane of my existence right now; the only modern cafe in Samsun just went out of business and I don’t think I’ll see a mocha until my contract expires), legal alcohol, an arts scene, and high speed internet. Between the wiki sites and Virtual Tourist, I can usually get an idea if those are possible. I’ve also had a lot of fun over the years with people from the Couch Surfing club, so I try to see if there’s an active group with regular meetings.

Then I’ll try and evaluate the photographic potential of a place. My favorite travel photography site is TrekEarth, which has gorgeous photos arranged by geographic location. Google maps also lets you turn on geotagged photos, which can give a nice idea of local attractions; simply doing an image search on Google for the place name can be a good start as well. I’ll also take a look at stock agencies like Travel-Photos.com to see how other stock shooters have interpreted the place, and look for what sort of images seem to be missing.

Finally, I’ll take a look at local talent on Model Mayhem. Local models willing to do a location shoot can give life and fire to a site, and incidentally also know where to go get a good pint once the shoot is over. I’ve made long term friends with a lot of the models I’ve worked with on trade shoots (meaning they give me a model release to sell the images, and I give them good pictures for their portfolio).  If I can’t get any local models, I’ll usually either make my husband pose or see if I can find some other locals — Couchsurfing members are sometimes willing.

Anyway, that’s my research process and I hope others find it useful! Please do post any suggestions for other sites you’ve found useful, or other research ideas, in the comments section.

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The last trip got to me. Just a bit, nothing too bad, only traveling two weeks around Turkey, where I’ve now lived for 5 months. It left me exhausted, though, and I’ve spent the last three days since getting back to Samsun in the house, all burned out and anti-social.

I always try to go… further. Deeper into a place, to grab its pain and love and history, to wrap it up around me and get it under my skin. How can you understand something without getting too close to it? Too close means the barriers fall, you get past the polite masks, the illusion embraced by the uninterested — ignorance’s safe haven. Too close means you get touched. You get muddy, soaked, exhausted, afraid. It’s when it’s trying you, though, that you see the real face of a place, begin to touch its soul, to have your own soul exposed by it. Not safe. Not comfortable.

I named my blog “Seeking the World’s Soul” because that title describes what I’m doing, in this long wandering path around the globe. I’m trying to understand these places, the people, the reverberations of history on the present, to understand this crazy lovely heartbreaking world of ours. I’m trying to catch glimpses of its soul in my viewfinder, to share its darks and lights, its wildness, its sacredness, its desecration, and sometimes the glimpses of that shuddering beauty that shines through its pain.

Of course I do more normal photo projects — various shoots with fantastically costumed models, weddings, the odd product shoot. But I rarely try and shoot ugliness, because the world has enough of that already.

The artist’s role is to burn with Promethean fire, and its fuel is Promethean pain — to have your guts pulled out for all to see, picked over by the vultures of the world, and still to keep breathing, keep being reborn. To keep dreaming, and to keep the fires alight. “Art” that is only a commentary on ennui, on boredom, on apathy… fails.

Good art alchemizes reality into truth. It takes the world and shows its deeper heart, the eternal balancing the transient.

But the process itself can be exhausting.

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The English Club visited Amissos on a cool November afternoon. The the wintry sunlight was fading fast, and slid golden over the twin tumuli atop the hill above the old harbor, slowly fading to twilight blues as it sank behind the coastal mountains. The air was cool, a faint breeze blowing in from the sea. Situated  to give panoramic views of the Westwards from Samsun, the city seemed, for once, tranquil in the Black Sea dusk.

Amissos is the name of the ancient settlement which preceded modern Samsun. It was a trading port in Hellenistic times, and famed as belonging to the homeland of the Amazons. Samsun’s modern citizens use the name mainly to mean the site of two tombs and a modern cafe somewhat East of the city, and also to denote the otherwise invisible historic forebear of the ramshackle modern town.

The tumuli are named Kalkanca and Baruthane, according to the Directorate of Culture and Tourism’s Samsun handbook, and may have been used as lighthouses; from a certain angle the two mounds align and only one is visible, apparently indicating an ancient harbor entrance. Claims have been made that the hills were used as temple spots for Roman dieties as well.

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Samsun is a small city on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey — friendly, middle class, full of observant Muslims, and a bit dull. I’m teaching English at a private girl’s school outside town, and my husband is doing the same at a boy’s school under the same management. People are friendly, the food is *great*, there’s nothing to spend money on, and a year here should let us recover economically from the debacles we’ve had to deal with since leaving Moscow.

I’m going to be posting a lot more travel writing and catching up on older photographic work, so do want to find a good way to present all this material… which I guess means fussing with WordPress more.  I’ll try to post more often, anyway.

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Statues covered in plastic draping at the Louvre

I love watching art restoration work in progress, especially when the technicians are actively working on things. These statues were in a wing of the Louvre that was undergoing repairs and covered in a great deal of dust. The plastic draped over them made me think of bridal veils.

In other news, I’m updating this site with a new theme (my old one broke) and upgrading to Gallery3 from Gallery2 — not exactly a painless process so far; it’s still in beta and I’m jumping the gun a bit…

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Living history Viking combat

This is my favorite shot from the Gorodets living history festival in 2006. It always makes me think I should title it, “No shit, there I was…” The guys fighting are mainly college students who do this as a hobby. It’s live steel, dull weapons but otherwise real. My husband joined the group and got to find out exactly how authentic Viking re-enactment combat can be when he took an axe direct to his shin bone and had to be carried out of the woods on his shield.

The really annoying thing about that… I mean other than the four months following of bringing him beer and coffee while be propped up his cast… was that we’d just watched “300” before he went out to the event. And I quoted Queen Gorgo to him as he went out the door, “Come back with your shield, or on it!”. Sigh. And now he’ll never, ever let go of the bloodstained thing.

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