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The Poet as Photographer.
Jan
Patrik Andersson
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Lütfi Özkök’s date of birth is uncertain, but is registered as the 15th of March, 1923.
He grew up in Istanbul, where his first years in school was paid for by his father, a fishmonger, in fish. University studies brought him to Vienna in 1943, and to Paris in 1949. He met his Swedish wife-to-be, Anne-Marie, at the Sorbonne. The couple moved to Sweden in 1951, to an apartment in Stockholm where he still lives and which is also where his photo archive and darkroom are located. During the first fifteen years in Sweden he worked as an architectural model-builder and draughtsman. Since his main interest was poetry – he translated Rimbaud into Turkish at the age of sixteen – he soon made contact with some of the leading Swedish poets, such as Artur Lundkvist, Lasse Söderberg, and Tomas Tranströmer. They used to “drink cheap wine, dance and sing and discuss poetry”, and they also translated each other’s poems. His career as a photographer began when a Turkish journal editor asked for portraits of the authors he had translated.
Today Özkök can look back upon about 1,400 photographs of authors and artists from various countries, some of them iconic, such as the Beckett portraits from the 60s.
The photos have been published in a multitude of books and journals, and have generated a great number of exhibitions at reputable art museums worldwide. When studying his photos and his correspondence, one understands what it is that has made him successful. Zbigniew Herbert writes, for instance, in praise of him: ”You own the ability to see people from their most intimate aspect, which perhaps is associated with your sensitivity and the fact that you are also a poet.”
It was Herbert’s words that helped us to fix on the title for this catalogue: The Poet as Photographer.
Presented here is a selection of inscribed books and letters that Özkök received over the years from appreciative authors, as well as some of his original photographs.
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