Good Dog, 2012

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Co-published by Espas (Turkey) & Filigranes (France) 

80 Pages,  44 Images

Clothbound hardcover

21 x 27 cm

Turkish/English

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The only significant text found in Good Dog comes from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It begins, “Life is an experimental journey that we make involuntarily. It is a journey of the mind through matter, and since it is the mind that journeys, that is where we live.” It is a successful use of the quotation, particularly relevant to Sevincli’s photographs. 

Good Dog, as title, is a nod to Daido Moriyama famous Stray Dog image. The parallels between these two photographers are obvious: every picture a mixture of what is dirty, irreverent and dreamlike with that which is crystal clear; the overwhelming darkness that brings to mind coolness, and for book collectors — the smell of ink; the mundane, the erotic, and the charged coexisting; the sense of a world that is all movement without sound. Both concrete and abstract, these are themes in Moriyama’s work that have found Sevincli and impressed, impressively even, his photography.

But an homage to Moriyama would be selling Good Dog under a very small portion of its worth - at which point I interject, this photobook is one of the best, most haunting and powerful that I have encountered since undertaking a discourse on the subject; rarely is a photobook as immediate as this without utilizing some brutality of fact. Good Dog is melancholic, eccentric and, perhaps, a bit eerie, but it is not brutal nor does it evoke dream. Good Dog has the impression of a memory.