issue 43|when diamonds are ephemeral

I wanted to capture the diamonds.

On the water, in the air, between the waves and the leaves, behind the flowers and the pomegranate trees. There is magic within that moment when the light touches the surface of something as strong and indestructible as the sky or the sea — how the ephemeral meets the eternal.

That’s probably why I wanted to capture the diamonds before they disappeared. Every instant you see in these memories I have archived existed only for a few seconds.

A blink of an eye.

I often reflect on the meaning of photographing such transient instants, questioning the urgency I feel to archive my own experience of light — no matter how imperfect the result.

I do not like photographing performances that are meant to be lived and experienced live: concerts, theatre, storytelling events, talks and debates. At least not extensively. I sometimes catch myself taking a picture or two with my phone, as if to make sure I don’t forget that I was there. Which is strange because I have experienced concerts, theatre plays, and dance performances pre-smartphone era. I’ve seen thousands of cultural events — from the greatest legends like Simon and Garfunkel back in Paris to a most obscure play in a small Brussels cabaret, or a concert by an American folk singer in a bar in Ravenna, where only five people showed up. It was so uncanny, it became magical when the lead singer jumped off the stage to come play among us as we surrounded him clapping and singing. I have deep, vivid memories of most of those unique experiences. None of them are captured in photographs. Maybe because I wasn’t concerned with archiving them at all, they’ve found their way into my memory through what the collective experience of art was always meant for. 

Since I stopped using Instagram personally, my relationship with photography has become true to my own values — to how I want to be in the world. I mostly photograph with my digital Fuji camera, and my maternal grandmother’s analogue camera. When I visited my father in Bodrum this autumn, he gave me two 8mm films to use with my grandfather’s Super8 camera, which he had handed me during a previous visit. He also gifted me his late mother’s analogue camera.

It feels as if my grandmothers are acknowledging my artistic vision and needs from where they are — somewhere behind the light I remain obsessed with capturing.

I find it increasingly difficult to exist in the world as it expects us to be: fast, always connected, preoccupied with impact and numbers. It’s a daily struggle to resist that. And maybe the way I approach the gesture of photography reflects that state. By refusing to photograph certain experiences, I embrace the freedom that is brought by the ephemeral. Being able to express yourself without having every word or breath recorded gives you space to make mistakes — to fall and get up again at your own pace.

And yet, the archivist in me cannot stop and I find myself in immense distress at the moment, as I try to access years of photography I thought I had properly stored and backed up in my external hard drives and on cloud back-up systems. While I am convincing myself that I want to live within the moment, I also feel a certain amount of grief at the idea that I may have lost the thousands of photographs I took in the past two decades. And I wonder why, after my somewhat pompous introduction on the importance of live existence, I am grieving the loss of material data?

My parents’ homes are full of old photographs; my mother has boxes filled with masses of printed memories, my father has his own curated and stored in photo albums, each of us and our elders caressed by pergamine paper. You cannot categorise emotions; chaotic or well-ordered, trauma will be passed on, lives we never knew will be fictionalised in our imaginations. Second-hand stores and market stalls are filled with photographic captures of people’s lives, people who once were joyful, felt pain, struggled, loved, were loved, or yearned to be loved.

So maybe my photographic gesture and pursuit of diamonds on surfaces as reckless and powerful as ocean and skies is a nostalgic gesture. Nostos algos, like the nerdy character in the Turkish crime series Mezarlık explains: Yunanca’da nostos “dönüş” algos “keder” anlamında kullanılır. “Nostos algos” yani nostalji dindirilememiş bir geri dönüş özleminin verdiği tarifsiz ızdırap olarak kullanılir. Or like Don Draper says in Mad Men; in Greek nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. […] It lets us travel …around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

Maybe it is not diamonds I am trying to capture, but love. 

A FEW THINGS THAT MAKE ME THINK AND FEEL…

• Two memoirs have haunted me these past few weeks, I have not only read them but also listened to the audiobook versions read by the authors themselves: one is Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me, and the other is Patti Smith’s Bread of Angels. Both depict very different lives, oeuvres, literatures, and both are not only captivating but lessons of humility, care and resilience. 
  

• The documentary on the 100th anniversary of the New Yorker is an interesting watch. The magazine with 1.25 million subscribers is one of the rare print media still thriving, and nurturing investigative journalism. I was particularly fascinated by the sequences of the film about the fact-checkers that go through every single line in an article, looking at all the details in a cartoon. The documentary by film-maker Marshall Curry is called The New Yorker at 100 and can be seen on Netflix.
  

• The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is showing a powerful and confronting exhibition by artist Tina Farifteh who documents the Dutch asylum system through video and photography work. The central figure in her exhibition is a man identified only by his initial: B. Following more than four months in immigration detention at Schiphol Airport and a stay in Ter Apel asylum reception centre, B. is now in the midst of an asylum procedure. By positioning him as the narrator, Farifteh reverses the gaze on the Dutch asylum procedures: Instead of talking about asylum seekers, she has us listen to one of the people this system is treating with immense violence. Document Nederland can be seen until 11 January 2026 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. 

ABOUT + SUPPORT

Canan Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. She established the attention span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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