Demirci's Images Can Touch the Soul
LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 16, 2010) – Soldiers crouched in an Iraqi bunker, a weeping child in Darfur, sheet-swaddled bodies lining the streets after a Pakistani earthquake … all images of "The World Through My Lens" by award-winning photojournalist Mehmet Demirci.
A New York-based photojournalist, Demirci will share his photos from Iraq, Pakistan, Darfur, Haiti and many other locales with University of Kentucky students, faculty and staff as well as members of the Lexington community at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, April 18, at the William T. Young Library auditorium. The event is free and open to the public
Before Demirci's presentation, Terry Anderson, UK journalism professor and former chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, will speak about his experiences as a journalist.
The event is the spring meeting of the United Nations Association-Bluegrass Chapter and is co-sponsored by Rumi Forum of Washington, D.C., and the UK Interfaith Dialogue Organization. It also marks the end of the "Conference on War, Journalism and History" presented by the UK School of Journalism and Telecommunications.
Demirci currently works for Turkey’s largest-circulation dailies both in Turkish and English, Zaman and Today`s Zaman, in addition to a contract with Zuma Press. His photos represent those regions around the world that currently face wars, natural disasters and conflicts.
"Since my early childhood, I have contemplated the ever-changing nature of all things, enchanted by their ephemeral beauty," Demirci has been quoted as saying. "The undeniable desire to see a person, an object or a place as it appears at a very specific and finite moment resplendent of its glow of light, never the same in the next instant, led me to my medium, photography. After I have seized that brief moment, I feel like I have won a short-lived battle with mortality, maybe my own."
Influenced by photojournalism, Demirci has traveled the world to capture the transient nature of events and to convey the mysterious, momentary lives of people. His most recent journeys include Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, India, Cyprus, Sudan, Israel, Palestine, Bosnia, Greece, Haiti and Turkey.
Anderson is a former journalist, writer, professor, columnist, poet and lecturer. He has worked in television and radio news, as a newspaper editor, wire service reporter and foreign correspondent. He was taken hostage by Shiite militants in Lebanon and held for seven years, and subsequently wrote a book about his experiences, "Den of Lions." He also produced and narrated a prize-winning documentary (CNN and PBS) about his return to Lebanon five years after his release and that country's recovery from its 16-year civil war. He taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and Ohio University's Scripps School of Journalism and is currently a lecturer at the UK School of Journalism and Telecommunications.