Nearly 20 years ago, a young Turkish professional photographer landed in Jeddah. He arrived from London to cover the Taif Islamic Summit. After a string of employment contracts, he is now a freelancer doing assignments and espousing the cause of environment protection worldwide. His lenses are currently busy capturing the glimpses of the ongoing Jeddah 22 summer festival.
“What will happen to our children and grandchildren if rampant pollution all around is not checked? Won’t their lives be miserable? So is it not our responsibility to do our bit in protecting the precious environment?” asks the cameraman and film director, Omer Faruk Aksoy. “After all, this is the age of globalization and we’ve to think locally and act globally.”
“Catch them young” is his motto in tackling the pollution problem. Two years ago, he thought he could realize his dream of bringing together some teenagers from all the continents and conducting them on a world tour so that they interact, exchange ideas and address the environment issue in its true perspective. But that remained a dream unfulfilled because of financial constraints. Today, he is willing to invest in such a noble venture thanks to the expected generous support. He thinks he has a duty to perform and a responsibility to discharge. “I want our young generation to be more concerned about preserving nature and environment,” says Aksoy.
As a prelude to the project, Aksoy took his wife, son and daughter on a world tour, starting from Jeddah and visiting all well-known places of interest in the West and the Far East. “That was really a trial tour. I wanted to see how much we cover in a given period of time. We visited several known and unknown places in different countries in 35 days.”
“I’m training my 16-year-old son Rakan in photography. He accompanies me whenever I go to shoot for documentaries or events. In fact, Rakan and my teenage daughter Meral, who loves painting, are acting in TV commercials which also I shoot, Aksoy said.
Recalling the family’s world tour, Rakan said: “It’s something that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. Very few get a chance to tour around the globe at my age. I was 13 then and the kind of exposure I got by visiting so many places in one trip is unbelievable.”
Asked which places he liked the most, Rakan, a 11th grader who plans to study computer engineering, said: “It’s difficult to say which one was better than the other. Amsterdam, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur were among the places we visited. Holland’s wax museum and miniature city, the Statue of Liberty and the natural history museum in New York, the Niagara Falls, the Universal Studios were all interesting. Likewise, the Santosa Island in Singapore and the various mosques in the US, Europe and the Far East are all very well etched in my mind.”
In the global tour Aksoy is planning, the teenagers will not only see the world’s seven wonders but also interact with people of diverse cultures and lifestyles, and exchange with them ideas on environment protection and preservation.
Aksoy is considering 13 countries for the tour. Children in the age group of 11-13 representing all the continents will take part. The itinerary includes the Kingdom, Iran, Uzbekistan, India, China, the Far East, Australia, Alaska, the United States, South America, Europe and Africa. “I want them to watch the midnight sun in Norway and enjoy nature at its best.”
During his two-decade stay in the Kingdom, Aksoy has worked for the Haj Research Center at King Abdul Aziz University, filmed pilgrims during the annual Haj, as well as official projects and TV commercials for reputed Japanese, American, German and Korean car companies, as well as banks and commercial houses.
By far, the most satisfying project he has documented through his camera is the expansion work in the two holy cities. “It took six years (1988-94) to shoot the project as it progressed in its various stages, but the final result was astounding. It turned out to be the longest documentary film project in the world,” he said.
He traveled with Dr. Abdullah Omar Naseef during his tenure as the director general of the Muslim World League covering his tour of China, Pakistan and Africa. He produced a documentary on Uzbekistan’s Islamic culture, and held an exhibition of his pictures of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara at Nazer Center in Jeddah five years ago under the sponsorship of Arab News.
Among the other outstanding documentaries he has filmed is one on Ellison, a British woman hailing from Norwich, England, who embraced Islam in Granada and adopted Aisha as her new name. The documentary, produced by Algerian film producer-director-actor Bensalem Bou Abdullah, is about her life, her conversion to Islam, her marriage and her family. “The documentary was shown in a film festival in Qatar and deals are under way to screen it on one of the region’s leading satellite TV channels.”
Aksoy had to struggle his way to the position he occupies today as film director or cameraman. His love for camera took its roots at the age of 11 when on the occasion of his circumcision his father gifted him a Russian-made camera. A few years later he acquired a German movie camera (8 mm). He was sought after for filming the excursion trips of his schoolmates. “It was then that I discovered the power of the movie camera and nurtured an ambition to become a film cameraman and director.”
In the absence of a film institute in Turkey, he wanted to study the art in Paris. But his father was opposed to the idea. One night in November 1972, he wrote a long letter to him and left for Paris. But he couldn’t join any film school due to the lack of financial support. “I bought a bicycle and pedaled my way to Switzerland. I covered 500 km in five days. At Basel, a Turkish friend’s acquaintance got me work, which involved road digging for a cable TV company. After five weeks, I gave up the job and joined a regular language school and did some courses in photography. The next two years, I hitchhiked to various places. My father, who took six months to respond to my letters, met me when he arrived with two other religious scholars to pray for the 350 victims of Turkey’s worst air crash in 1974. It was then that my father introduced me to a well-known film director and I joined him as an assistant cameraman.”
After two years in Basel, he returned to Istanbul in 1974 and joined the Marmara University to pursue Islamic studies and arts. “In my spare time I worked as an assistant cameraman in the film industry. After finishing school in 1979, I went to London. It was here that I met a Muslim film producer who changed the course of my career from motion pictures to documentaries. My new career took me to the United States and Africa. In Africa, I shot a documentary on the Eritrean refugees in 1980. The following year, I shot another documentary on Hassan Fathy who had designed a village based on Islamic architecture in New Mexico. And in 1981 I came to the Kingdom.”