Abstracts: Garip, Of Tooth and Stone

In 2010, Salzmann permitted James T. Rowland to create a series of digitally made composites utilizing Salzmann’s photography of his beloved and recently deceased Turkish sheepdog, Garip, and photographs of the archaeological dig at Gordion in Turkey, Garip’s birthplace, in a series titled Of Tooth and Stone. Salzmann over the years made repeated visits to Gordion, the primary site of Gürsan-Salzmann’s academic research, and showed these landscapes as an independent work. These digital superimpositions of Garip+Gordion differ from the Romanian and Egyptian work in the addition of color.

The series effectively links the themes of the human-transhuman rapport evident in Salzmann’s Romanian sheepherding work, with the dichotomy of antiquity and modernity present in the Egyptian double exposures, though the element of antiquity is not as forthrightly legible as such.