In all the images of Kerim Aytac’s series ‘tokyo hotel’, there is something very discreet, subtle. These are quiet photos: even when film is referenced, there is no soundtrack, no conversation, no embellishment. There is no manipulation or seduction here – far from it. Some are even quite casual, vernacular, involuntary, just above banality – where the artist seems almost to defy aesthetics al-together. Fortunately for us, the photograph itself is spared.

Kerim Aytac (*1979 British / Turkish) seems to resist clichés of composition, resist the ‘good’ shot. Instead he seeks out small, incidental, sometimes even unremarkable goings-on. At times the work brings to mind Robert Frank or Walker Evans. But in fact these images adopt more of an in-between viewpoint; alongside an American low picturesque there is also nostalgia for the French semi-abstract black-and-white tradition. The B&W also serves to bring everything to an equal formal level; layers of reflections, markings and traces dissolve into the surface on the brink of the recognisable. As a viewer you have to struggle to identify individual elements, which resist, like embedded ciphers.

Seen as a collection, some shots are very gratifying while others are neither legible nor particularly generous. This makes for a certain kind of ebb and flow. For instance, with certain very close and blurred images, there is no edge, no hard line, no point of reference. It is extremely disarming to look at them, or try to, without getting a proper handle on them. Then, abruptly, he throws in a perfect, enigmatic, almost cinematic snapshot, because he can. This jars because on the one hand, you are given nothing, no subject, no way in. On the other, there is this film still, faintly suggesting action, or the passing of time. And then there is the space in between these, uneasy, disorientating, confounding – the artist’s own space, where he himself is in fact most at ease.