photo beirut

Bidoun and the unintended lives of photographs

My copy of Bidoun's Fall 2010 issue on a slightly smoggy Beirut morning in November.

Bidoun magazine's latest issue provides all sorts of interesting food for thought. I was drawn in while browsing at Librarie Antoine bookstore on Hamra street in Beirut. Each copy of the magazine had a different original photograph affixed to the front. I had to  choose but wasn't sure what criteria I would use. Did I want the most aesthetically appealing, the one that seemed the oldest and thus most nostalgic, or the family snapshot? I went with the black and white identity photo of a young man, maybe partially because it made me more comfortable as it seemed to be made for public (bureaucratic) consumption and didn't feel like an invasion of privacy. There is writing in Arabic on the back of the photo but I haven't felt like prying it off to read it yet. I like the look of the cover, it has a minimalist, off-center design that was likely accidental.

The photos, it is explained inside, all come from Cairo and were bought for about 18 cents (1 Egyptian pound) each, then sent directly to the magazine's publisher. The staff and editors have not seen the photos. I wonder, though, who bought them and made those first choices, before I made my choice?

The cover is an interesting counterpoint to the interior. While the cover photos were procured and distributed with much randomness, the issue itself is devoted to reproducing fragments (images and textual passages) from books and printed matter Bidoun has collected. This highly edited, curated selection comes from a wide array of materials that were themselves carefully selected "with no regard for taste or quality, in an attempt to document every possible way that people have depicted and defined - slandered, celebrated, obfuscated, hyperbolized, ventriolquized, photographed, surveyed, and/or exhumed - that vast, vexed, nefarious construct known as the 'Middle East'." It's oddly compelling, even the excerpts from dry promotional publications.

The use of original photos on the cover brings up some questions for me, for example, what are the implications of this use of found photographs? These were "discards," as Babak Radboy notes in the introduction to the issue, that have been only momentarily rescued from obscurity. But given that archives of photographs of the region (by photographers from the region) barely exist beyond the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut (which has 300,000), shouldn't we be rescuing these for long term study and preservation instead of taking advantage of them for purposes of art and consumption? I do realize that we can't save all available photos since any archive must be selective in the allocation of their resources (each photo costs money to conserve).

Also, what about issues of power and rights? If it was my brother's photo used on the cover without his permission I might not think it was so cool. Which also brings up the question of how that photo came to be for sale to begin with. Do families sell their photos? Why? Do people find them in the trash and then sell them? Were they in some discarded collection (like the files of a government institution or company)? There must be some sad stories in there somewhere.

Do any other readers have the impulse to post  a photo of their unique copy? I'd certainly like to see them (in the context of where the issue now resides). Maybe I'll start a Facebook group to give them one more life, digital this time.

[By the way, this post marks my return to Beirut. It's good to be back!]

 

Yasser Alwan's portraits and Paris Photo 2009

Paris Photo 2009 begins today. Unfortunately I am in Baltimore. The focus this year is Arab and Iranian photography and the central exhibition space is devoted to the Beirut archive I have written about before, the Arab Image Foundation. The Paris Photo website includes a selection of their photos that are on display in Paris.

Tonight a group of photographers will discuss the art photo scene in the Arab world and Iran with guest curator of Paris Photo Catherine David at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Among them is Yasser Alwan, whose wonderful work I have recently used in a publication by the Solidarity Center called "The Struggle for Worker's Rights in Egypt," written by Joel Beinin. His photos are included in Paris Photo in the Sfeir-Semler gallery space along with Wael Shawky and Akram Zaatari (who I have also written about on this blog, here).

Many of Alwan's photos are portraits that show people as individuals in the context of their work or in the public sphere. Details of the street, workshop, tools of their trade, and clothing give the viewer clues to the texture of their lives. Although these portrayals convey a sense of dignity as well as compassion for the hardships of working class Egyptians, the photos do not devolve into abstract statements about the "human condition," a problem -- to my mind -- with some documentary photography. 

The people in Alwan's photographs are always being themselves, even if caught in a particularly self-possessed, carefully composed moment. This is not "decisive moment" photography like that of Henri Cartier-Bresson or poetic street photographers like Robert Frank, both of whom preferred the candid and thus seemingly revealing gesture or expression. Alwan allows his subjects the privilege of projecting their image of themselves to the camera knowingly and with confidence. People in the Middle East, especially the working class, have historically not often been allowed that kind of agency or control over their own appearance. This doesn't mean that the resulting photos are somehow less true or meaningful. As in all photography, the fraction of a second exposure can only convey that momentary slice of time. Things look different in the next instant. But in this brief moment of speaking to the camera Alwan's subjects tell us something about their resilience and uniqueness with complex expressions of defiance, curiosity, humor, patience or sadness. 

I urge you to look at Alwan's photos on his website and also to explore Paris Photo, in Paris if possible! I would love to hear comments from anyone who gets a chance to see the exhibitions.

Maha Maamoun and the Pyramids

A friend of mine from the year I spent at the American University in Cairo in 1989-90, Maha Maamoun, became an artist who uses photography. She is also a curator. We re-met in Beirut in 2007 where she was organizing the Meeting Points 5 arts festival and now I see her work has been in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. There is a statement by her in the most recent issue of Nafas art magazine. Her recent work, Domestic Tourism I and II, is described there, with photos.

For Domestic Tourism II she searched for scenes in movies that featured the pyramids as backdrop and put them together. She explains the chronology and rhythm she chose for the resulting film, which sounds evocative:

"I wanted to start and end with the present so that the film does not end up as a celebration of a romantic past vs. a rough present. Instead, it visits the past and shows its various formulations by a changing present.

The film starts with recent scenes, from the 2000’s, with their lighter and more superficial engagement in social and political issues, then the tone of the film heightens as we move backwards through the 90’s, 80’s, and 70’s, with cinema’s deeper engagement with the harshness of political and social realities. The tension is then released with the celebratory scenes of political and social glee from the 60’s and 50’s, where the pyramids act mostly as a backdrop to a celebrating and celebrated middle class. Here we reach the oldest scene I have, the turning point, after which the tension gradually builds up as we move up again through the traumatic political and economic upheavals of the late 60’s, phasing out to the present."

Beginning again, and art from the Middle East

I was inspired by discussions with David Campbell (Photography, Multimedia, Politics), Jim Johnson (Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography), and Mark Reinhardt (editor of the book Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain) to begin this blog again. We were on a roundtable together, along with Victoria Hattam, at the American Political Science Association conference in Toronto last week about the fear of images in political science and the broad topic of politics and photography.

So, I hereby rededicate myself to posting about photography and the Middle East, including some of my own photographs once in a while. Please keep in mind though that this will still be a "slow blog." These will be occasional posts.

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In the Nafas Art Magazine there is an interesting article by Nada Shabout, Are Images Global?, about interpreting art from the Middle East. She talks about how interpretation, critical writing and curating art from the region is being done for the most part outside the region, primarily in Europe and the US. She makes the useful point that a consequence of this trend is the lack of understanding of the art's historical context and development and goes on to say:

"There is little scholarship about modern art but, instead, an ever-growing number of exhibition catalogues arising from the increasing number of contemporary shows of Middle East art. The move from a period of invisibility through to one of celebration of everything related to the Middle East has fostered a sense of discontinuity, with contemporary production being seen as a new, detached phenomenon."

In my own writing about photography I am very interested in and concerned with historicizing -- putting photographs in the context of the period they emerged from in order to explore how and why they look the way they do. To understand visual images we have to investigate the myriad forces that acted upon them as they were made, such as markets, intellectual trends, politics, technological changes, the photographer's working conditions, etc.

She ends her article just when it gets most interesting:

"Finally, I would note that this displacement of centres of knowledge production has affected the development of art education and art history within the region. ... Nevertheless, some ambitious institutional initiatives around the Arab world, as well as new research and critical thinking by an increasing number of younger scholars, signal possible fresh directions for the field’s future advancement."

I have also noticed that contemporary institutions and practices throughout the region are creating a new creative economy, much of it transnational in nature. There is an overlapping network developing of artists, non-profit cultural groups, publications, galleries, cinema spaces, art buyers, educational programs, festivals, bloggers, curators, exhibits and funding. But I'm not aware of the new research and critical thinking she mentions because my Arabic is not good. I hope some will appear in translation.

Addendum added later:

I just saw that the latest Middle East Studies Association Bulletin (Summer/Winter 2008, though it just came out) has a special section called "Art Without History," introduced by Nada Shabout and with 6 other interesting essays on the topic. It's not online, but you might find it in a university library.

alternatives to disaster photographs

Wandering around the web this morning I spent some time reading a call for papers for a conference at Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies called "Humanising Photography". (Proposals by photographers, scholars and humanitarian workers due Dec 19th.) The associate director of the center (at Durham University in the UK) is the geographer David Campbell, who has written quite a bit on the representation of war, famine and disaster. Two projects he was involved in are on the web: Imaging Famine and The Visual Economy of HIV/AIDS.

While I appreciate analysis of images of famine and disaster and how they shape the way the public understands the world (Africa in these cases), I am usually more interested in exploring the alternatives to these depictions. It seems to me that contemporary photojournalism is gradually expanding its visual language to incorporate new visions and ways of seeing that go beyond the simplistic, decontextualized, isolated close up image of an emaciated or suffering individual. (See some of the newer members of Magnum Photos like Jonas Bendiksen for example.) However, the most interesting photographs for complicating our perceptions of a place or a people or a situation seem to be those embraced by the art world.

In that spirit, here are a few artists I stumbled across this morning who create representations of places that go beyond the stereotypes and cliches of the mainstream media.

The curator/photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi addresses this issue directly in a short, interesting interview about the Bamako 2007 photography biennial (in Mali). He put together a smaller exhibit of photography, "Spot On: Bamako 2007," from the biennial at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (ifa) in Berlin. (If you're in Berlin the exhibit is on now until January 11, 2009.)

Check out work by artists from all over Africa (including North Africa and Egypt) by going to the Berlin exhibit website.

Here's a taste.

Sammy Baloji

Baloji makes collages of colonial era photographs incorporated into present-day landscapes. As the exhibit explains: "...in order to understand the present, he reads the traces of the past. He finds such traces and signs in the architecture of Congo’s state mining company. Once the Gécamines stood for the richness of the Belgian colony and the extraction of copper and cobalt was the backbone of the Congoles economy. Under Mobuto’s regime, however, this sector of industry was run down because of the lack of investments and the dictator claimed the profits."

Mouna Karray

"The industrial and harbour city of Sfax, Tunisia, is the home town of the artist Mouna Karray. Since four decades, a series of political decisions has led to the point that public places in Sfax have gradually become non-accessible areas without any function. The remains of these places, redefining the image of the urban landscape, are shown by Mouna Karray in her series Murmurer."

Another artist I found this morning is Ahmed Mater Al-Ziad Aseeri, from Saudi Arabia. He is also a doctor and has incorporated x-rays into his work.

Mixed media on paper, 152 x 102 cm

He explains: "It is designed to be like the opening pages to a religious text. But much larger. Originally the craftsmen would always spend a great deal of time on these pages. They’re the first thing you see. Instead of a traditional geometry I have printed two facing X-ray images of human torsos. I prepared the paper using tea, pomegranate, coffee and other materials traditionally used on these pages. By using them you ensure that when you come to paint onto the paper it will have an extraordinary luminous quality – the paint will truly shine. And that’s what I want to do with this piece, to illuminate. I am giving light. It’s about two humans in conversation. Us and Them. Dar a luz. So many religions around the world share this concept of giving light, not darkness. It is one religious idea that has reached mankind through many different windows."

NYC and Catherine Opie

We were in NYC for just an afternoon last week but we managed to squeeze in a visit to the fantastic B&H Photo store (professional photographer's heaven, if you have a little money to spend), a tasty lunch of mezze at a Turkish restaurant called Beyoglu, and a long visit to the Guggenheim to see the Catherine Opie exhibit of photos. Not much time to take photos, but here are two snapshots from the day.

Lunch.

View from inside the Guggenheim.

Here's a Catherine Opie photo from the exhibit:

Untitled #2 (1994), Platinum print, 2 1/4 x 6 3/4 inches

On view at the Guggenheim (this link takes you to the page of her work, including an online exhibition) are a number of her coherent, separate projects - such as Freeways (example above), Being and Having, Portraits, Mini-Malls, Domestic, American Cities, Icehouses, and Surfers. She began in the 1990s by taking formal studio portraits of friends in the queer communities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. They are striking for the way she photographed each uniquely dressed, tattooed and pierced individual against richly colored backdrops and baroque patterns. She refers to being influenced by the 16th century portrait paintings by Hans Holbein. She also photographed domestic scenes of lesbian families around the country, and her own family with her young son. As with most of her work they are done with medium or large format cameras, very deliberately arranged and meticulously lit. Also very tender, expressive and moving.

I particularly enjoyed Freeways, the small panoramic platinum paladium prints of overpasses and roadways in Los Angeles. The forms are sensuous and compelling as abstractions but also visual testimony to the vast - generally unnoticed - infrastructure that connects the LA area (and divides communities, as Opie mentions in the audio tour). By shooting in black and white on Sunday mornings when there are few cars around she heightens the abstract qualities of line, shape and texture, and directs our attention to the forms themselves rather than their usage in a particular era. The platinum process creates an almost antique, historic aura that lacks the contrast (bright whites, dark blacks) usually seen in silver gelatin prints (the most common black and white printing method). By printing them small she pulls us away from feeling their monumental scale as we would if we were standing there in person or if she had made massive prints as is so common these days. Instead of asking us to be awe-struck by the freeways' size in relation to ourselves, she has shrunk them down to a whole new scale. We peer at the prints from up close as if we are getting a glimpse into another world, our world made temporarily unfamiliar.

I also really loved the two series facing each other in one gallery, Icehouses (2001) and Surfers (2003). You can see a video of their installation with Opie's reflections on the images by clicking here. Instead of capturing moments of action among ice fishers in Minnesota and surfers in California she photographs the quiet time of waiting, and from a distance. The horizon lines in these are very important, as they align from photo to photo, but are often almost imperceptible as sky melts into snow or ocean. These photos are huge, 50 x 40 inches and were made with field camera on 8x10 inch film. Both series are about temporary communities, not individuals (no people are even visible in Icehouses, only the little shacks within which people do their fishing). 

 

Untitled #9 (Icehouses) 2001, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40 inches

 

Untitled #9 (Surfers), 2003, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40 inches

It's an excellent show all around. I haven't even mentioned the urban landscape shots of mini-malls in Los Angeles (also without people, which highlights both the signage that points to the presence of multiple cultural communities and the dreary architecture) and similarly large scale, detailed but low-key panoramic shots of Wall Street and Chicago that are also quite compelling.

Her aesthetic of capturing the mundane and the overlooked, and the in-between moments, without drama but with incredible technical finesse and intense detail really appeals to me. So very different from the photojournalism that I normally work with, but more in tune with my own photographic sensibility.

Hashem El Madani Itinerary, by Akram Zaatari

On Saturday we took a trip to Saida (Sidon) to see Akram Zaatari's latest project involving the photography of Hashem El Madani, a commercial studio photographer from Saida. Madani opened his Studio Shehrazade in the early 1950s. In addition to studio portraits he also created wonderful portraits of people at their places of work. Forty-one of those that he took in the old district of Saida have been printed, framed and displayed in the original locations or in nearby cafes.

Visitors get a map that locates each photo and provides a thumbnail image of each along with a caption.

 

[Fragment of the map.]

Having a common purpose for wandering around the old district's narrow streets and to pop into various stores, workshops and cafés created a unique experience. Some shopkeepers kept working after we exchanged greetings, others wanted to point out something from the photo such as the elderly man who kept telling us the guy in the photo is his father. Some of the others following the itinerary took photos of him, while neighbors watching it all teased him affectionately.

I wondered if many of the Lebanese who were following the itinerary had been there before. In a way it seemed like a great method for creating a moment of mixing between Lebanese of different social classes and backgrounds. In addition to calling attention to the history of the area and of the role of studio photography in Saida, of course.

It helped me feel a bit less like the typical tourist. Being part of this mini whirlwind of visitors sweeping through to participate in an art exhibit created a different dynamic. I wasn't there just to look at a place but to participate in some kind of interaction, however brief and ephemeral.

The only drawback was that in such a stimulating environment I couldn't concentrate on the photos much. But perhaps that was as it should be. The text on the map explains: "The Madani Project [of which this project is just one part] takes the archive of Studio Shehrazade as study material to understand the complex relationship which ties a studio photographer to his working space, his equipment and tools, economy and aesthetics, and further explore his ties to his clients, society and the city in general." In this experience we visitors were placed into the actual physical environment and given the tools to imagine Madani out with his camera, taking the photos and building the relationships he needed for his business. On the other side, I was also compelled to wonder about Madani and Zaatari's relationship to the current shopkeepers and owners as they put this project together. What does this all mean to them and the other residents of the old district of Saida?

Below are some photos I took, which show the placement of the photos and the shops' current appearance. Sorry you can't see the original photos, for other work by Madani look into getting one of the excellent books Zaatari has published, such as Mapping Sitting or Hashem el Madani: Studio Practices.

Cobbler's shop. Photo 17 on the itinerary. In 1951, when the photo on the back wall (beyond the mirror) was taken, it was a watch sale and repair shop. The red symbol on the wall is the Arabic letter meem, or m, for Madani I assume. Each shop with a photo inside displays this symbol. This alleyway was my favorite visually, it was covered so many shops spilled out into the alley. Most were cobblers with grand old machines.

Photo 14. This shop is Mohamad Ali el Jardali Nouveauté, but in the early 1950s it was two shops, a calligraphy and paint shop and a place called Nouveauté Barsha.

Photo 3. This textile shop displays a photo that was not taken here originally, but nearby I guess. If you click on the scan of the map above you might be able to make out the thumbnail of the photo that is hung here.

 

 

Photo 23 (up from the fan, next to the mirror) shows Wafiq el Baba at the door of his shop Nouveauté el Baba taken in the late 1940s. It is now a barber shop called Salon el Anouar.

Photos 5, 7, 25 and 26 are placed in this café, Beb el Saray Café. The photos show men standing in front of a pharmacy, a tobacco, perfume and spice shop, a sandwich and tobacco kiosk, and two young men standing by a tree in the square. The green fruits on the right are oranges for making fresh juice.

Photo 29. This carpenter's shop was closed by the time we got there. In the early 1950s it was a pastry shop.

Emily Jacir

Congratulations to Emily Jacir. She won the Golden Lion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. Jacir's contribution to "Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind," curated by Robert Storr, is titled "Material for a Film."

[Photo from Electronic Intifada. A part of Jacir's exhibit at the Venice Biennale, with a photo of Wael Zuaiter on the wall.]

She wrote about her project for Electronic Intifada in July. It's a sad and fascinating story of the Palestinian poet Wael Zuaiter and his assassination in Rome by Israeli agents in 1972. I gather that his story is depicted at least partially in the recent film Munich. Jacir's investigation into his life is poignant and direct. She interviewed people he knew, visited the apartment building where he lived and was shot 12 times, read letters and looked at the archives of his life.

When he was shot one bullet lodged in an old Arabic book of 1001 Nights, which he was translating into Italian. Jacir photographed all the pages that were marked by the bullet. She learned to fire a .22 caliber pistol, the gun the Mossad used to assassinate him, then shot 1,000 blank white books. These were put on display with the photos of the scarred 1001 Nights volume and other materials she gathered. I wish I could have seen the exhibit, but I was affected even just reading her account of the project. I recommend reading her short essay.


[Photo from Electronic Intifada. The photos of the bullet-scarred 1001 Nights, blank books shot by Jacir beyond.]

I wrote a short blurb (see below) about Jacir's work in 2005 for the book The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005, edited by Joel Beinin and Rebecca Stein. [Incidentally, I was also responsible for finding and procuring the photographs for the book, including the cover.]

Emily Jacir poignantly distills the Palestinian experience of displacement into politically astute conceptual art. Living and working in both New York city and Ramallah, she constructs paths to lost or inaccessible places and memories with words, rough materials (such as newspaper, thread and tent canvas), and photographs. Often her work draws friends and strangers into the artistic process, using them to amplify the message. In "Sexy Semite" (2000 – 2002) she asked Palestinians in New York city to submit satirical personal ads to the Village Voice newspaper in a mock search for Jewish partners with whom they could return home via Israel's "law of return," applicable only to Jews. Jacir collaborated with strangers when she opened her studio to anyone who volunteered to sew a village name onto a refugee tent in "Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages That Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948." (2001)

In "Where We Come From," (2001 – 2003) Jacir asked Palestinians around the world and in the occupied territories: "If I could do anything for you anywhere in Palestine what would it be?" Jacir positioned herself as a conduit for others, using her American passport to traverse restricted landscapes on their behalf. As in the example reproduced in this volume, "Omayma," she documented the requests and her attempts to fulfill them in texts and photographs. Here, as in much of her work, Jacir traces the intricate Palestinian web of severed relationships, lost property and remembered experiences that crisscrosses Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

[Cover photo by Bruno Stevens/Cosmos/Aurora]

improvised music in Beirut

The other night I went with some friends to hear a group called 6 at a theater in Ashrafiye. The event was billed as a "free improvised music concert." Free as in, for example, free jazz, not free entry. There were six musicians playing with their instruments -- trumpet, guitar, drums, saxophone and double bass (though the poster said "electronics" for that musician).

I said playing with because the music came from their creative manipulation of the sounds made by scraping, vibrating, scratching, plucking, rapping, and sawing on their instruments with various tools. The trumpet, by Mazen Kerbaj, was my favorite. His techniques were a bit different since it's an instrument you blow air through (must be a word for that). (The saxophone too of course, but his back was to me, so I can't describe his methods.) So, Kerbaj often put objects directly in front of the horn such as an aluminum plate, glass bowl, plastic things. Sometimes he just blew through the trumpet in a different way or through alternative pipes, creating new sounds. (Kerbaj is also a visual artist whose drawings have appeared in Middle East Report, for example see this cover.)

The effect of all this was really mesmerizing. I imagined doors creaking, trams rattling, machines, busy streets, industrial landscapes, screams, birds chirping, fog horns, cities, raspy breathing, ships and much more. That might seem very unmusical, but it's the way they made the sounds build up or ebb away and intertwine with each other and create patterns that made it so engaging.

For me, the sounds conjured up images from the films of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, Andrei Tarkovsky and Dziga Vertov (the movie Man with a Movie Camera poster below). So, it was a really enjoyable evening.

"Developing a photographer's eye"

I have signed up with an organization called The Compelling Image to teach an online course about photography. It's called "Developing a photographer's eye," and will guide students through a series of 4 lessons and photo assignments to improve their photography skills. Students have to be able to upload photos so that we can discuss the work online. It lasts 4 weeks and should be fun! My focus is going to be on understanding the elements, such as light, depth of field, and composition, that make up a photograph so students can then use those tools to create more expressive images. We will also discuss how to evaluate ones own photos, something many people find difficult to do. And there will be more. The complete description will be up on the site soon, for now there's an outline.

Take a look at the site, there are a number of interesting courses being offered this fall.