As I'm working on my paper and presentation for the conference Global Photographies: Histories : Theories : Practices at the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire (near Dublin, Ireland), I'm running across interesting reading that I want to introduce you to.
The Atlas Group is a project by Walid Raad that uses themes and practices common to archives to create new information about how Lebanon experienced its civil wars (1975-1990).
["The Fadl Fakhouri File", sample page from the notebooks documenting the make of cars used in car bombs during the civil war. The Atlas Group.]
Raad uses found images, for example from newspapers of the time, and makes his own (such as videotaping an interview) in order to assemble notebooks, documents, multi-media, and performance with sometimes fanciful (though realistic) tales of detailed human experiences to question how these wars have been experienced, what makes it into official history narratives and how history is recorded or explained. He won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize this year. Janet Kaplan wrote a very good article in 2004 explaining his work in Art in America, I recommend it for getting a better sense of what he's doing.
Mapping Sitting is a project by Akram Zaatari and Walid Raad about portrait photography culled from the archive in Beirut I've written about before, the Arab Image Foundation.
[Antranik Anouchian (1908-1991),
Anouchian
4250 portraits, 8,7 x 6,3 cm each
Tripoli, from the 1930’s to the 1970’s
Coll.FAI / M.Yammine.]
Here's how they describe it:
“In Mapping Sitting, we present geographically and culturally specific photographic works that raise questions about portraiture, performance, photography and identity in general. We proceed from the proliferation of portrait photographic practices in the Arab world in the early to mid-20th century such as passport studio photographs, institutional group portrait photographs, Surprise photographs and street portrait photographs by itinerant photographers to ask how the photographic portrait functioned in the Arab world as a commodity, a luxury item, an adornment, as a description of individuals and groups, and as the inscription of social identities. We proceed from the thesis that the photographic practices in question are symptomatic of an evolving capitalist organization of labor and its products and of established conventions of iconic representation. We also propose that these practices were not only reflective but also productive of new notions of work, leisure, play, citizenship, community, and individuality.”
I find this mode of analyzing and studying photographs as objects within society most interesting, more so than trying to interpret the meaning of a photograph by only reading it's visual content (as fun as that is).
In the Spring 2007 issue of Bidoun (magazine on arts and culture of the
Middle East) was this great article on the work of Jill Magid,
'PERMISSION IS A MATERIAL AND CHANGES THE WORKS' CONSISTENCY,' by Elizabeth Rubin.
A quote from the article:
"I seduce systems of power to make them work with me," she says. It would be easy to engage that system with the snide superiority of the urban artist, making easy political statements, mocking the battlers of terror and crime. But she was looking for something more. She wanted mutual accountability, an exchange of power and vulnerability. Artist as gift-giver and -receiver."
What I like is that her projects interrogate surveillance systems but she incorporates cooperation and discussion with the police to achieve what I think are poignant and revealing results.
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