three snapshots and a long exposure, 2022

Exhibited on the first floor of the gallery, the series that gave its title to the show focuses on post-civil-war iconography from Beirut. In the mid-1990s, while the reconstruction project of the city’s downtown was provoking heated debates, Zaatari started documenting the first belt around the city center, with the aim of indexing houses typology for a book project initiated by then professor of Urban Planning and Design at the American University of Beirut, Robert Saliba. The images, taken with a 4x5” view camera, were never used until Zaatari returned to them nearly twenty-five years later. Printed in large formats, the landscapes, which Zaatari qualifies as missing any specific focal points, might have captured an atmosphere of speculation, a gentrification on its way, and an urban transformation, back then still latent in the neighborhoods located on both sides of the green line that had divided Beirut between East and West from 1975 to 1990.