A

فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Photographic objects have been the centre of Akram Zaatari’s artistic practice since 1995. Photographic formations or emergences, as he calls them, are the focus of this exhibition: enigmatic objects that bear traces of past events and accompany people through key moments in their lives. Cherished at times, destroyed at others, photographs are capable of provoking diverse and extreme reactions. Initially, capturing instances, they change over time. The perception of an image changes, but sometimes the physicality of the object itself is also altered as a result of its contact with the natural, social and political environment. The desire to own these images, to look for them and collect them, is rooted in a spectrum of motivations from the personal to the commercial. They are currency for our emotional, cultural and economic desires.

In 1997, Zaatari co-founded the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) partly to contain this activity of collecting, but also to organise it within an institutional framework and give it form through an expanding collection, which itself is a result of multiple modes of acquisition. Less of a repository of documents, the strength and originality of the AIF lie in the critical intersection the archive and artistic practices.

As an artist initiative, there was freedom for different approaches to photographic heritage that challenged conventional notions of museum or archival practices. Its artist-led projects shunned the academic and proto-institutionalized formats of writing history, situating the artist in the role of agent of historic memory, while also propelling the archival document into the realm of contemporary art. Against Photography is a subjective reflection on AIF’s activity and evolution through Zaatari’s own extensive work on photography that has paved way for an expanded understanding of the photographic object. Over the past twenty years, the AIF was the way through which many of Zaatari’s projects and interests were developed.

The exhibition can be seen as the outcome of an ongoing excavation that spans the macro to the micro—beginning with the AIF itself to specific collections to works that explore the practices of photographers such as Van Leo and Hashem El Madani, and finally delving into the nature of the photographic document as object that carries traces of wear, and sometimes violence.

New works have been produced especially for the occasion of this exhibition, including the premiere of On Photography, Dispossession and Times of Struggle.

An illustrated catalogue will be published with an introduction by Hiuwai Chu and Bartomeu Marí, an essay by Mark Westmoreland, a conversation between Akram Zaatari and Chad Elias, and descriptions of selected collections from the AIF by Ian B. Larson.

A Photographer's Shadow, 2017

Shadows are effects caused by light. They are like binding agents, in the sense that they tie distinct elements one to another.

At a time when it was uncommon to own a camera for private use, one of the recurring patterns that appears in family photographs across the world is the shadow of the photographer falling on his subjects. Camera users, told to keep the sun behind them while taking pictures for better results, were often unaware that their silhouette overshadowed the scene they were trying to capture. In this series Zaatari re-photographed the shadows of photographers that appear in negatives and prints, shifting the viewer’s attention away from the scene, focusing on areas of the pictures where the photographer merges with the photographed, or what could have been an early form of shadow selfie.

The Vehicle, 1999-2017

Zaatari’s early projects with the AIF shared an anthropological approach towards reading photographs and derived from the predominant patterns that he observed in family albums from the mid-twentieth century.

The photographic series presented here are a revisited versions of a project by the artist entitled The Vehicle: Picturing Moments of Transition in a Modernizing Society (1999), which looks at two significant inventions of modern times: the camera and the motor vehicle. The images selected in these series are as much about representations of individuals, as they are an exploration of modernity infiltrating the lives of people in the Arab world and captured and promoted through their pictures; at once, descriptions and inscriptions. This revisited display is informed by the artist’s consideration of photographs as objects. Both sides of every photograph are reproduced to size and given equal importance, allowing viewers access to both the family and the AIF’s annotations on the back.

Her + Him, 2002-2012

In April 1998, Zaatari interviewed Van Leo in his studio with a mini DV camera. Van Leo talked about the details of his work, the changing role of photography and the transformation of Egypt in the past 50 years. This remains one of very few instances Van Leo was captured on video, while talking about his work.

In 2001, Van Leo received the prestigious Prince Claus award. For this occasion, Zaatari decided to make this film, which is based on the interview he made in 1998. He developed starting from the story of Nadia Abdel-Wahed, an Egyptian woman who came once into Van Leo’s studio and asked him to take pictures of her. Every time he took a picture; she took off one piece of clothes until she was completely naked. Nadia remains the only example of a woman who paid a photographer to take nude portraits of her. Given that the photographs were taken in 1959, Zaatari narrates the film from the point of view of Nadia’s imagined grandson, discovering for the first time the photographs of his grandmother.

In 2001, Van Leo gave Zaatari five photographs from this series and told him that he took twelve pictures of Nadia. Ten years later, after the passing of Van Leo and thanks to a collaboration agreement between the American University in Cairo and the Arab Image Foundation, Zaatari had access to the negatives showing the total of the 12 poses. He decided to incorporate the new photographs into the film and made a new edit.

Van Leo’s Footnotes, 2001
and To Retouch, 2001

Hand retouching photographs demonstrated the skill tied to portraiture. It often included hand coloring prints.

Van Leo’s Footnotes looks at color and manual skill and makes use of an early experiment that Van Leo did. The three diptychs are based on hand colored photographic prints that represent the singer Dalida, the actor Rushdy Abaza, and an unknown Italian woman, which Van Leo referred to as an Italian Beauty. Zaatari’s inquiry into Van Leo takes an experimental stance, performing or re-writing Van Leo’s gesture, transposing it from analogue black-and-white photography into digital color.

These three diptychs are a digital re-enactment of one of very few experiments made by Van Leo while producing a portrait of a South African male dancer, in which he superposed a negative and a positive transparency of the same portrait and placed them in the enlarger and exposed them with a slight shift, which produced a strong line and an almost solarized image. This re-enactment, which Zaatari made in color and printed onto copper sheets was triggered by an on-going disagreement with Van Leo, who despised color photography and video, and who believed that there is “no Art in color.”

Among the first 100 prints that Van Leo donated to the AIF were two prints of the same portrait, one of which was hand-colored. Zaatari based To Retouch on these two prints which are made from the same negative but are two distinct objects.

The Construction of Class, 2017

In the late 1990s, Zaatari’s approach to reading photographs was very much informed by Cultural Studies, namely John Berger. Many of his writings specifically while producing Cairo Portraits, which reflected on the photographs of the privileged class in Egypt, focused on representation of class, gender and the body. The original photograph represented here, reflects well how class emerges in typical touristic photographs where workers appear, but where the photographer does no effort in making them recognizable. Such a photograph is made for those who pay for it. Workers figure in this picture only because they hold the camels. Inspired by so many photographs where photographers tried to mask out servant figures, Zaatari accentuates the underexposed faces of dark-skinned camel caretakers to render visible the class-encoding inherent the photographic genre.

Twenty-Eight Nights and a Poem, 2006-15

Twenty-eight nights and a poem borrows elements from the life of a photographic studio named Studio Shehrazade in Saida. It rearranges them like a music composition to communicate the multiple uses of such a space, and the complex nature of photographs, machines, super 8 films, and postcards. It examines how this affected local imagination in a provincial town like Saida.

This work is based on extensive research that almost considers the site of the studio as an archaeological site. Studying photographer Hashem el Madani’s work since 1999, Zaatari has been looking to identify work patterns, social habits and attitudes, the development of the practice itself, as well as the technology of image production and diffusion. Studio Shehrazade has been used as a place of transactions, ranging from portraiture and photographic processes to the purchase and sale of photo and super 8-film equipment. For some clients it was a place to explore identities while taking a picture, or to find cheap reproductions of European girls in swimming outfits, yet for others it was simply the place to learn how to use a camera.

In the 1960s, and the early 1970s, Hashem el Madani used his super-8 camera to film his family and friends. The video looks at how a self-taught still photographer visualized movement and spontaneously directed himself as well as others. The rushes used in the five movements were shot in the late 1960s and early seventies in Egypt, and in touristic sites in Lebanon such as the Beiteddine Palace, Kfarhonah, Dahr el Ramleh, and Jezzine, which used to be Madani’s summer residence.

This installation presents 28 photographs of objects Zaatari excavated in Madani’s studio and organized in three cabinets, a super-8 projector showing a film shot in the studio on expired super 8 stock, a set of videos showing various operations related to the practice of photography, and a few large prints to communicate the idea of aging in skin in emulsion and in the technology of image production and diffusion.

On Photography, People and Modern Times, 2010

This work tracks photographic records that Akram Zaatari researched and collected for the Arab Image Foundation in its early years (1998–2000). It is a meditation on the intimate past moments evoked by photographs and an environment that secures their preservation. Cutting across temporal and geographic borders, the film probes the nature of human relationships and assert the permeability of memory.

On Photography, Dispossesion and Times Struggle, 2010

Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this film, based on interviews that Akram Zaatari made in 1999 and 2000, is a reflection on photography and its people. It looks at the position of the individual within the context of war and displacement, as well as how photographs have become the sole record of that displacement, as the risk of them being dispersed as well.

Sculpting With Time, 2017

Negatives bound to cellulose may react to change in temperature and humidity. Their versatile nature, compared to negatives bound to glass, makes them curl causing the emulsion displacement. These are extreme close-ups on two negative sheets that have morphed over time and developed air bubbles and channeling. The first represents the same detail photographed in three different light setups to capture the 3D quality of the object and to differentiate the bubbles from the image on the gelatin. The second represents close-ups of the subjects on the same negative, in this case a portrait of two ladies.

The Body of Film, 2017

In May 1948, photographer Antranick Bakerdjian photographed his own home destroyed in the Armenian district of Jerusalem. His negatives reflect a turn from that point on. From taking pictures of friends during excursions to nature and of religious ceremonies, he moved to photograph the fortification of the Armenian convent St. James, where many Armenian families took refuge. He found himself in the center of an unfolding war for the years to come.

Zaatari looked closely at Bakerdjian’s negatives and decided to take the body of film itself as a testimony of war, focusing on erosion and on the different film brands inscribed on the edge of negatives, such as DuPont, Safety Film, Nitrate and Panchromatic. This is a story of war told through the deterioration of photographic emulsion. The film presented here were mostly produced at a time when the photographer was deprived of his darkroom, and was moving from one home to another.

Faces to Faces, 2017

What appear to be double exposures are photographic close-ups of glass plates that represent portraits made by Tripoli-based photographer Antranick Anouchian in the early 1940s. These plates, found by collector Mohsen Yammine, were stuck to one another.

Zaatari selected the pairs of negatives with glass plates representing French soldiers paired with others showing individuals, random citizens from Tripoli. These photographs depict the faces of French military men in uniforms, seen through the portraits of the community they governed at the time.

Sculpting with Time, 2017

Negatives bound to cellulose may react to change in temperature and humidity. Their versatile nature, compared to negatives bound to glass, makes them curl causing the emulsion displacement. These are extreme close-ups on two negative sheets that have morphed over time and developed air bubbles and channeling. The first represents the same detail photographed in three different light setups to capture the 3D quality of the object and to differentiate the bubbles from the image on the gelatin. The second represents close-ups of the subjects on the same negative, in this case a portrait of two ladies.

Archeology, 2017

The work Archeology evokes, at once, the excitement and disappointment of an archeologist upon the excavation of an artifact, which misses crucial parts. It is based on a glass plate found in Tripoli by a photography collector named Mohsen Yammine in a flooded studio. The original glass plate represents the portrait of an athlete photographed by Tripoli-based Antranick Anouchian (1908 - 1991). Zaatari applied layers of dirt; metal and broken glass transforming it into an unearthed artifact. The object has been enlarged to match Zaatari’s excitement at his first encounter with the plate while looking through Yammine’s collection in 1998.

Photo: Roberto Ruiz / MACBA