images | text

Akram Zaatari
Born in 1966 in Saida, Lebanon / Lives in Beirut, Lebanon

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): Tell me about your project with the work of the Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani, the series Studio Practices(2007) and the video Hands at Rest(2006), that we are exhibiting in Istanbul.

Akram Zaatari (AZ): The project started in 1999 as part of my involvement with the Arab Image Foundation and has become over this period an open excavation that aims to study an entire archive of a photographer, Hashem el Madani, and the rise and fall of an economy
and an industry of image production. In more than 60 years of work,  Madani photographed hundreds of thousands. People posed alone for IDs, but in so many cases as couples or groups to commemorate friendship, love, camaraderie, marriage, or family ties. For the photographer, having two people pose provided  possibilities of mise-en-scène inevitably connected to a regime of suggestions about the couple— suggestions of situations, human relationships, power, sensuality— which all depended on the accessories they used, and their gestures, outfits, age, and gender. It is then that studio photographs start to become performative images. The images presented in Istanbul show different examples of postures with couples. In Hands at Rest I stress the photographer’s manipulation of hands in his pictures. The photographer says he does it as a way to straighten people’s shoulders, but the result is a paradigm of emotions and sensuality.

AP: Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright (2010), the video that captures the dialogue between two men, seems somehow (auto)biographical, but it also seems to call to mind familiar conversations and situations, at least to me. There is a discreet reference to the passing of time, on the date imprinted by the camera. I understand that it is an homage to Eric Rohmer?

AZ: Our imagination is tied to our experience, so fiction sits on autobiography. The plot is inspired by my feelings and desires, longing for love, for people who have been in and out of your life. It is the hope to unmake loss, or win it. But the film is also a tribute to the writing of a script as everything unfolds through a typewriter. The sunset is very present in the film, as it is very present in romance films in general. The film is a tribute to Rohmer’s Rayon Vert (The Green Flash, 1986), in which a young woman observes the sunset, waiting to see the green flash, hoping to understand things about herself that she didn’t know. The green flash represents hope to those who can see it, as the legend says in that Rohmer film, and my film is about that hope to reunite with those you love.