images | text

Taysir Batniji
Born in 1966 in Gaza, Palestine / Lives in Paris, France

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): Tell me about Fathers (2006), a series you are  exhibiting in Istanbul.

Taysir Batniji (TB): Fathers is a series of 34 photographic portraits taken in shops, cafés, factories, and other work areas in Gaza. The framed portraits of the “masters of the shop” (the founding father of the shop—disappeared, or, more rarely, the current owner) are hung behind the bar, shown on the shelves, or hidden among a pile of goods. They compose a series of “unconscious compositions” (Walker Evans) arranged by the owners. Fathers is a part of a personal interest in a state “in between” (or non-state), present absence or absent presence, for the representation of disappearance. The connection that is created between the image of the “father” and the elements that make up the photographic field bounded by the frame (the picture in the picture) is, in some ways, an attempt to establish a relationship between the contextual environment and the history of the place and, more broadly, between history and current events. I also wonder about the encounter between the private and public spheres: the portrait of the “father” as a private “monument,” family reference, social reminder of the patriarch, and genealogical public (collective) memory of the trade place; the store, as living space (inside) and place of common, daily, and permanent sharing (outside). The boundary between those two spheres is porous, ambiguous, indistinct—neither public nor private, a space in between.

AP: Watchtowers (2008) also speaks about this in-between-ness.

TB: The idea of the series Watchtowers came to me during the retrospective of the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher in Paris in 2004–5. The formal resemblance between their water towers in particular and the Israeli watchtowers hit me. In the style of the Bechers, who in the late 1950s tried to document the postindustrial heritage in Europe, I tried to establish a typology of viewpoints in the West Bank, to identify those architectures of war. I wanted to create an illusion, a sort of Trojan Horse. Dealing with those pictures, the viewer thinks about the authors. But, looking closer, you realize quickly that this is neither the advanced technique of German photographers nor water towers. The particularly dangerous shots in question, carried out by an assigned Palestinian photographer (since I was born in Gaza, I am not allowed to enter the West Bank) are visible: blurs, candles, frames clumsy, imperfect lighting . . . There would be no way, on those grounds, to install the heavy equipment of the Bechers, to wait several days before finding the right light, to take the time to pose. No possible aestheticization. No way to consider those military buildings as sculptures or as heritage.

AP: They speak of both history and a very particular culture or condition, but from a more personal, affectionate side, and the other one with a harsher outlook.

TB: It is precisely to defuse this immediate “hardness” that I chose between me and the Watchtowers, two intermediaries (Becher and the delegate photographer).