Akram Zaatari's Exhibition Explores Photography Through Film and Archives

Akram Zaatari's exhibition, reviewed in March 2014, features his 42-minute film 'On Photography People and Modern Times' (2010), displayed across two gallery spaces. The film uses synchronized projections from bird's-eye and front-on views of a desk at the Arab Image Foundation, a nonprofit research institution Zaatari co-founded in 1997 with Walid Raad, Fouad Elkoury, and Samer Mohdad. It includes video interviews recorded between 1998 and 2000 with retired studio photographers or their relatives from the Middle East, who discuss old photographic work from the 1970s. Interviewees reflect on photography's nature, with one describing it as capturing the present like a reflection, while another recalls props and costumes highlighting its fictional aspects. A second gallery space presents an installation of Super-8 films, HD videoworks on walls or devices like Kindles and iPads, black-and-white portrait photographs from archive negatives, and new still-life color photography by Zaatari. These works document vintage imagemaking equipment and old photography studios, implicitly referencing Studio Sheherazade, a business run by Lebanese portraitist Hashem al-Madani in Saida from the early 1950s, though this is not explicitly stated in the exhibition. The exhibition suggests images can form unreliable or fictive memories, linking to Lebanon's turbulent history during the studio's operation.