Rose Issa and Michket Krifa (eds.), Arab Photography Now. Kehrer: Heidelberg & Berlin, 2011.
[This review is forthcoming in Goethe Institut`s publication Fikrun Wa Fann.]
Rose Issa and Michket Krifa, curators of art from the Arab world, recently published a collection of photographs by Arab artists in a major catalogue entitled Arab Photography Now (2011). Anthological publications in general and photography catalogues in particular that include reproductions of art works are often the product of actual, even thematic, exhibitions. Instead this volume is emblematic of bricolage, a genre that is eclectic and reflects a grouping-together of diverse thematic subjects and aesthetic forms. The editors make reference to this problem of the ambiguities of arbitrary selections that are timely insofar as they reflect an ongoing interest in the workings of the photographic, filmic and digital archives of an increasingly globalized yet nevertheless ‘othering’ visual culture.
Explanations that follow or accompany images, and images that follow explanations have characterized the notoriously complementary kinship of text and image and its influence on questions of race and gender across the Middle East and North Africa. The relationship between ethnography, the scientific (and initially structuralist) endeavors of anthropologists at the turn of the 20th century and the way in which photography became biometrically functionalized as a medium of ‘technical reproduction’ led to a shift in the production of knowledge on ‘otherness.’ A medium that could finally help to decipher difference, make it visible, record it, and enable anthropologists to scrutinize rituals, customs, and ‘manners’ of ‘otherness’ before the role of ethnography was critically reflected and revised in cultural and race theory. It seems all these discourses and their almost burdening impact on the role of aesthetics in Arab photography still hover like a Damocles sword over the encounter between art and politics in this part of the world.
The introductory essays by both Issa and Krifa showcase a number of problems addressing the state of photography as an art form in the Arab world, from the lack of cultural and academic infrastructures to raise and support generations of emerging artists, to the fragility of the political and socio-economic scaffolding across the Middle East and North Africa that leads to exile, disrupted lives in the diaspora, and frequent migrations across national borders. All of this diversity intricately binds the ‘dislocated self’ in a competitive relationship with the medium of photography and its long and dubious association with the history of the colonial enterprise in the Middle East and North Africa. This somewhat residual colonial rhetoric is central to the display of the photographs in this collection, since the selection of the pieces demonstrate the strategies of the mediatized gaze—the non-native gaze of the inhabitants of a region materialized through media channels that have informed the self-perceptive artistic endeavors and obsessions of a generation of Arab photographers.
The editors deal with the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the artists whose work they include in an encouraging yet also self-reflective manner by displaying what represents a ‘figurative turn’ in Arab photography. The collection illustrates a desire to uphold an emphasis on the textual negotiations of the medium and, at times, the materiality of the photograph. Produced mostly within the last ten years, between the cataclysms of 11 September 2001 and the Arab revolutions commencing in January/February 2011 when their own people toppled the presidents of Tunisia and Egypt, the photographs are imbued with documentary form. The topographies of the Arab world—the landscape and the vernacular—become territories of self-identifying signs that relate the image to its suspect and often abusive function. This is akin to the exploitative use of these topographies in news reporting, warmongering, stereotyping, propagandizing, ideological indoctrination, and gendering.
Many of the artistic expressions conveyed by these twenty-two Arab photographers address bicultural and bi-national narratives, thereby embodying the fleeting spatial and temporal landscapes that they inhabit. Those who have chosen to stay in their home countries, e.g. Palestine, Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, or the Gulf region, disclose a fascination with forms and methods of artistic practices as well as with the politics of ‘representations’ in journeys towards a self-determined modernity. However, this empowering modernity is in flux, growing out of the perpetual duel between the regime of ‘representation’ and the ‘other.’ Ideally, the product of this contestation is a politics of aesthetics. For instance, the Iraqi-Irish photographer Jananne Al Ani names her photographic series The Aesthetics of Disappearance: A Land without People (2010) in a supposed nod to Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Al Ani’s series features aerial shots of archaeological sites, referencing satellite images of wars in the Middle East (such as the Gulf War of 1991). The focus is on the disappearance of the subject in the on-going armed conflicts and wars, particularly with the rapidity of technological advancement, which allows for death and destruction obfuscated by the disappearance of the subject, who remains invisible in a dehistoricized cartography.
In both military imaging, imaging technologies, and archaeological topography, the accumulation of knowledge is emphasized by the deserted blank landscapes empty of human beings and their existence. In one instance, the show Shadow Sites II (2011) was originally produced as a film disclosing the ‘denigration of vision’ by implicating the role of light. By literally ‘enlightening,’ culture and civilization become visible in aerial shots when the shadows, the black spots, and the lines disappear with sunset. Western folkloric and mythical characters such as Penelope and Cinderella are set in the contested Palestinian landscape in Raeda Saadeh’s Once Upon a Time (2007) series, in which the artist herself becomes the disguised subject. Scripture and its materiality become a very prominent part of an artistically intertextual gesture in the photographs displayed in the catalogue, which makes this technique of subversion as visible as the image of the Arab woman in colonial postcards and Orientalist paintings, or a Nubian man’s face staring down a scripted Arabic print shaped like his face.
The latter is Fathi Hassan’s Glance towards the Unknown (1985), which appears as one of the first photographs in the catalogue, almost framing the confrontation, in the likes of an identity parade between scriptural forms personifying an opponent and the face of the photographer himself—ghosts in discursive disguises. Lalla Essaydi’s photographic series Les Femmes du Maroc: Fumée d’Ambre Gris (2008) challenges the materiality of calligraphy by using natural herbs such as henna to cover the bodies of her female subjects and their clothing, shedding light on forms of female self-perception that have themselves been altered through the imposition of the white male gaze.
The publication is hardly free of the overarching binaries, even hegemony, of the gaze and the different cultural perceptions Arab photographers are often trapped within. It seems that the aesthetic styles here are concerned with different visual genealogies. These artists are concerned, albeit in an often-existentialist manner, with the aesthetic matrix of creativity. For instance, Taysir Batniji, a Palestinian photographer, blatantly discloses the desire to follow artistic methodologies and forms in war zones. Unable to visit and photograph the Israeli watchtowers in the West Bank himself, he commissioned a friend of his to shoot the images that do not achieve—and do not want to achieve—the perfection of the Düsseldorf school, and the Bechers’ water towers in particular. The need to aestheticize the subject is challenged by realities on the ground: the Arab vernacular in Pop Art and advertising parodies inform Hassan Hajjaj’s photo series; the performativity of the photographic portrait in visually apparent Arab religious identities in Nabil Boutros’ photographic series; fantasy as the mise-en-scène of photographic fragments, scenes even in the hyperrealist desert in Lara Baladi’s Oum el Dounia (2000); the amalgamation of photojournalist ambitions with artistic practices; the role of cultures of copy and aesthetic adaptations in art; or the cinematic scenography in photographic slices in Tarek Al Ghoussein’s Untitled (2003) series.
We might look at these photographs as different forms of ethnographies of the self, sometimes in their primary deconstructive stages, at other times with a bird’s eye perspective, yet always with the subject at its centre, visible or invisible, but abstaining from the master narratives of Arab nationalism, pan-Arabism and Islamization. It’s the return of the artist, or the author, in a region that is struggling to find its passage towards a novel and variable modernity without yet managing completely to bypass the many indices imposed or self-imposed on it in all their forms and functions. This catalogue displays a desire to finally ‘become’ in an often-cumbersome fashion. Comments by the artists to explain their intentions are important for readers engaging with the contemporary photographic history of the Arab world. Yet this also sheds light on an unresolved perpetual aspiration to come to terms with the complementary relationship between image and text, in photographic form as well as in life.
This relation seems to disclose an often-traumatic mnemonic past of visual colonization, ‘representation’ in its most conventional, theological as well as sign-based interpretation and etymology, war, Western or native autocratic domination. The catalogue is published in a time of political changes and challenges, when art is increasingly becoming a political tool and medium for the uprisings across the Arab world. Artistic activism and its interrelation of bottom-up grassroots political movements have led to a coalescing of forms and individual human forces in public as well as digital spaces. Images now inhabit a memorable subversive space and political function in public, in Cairo’s Tahrir space and Tunisia’s Sidi Bouzid’s. The publication serves as a reminder of the uncompleted and still contested negotiation between image and the self in the hype around ‘global art’—its practices and discontents.