Mideast stock shots – minus war and tyranny

REVIEW

Newsday (New York)
January 14, 2005

BY ARIELLA BUDICK, STAFF WRITER

Third World faces, battered by war and disaster, gaze out of the pages
of the daily newspaper. Their pain is palpable, yet far away, a distance
shaped by differences of dress and culture as well as a sheer quantity
of miles. Our vision of the Arab world, and particularly Iraq, is now
shaped by images of destruction. Pictures of ruined homes, blown-up cars
and wailing civilians are now the principal filter through which we can
understand this part of the world – or so it seems.

The Grey Art Gallery means to issue a corrective to this skewed view of
the Middle East with a show of 20th-century portraits taken in Lebanon,
Egypt and Iraq. These formal, serious images offer a different panorama
of that part of the world. The people staring seriously into the lens
are neither random victims of violence nor grateful recipients of
international largesse, but individuals self-consciously confronting the
camera with unruffled dignity.

The exhibit’s two organizers, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, both
contemporary artists, collaborated with a Beirut-based photo archive
called the Arab Image Foundation to assemble a wide range of indigenous
images.

Most striking is a wall of some 4,000 ID photos by Antranik Anouchian
(1908-1991), a Turkish-born Armenian immigrant whose studio was in
Tripoli, Lebanon. Taken for passports, licenses, permits and the like,
these portraits offer a kind of random cross section of Tripoli society.
Oddly, though, Raad and Zaatari have mounted them into a mammoth mosaic
that wipes out the singularity of the separate faces. It’s a curious
echo of the Western media’s take on the Middle East, in which individual
dramas are subsumed into larger stories of war, devastation and tyranny.

The same kind of generalization takes place in another section of the
exhibit devoted to group photos of Iraqi and Egyptian policemen and
soldiers, produced between 1920 and 1940. Rather than simply mounting
and framing these rather prosaic graduation pictures, Raad and Zaatari
have chosen to display them, one after another, in a looped video. Here
it is the changing fashions in uniform design and hairstyle that one
notices rather than the specific faces, which tend to blend into one
another. A 1927 group of graduates sports fezzes. Another group looks
much more Western, dressed in Colonial khaki.

What we see here is different from the usual newspaper fare, but hardly
seems less dehumanizing. Another group of pictures, taken by the Sidon,
Lebanon-based itinerant photographer Hashem el Madani, shows an array of
interchangeable vacationers at the beach, all in bathing suits and
virtually identical poses. What stands out is the formulaic quality of
the shots, the way each person becomes a stock character in a generic
depiction of leisure.

Madani began shooting Sidon’s citizens in 1948, a turbulent year that
saw the founding of the state of Israel and an influx into Lebanon of
large numbers of Palestinian refugees. Yet these photos convey few hints
about the political or social context in which they were taken. Unlike
contemporary news images, these pictures are about nothing but
themselves. Their eloquence is muted by conventionality.

WHEN & WHERE: “Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography, a
Project by Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari” will be on view through April 2
at Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East,
Manhattan. For exhibition hours, call 212-998-6780 or visit

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