Daily Star, Lebanon
Jan 18 2005
Behind the lens in Sidon: 50 years and 50,000 images
A new book pays tribute to Hashem El Madani’s recording of social
history
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: When Hashem El Madani was five years old, his cousins in
Palestine sent him a set of portraits to keep as souvenirs. Madani’s
father, a moderate sheikh who had settled in Lebanon from Saudi
Arabia, wanted to return the favor but these images gave him pause.
Were they haram (a sin)? Madani’s father decided no, they were not.
They were just like seeing one’s reflection in a pond. So he sent
Madani and his brother to a photography studio to have their pictures
taken. This was in the early 1930s in Sidon, and in all likelihood,
the novelty of sitting in a studio, watching a photographer work and
grabbing hold of a postcard-size print of oneself sparked Madani’s
lifelong fascination with portraiture. Seven decades later, Madani is
the oldest living studio photographer in Sidon. He has maintained a
business there for more than 50 years, building up an archive of some
50,000 images and posing close to 90 percent of the city’s
inhabitants in front of his camera. He recently turned his entire
collection over to the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation (AIF), a
nonprofit organization that was established eight years ago to
locate, collect and preserve the region’s photographic heritage. This
past fall, the AIF (which is directed by Zeina Arida) assembled an
exhibition of Madani’s work for the Photographer’s Gallery in London.
Last month, the AIF (in collaboration with the Photographer’s Gallery
and the Beirut graphic design firm Mind the Gap) published a slim but
potent volume of Madani’s photographs. And given the sheer breadth of
Madani’s archive, more projects are in the works. “Hashem El Madani:
Studio Practices” is a tiny, black, cloth-bound book of just under
130 pages. It is densely packed with a surprising wealth of
information – both visual and textual – conveyed through essays,
interviews and over 150 reproductions of Madani’s pictures. All the
images have been reprinted under Madani’s supervision from 35
millimeter, 6-by-6 centimeter, 6-by-4.5 centimeter and 4-by-5 inch
negatives. Edited by Akram Zaatari and Lisa Le Feuvre, the book opens
with a forward that slips Madani’s work into the context of rising
(art world) interest in studio portraiture and its role in the
history and understanding of photography at large. The Paris-based
writer and theorist Stephen Wright offers a nuanced essay on the
meaning of Madani’s images – how pictures taken for commercial
purposes can be read for sociopolitical and philosophical content.
And Akram Zaatari assembles a lively, often acutely detailed and at
times hilariously revealing interview with the photographer, covering
the development of his business, the intricacies of his working
process and the silent societal observations that have registered in
his mind over the past half century. After falling in love with
photography at the age of five, Madani finished school and left
Lebanon for Palestine to find work. He hooked up with a Jewish
photographer in Haifa named Katz, who taught him the tools and tricks
of the trade. When Israel declared its statehood in 1948, Madani
traveled to Amman and then to Damascus before securing the necessary
paperwork to get back home. When he arrived in Sidon, he bought a
cheap box camera, picked up some chemicals from a photographer in
Beirut and set up shop in his parents’ living room. Madani developed
his business slowly. He bought equipment on credit, one piece at a
time, from a photo shop run by an Armenian in Bab Idriss (the old
downtown district of Beirut). As soon as he paid off one purchase,
he’d make another. He retired the box camera for a Kodak Retinet; he
shelled out for a 35 millimeter enlarger. He started selling 6-by-9
centimeter contact prints for just 25 cents. Business picked up, and
in 1953, Madani moved his studio into the first floor of the
Shehrazade building in Sidon. He bought himself a large desk, props
and a stool for his subjects to sit on, a podium for elevation when
necessary. He named his business Studio Shehrazade.
On average, 30 customers strode into Madani’s studio a day. During
the 1960s and ’70s, Studio Shehrazade was flooded with over 100
portrait-seekers a day. Part of what propelled Madani’s business was
a government decree requiring photographs on passports and ID cards.
The Lebanese Army insisted that all candidates for service submit
both frontal and profile portraits. But judging from the pictures in
this book, Madani’s customers had fun with having their pictures
taken too. They decked themselves out in cowboy costumes and aped the
gestures of film stars. They played with all manner of identity
markers. Two maids dolled themselves up as glamour girls. A
particularly effeminate man returned again and again to pose like a
screen siren. Civilians donned the guise of resistance fighters.
Pairs of women and pairs of men assumed opposing gender roles and
arranged themselves in intimate embraces and campy kisses.
Intriguingly, these couples were always of the same sex. Madani
remembers only one instance of a man and woman kissing for the
camera. They were not married. “Films inspired people a lot,” he
explains in the book. “They came to perform kissing in front of a
camera … People were willing to play the kiss between two people of
the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman.” In his
interview with Zaatari, Madani insists that his photography practice
has always been a profession. He never considered himself an artist.
He provided a service and accommodated the desires of his customers.
In addition to producing black and white prints, he taught himself
retouching and hand-coloring to make his subjects more beautiful. The
only quasi personal project he ever embarked on was an attempt to
take pictures of every resident in Sidon, simply because it was his
home. He remarks with admirable grumpiness that some of his customers
never bothered to pick up their prints. Still, Madani felt it
necessary to run his business up on the first rather than the ground
floor of his building. In Haifa, photographers could operate on
street level because the city was cosmopolitan and religiously
diverse. In Sidon, however, discretion was key as photography,
particularly for women, was still considered shameful. In the book,
Madani relates a tragic incident in which a local woman used to come
in for portraits, unbeknownst to her husband. When he found out about
the photo sessions, the husband crashed into Studio Shehrazade and
insisted that Madani destroy the negatives. Not wanting to wreck a
full roll of film, Madani scratched out her face as the husband
watched. Years later, the woman burned herself to death. The husband
returned to the studio, desperate to see if Madani had any
photographs of his dead wife to develop. Two images of her, the
surfaces deeply gouged, are reprinted in the book. Madani remembers
the time when Mir Shakib Arslan, then the defense minister, came in
and uttered brusquely, “Make me a good portrait.” He also recalls how
a supporter of Adel Osseiran, who would later be prime minister, paid
a visit to the studio during the election season of 1952, when
Osseiran was running as a deputy to the South. The supporter asked
Madani to take pictures of all the area’s voters who didn’t have
valid picture ID cards. Another time, representatives from the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency came in and asked Madani to take ID
pictures for all the students in their schools, both for their
records and for the students’ refugee cards. During the civil war of
1958, people began showing up at the studio to have their pictures
taken with guns. The same convention took root with the rise of the
Palestinian resistance in the late 1960s, and again, after the civil
war broke out in 1975 and a crew of Iraqi Baathists took over the
Shehrazade building. When Gamal Abdel Nasser died, members of the
militias loyal to him let their beards grow for 40 days and then came
in for a portrait at the end of the mourning period. “It was all show
off,” Madani recalls in one of the interview’s most brilliant little
interludes. “They came and acted sad faces. It was fashionable to be
sad when Nasser died.” In addition to the anecdotes and observations
on human behavior, “Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices” is
interesting as an attempt to frame what was essentially a
commercially driven trade in a broader and more inquisitive context.
The book’s texts are clear-sighted in detailing what these pictures
were and what the motivation for taking them was. They do not leap
across the line and consider these images as artworks proper (as has
been the case with photographers such as Malick Sadibe and Seydou
Keita, who maintained commercial studios in Bamako, Mali and were
then feted by the art scenes in New York and London). Stephen Wright
is particularly adept at navigating these nuances. “Inserting these
images into a narrative, thus giving them a use-value, is an act of
reconstruction,” he writes. “Though it was not their initial intent,
Hashem El Madani’s photographs offer one of the most extensive and
fascinating laboratories of how, for instance, Christians perform
Christianity, or patriots perform patriotism, and perhaps most
strikingly, how men perform masculinity and women perform femininity
… Understanding an image is not only to focus on its declared
meanings – that is, the explicit intentions underwritten and
authorized by its user – but above all to decipher the surplus
meaning which it betrays in its role in the symbolic complex of a
social class, a particular confession, or simply, to some extent, of
an individual.”