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• Jayce Salloum

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Description:

sites + demarcations.. from the installation Kan ya ma Kan There was and there was not rn75-16 x 20” Fujicolor prints, © Jayce Salloum, 1992. To consider photographing in Lebanon I had to displace the critical traps that had forced me to stop engaging in 'street' photography for ten years and return to a medium that at once could record and annihilate, document and forget, both experiences and cultures. These photographs were made during the year of 1992, seventeen years after the war started and the year I choose to photograph in Lebanon. This is not a project about Lebanon but is a project about the making of pictures in Lebanon. the use of image representations of Lebanon and Beirut has an extensive history in the West and in Lebanon itself. This history is intricately tied up in the history of representation, of colonialism, post-colonialism and the mediation of images and the production of knowledge of that area. There are captions for the photographs, texts that parallel the visual inquiry.. collection, to do with looking at, and making of, and being and remembering through present histories and recent pasts, always slanted of course poking towards some movement,.. some process. These pictures fail in the their attempt to try to make evident the whole machinery, apparatus of 'documentary'.. the aggression that documentary partakes in, the violence that is wrought in its name where mediation is its aim and manipulation is the inevitable by-product. It is not an equivocal history considering the relative positions in regards to history, the site, the present. It carries with it baggage of both the West and Lebanon, and some of the disparities disjunctions arising in each. Photographs incorporating arrangements of objects obsessions mine and others, and a pervasive seething, a luscious type of sensual imagery and intimations of attachment and belief a social and a personal difference and familiarity. As if the object of the discussion photograph can ever be 'known'. People are not featured in these pictures. The subjects becoming objects. The parameters, perimeter... surrounding environments, the demarcations of. And the residue of culture. of representing it or not the use of Lebanon as a productsubject and as a laboratory both actual and metaphorical - a 'site' serving the real and imaginary of both 'native' and 'other'. Beirut as a ground for a history of discursive texts, claims and acts of 're-construction', including these photographstexts, in the referencing of this history - the boundaries and transgressions of local and imported popular culture, where mimicry, appropriation, and recontextualization collapse and merge into cultural forms relating to but deviating and expanding unpredictably from previous norms - the act of representation as 'spectacle', as a textual process belying it's form of entertainment and - the yielding of the repressed in the representation of memory, history and landscape. This discussioninquiry is situated within the contested and complex terrain, of the notions of the 'post-colonial' subject, but outside of it at the same time, or beside it, the sides collapsed in the middle, where subjectivity is at stake, and where one is always aware of this at one level and oblivious to it or consumed by it in the confusion of a contested culture on another level.

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• Copyright:n/a
• Year:1992
• Country Taken:Lebanon
• Awards:n/a
• Language:n/a
• Subtitles:n/a
• Duration:n/a

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• Restrictions:n/a