A new space for the Arab image

31 March 2011

Interview

BEIRUT: The Arab Image Foundation began its search for photographic material in 1997. It was a modest start, the AIF’s main resource being personal photo albums. Fourteen years later it has amassed a collection of 400,000 images stored in a climate-controlled environment. Now it is moving them all.

The move is part of a shift in emphasis at the foundation, whose director Zeina Arida describes its mission as “to preserve photographic material [from the Arab world], make it accessible, and study it.” In the AIF’s conception, this “Arab world’ encompasses the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora.

In moving from Downtown Beirut to the nearby east Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayzeh, Arida hopes the foundation will “become more visible” and “develop a stronger root in Lebanon.”

In addition to a state-of-the-art archive, the new Gemmayzeh space will include a public research center, a library, and a multipurpose room for small events. Arida says the foundation will have moved into the new facility by the end of May.

One AIF project, “rePLACE BEIRUT,” suggests the new, public-oriented direction in which Arida hopes the foundation is headed. A collaboration with the research and workshop project 98weeks, “rePLACE BEIRUT” asks members of the public to record a journey from their everyday lives in Beirut, such as a walk to work.

The journey can be recorded with words, photographs, sounds, or whatever else the journeyer chooses and the records uploaded to a website. During an April workshop at 98weeks, participants can choose one or several of the submitted routes, and document them in their own way. Arida calls this project “a way of remapping the city differently with personal stories.”

This remapping project will alter the way the foundation works. Arida says “it’s a good way for the foundation to start doing personal projects.” Previously the AIF’s work revolved around projects initiated by a small group of artists and scholars – including such luminaries as Akraam Zaatari and Walid Raad.

Several of Zaatari’s ongoing projects document and elaborate the work of the photographer Hashem el Madani, who has been working in Sidon for over 50 years. Earlier this month, Raad won Sweden’s prestigious Hasselblad Foundation prize for his photographic work.

Artists like Zaatari and Raad are part of AIF’s root structure and they will continue to be involved in its work but, as Arida points out, where they were not well known in the late 1990s, “now they are everywhere and have less time for the foundation.”

The artist collective-run archive is a novel model. Arida says the foundation only had an “anti-model” at its inception in 1997.

At that time, she says, Malian portrait photographer “Seydou Keita was very well known and widely published … ” The French, she continued, “had ghettoized African photography as African photography, whereas we were conscious from the beginning that there is no such thing as Arab photography. There is photography in the Arab world, and the practice is alike everywhere.

“What we were interested in, specifically in the region, is to look at the relationship the photographer was able to build with his clients, the relationship of people to the image in general, how people would like to represent themselves, how photographers would like to represent the modernity of the Arab world, and how the development of the Arab world actually went along with the development of photography.”

These interests are wide. Indeed, the foundation’s collection, much of which is available online, includes a variety of photographic material. Clearly, one criterion the AIF seeks in its photographs is idiosyncrasy.

Its website includes Frederic Elias Dakouni’s undated “Self portrait, multiple exposures,” in which the Beirut photographer appears five times, in different outfits, looking at times distinguished, inquisitive, angry, fearful, and just bizarre.

Another image, “Sousou the dancer and the snake” was taken in Baghdad in 1930 by Murad Dagestani. While the title of the work is descriptive, one has to see the image to understand how a woman manages to hold a beautifully dignified expression while a fair-sized snake encircles her body.

AIF never set out to create a historical archive but in its pursuit of individual projects, it has done so. It has also made these images, which might have otherwise been lost, relevant again.

“I think that what the foundation was able to look at the archive and give them a reason to be looked at today,” Arida says.

“We [the AIF] never were nostalgic, but at the same time the foundation’s projects can appeal to different audiences. For example, an older generation can find their nostalgic relationship to the city [in the images], and the younger generation can look at the contemporary art practice.”

At the beginning of last year, AIF found itself in what Arida calls “a very precarious financial state.”

“We were about to close,” the foundation’s director says. This led the foundation to question its long-term sustainability, and seem to build new roots in Beirut. With the support of such funders as the Ford Foundation, the Prince Klaus Fund, and Banque Franco-Libanais, the AIF is on solid financial footing and seems ready to enter a new stage in its development.

This is fortunate because, as Arida puts it, the AIF has “a collection of 400,000 images. We are not light. We can’t close.”

The Arab Image Foundation’s website collaboration with 98weeks can be found at www.re-place.info. The follow-up workshop will take place April 1-10.