13 January 2006

BEIRUT: Mahmoud Hojeij and Ziad Antar first met in 1998, in the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, known to both by the more commonly used name of Saida. At the time, Hojeij was just starting out as a video artist, and he trekked down to Saida from Beirut with Akram Zaatari, a fellow filmmaker who, having been born there, considers Saida home.

Hojeij was filming an experimental video entitled "Beirut Palermo Beirut" - a 17-minute parody about young people who are looking for work - and decided to cast Antar as an actor.

"We fell in love," swoons Antar, his own joke nearly knocking him off his chair. "But then she came along," he adds, cocking his head toward Hojeij's fiancee, who is strolling down the long exhibition hall at the Gemmayzeh gallery Espace SD, checking out the photographs by Hojeij and Antar that are on view through Saturday, January 13.

If Antar, 27, is the funny one, then Hojeij, 31, is his comic foil, straight-talking around Antar's amusing asides and slipping into occasional spells of genuine, intense seriousness. For the past two weeks, they have been showing two parallel series of photographs at Espace SD, the culmination of an ambitious and notably unpretentious project that began in Saida four months ago called "Performing Images."

During the month of Ramadan, in October 2005, Hojeij and Antar hung around the streets and cafes of the old city in Saida and took pictures of the people who gathered there. The resulting images are both on view at Espace SD and compiled into a well-produced, minimally designed book, published under the supervision of Saida MP Bahiya Hariri and with support from Banque de la Mediterranee (or Bank Med, as it's now known), which is distributing the book as a gift to clients, a one-up on the idea of giving them a new calendar for New Year's.

Though these images were taken over the course of a month, according to Hojeij, "They are the accumulation of being in Saida for 10 years." They also represent a solution to a problem Hojeij and Antar have long been struggling with, how to mix the rectangular digital prints that Hojeij takes with the square C-prints Antar prefers. (Answer: Let each series stand on their own and don't force their integration.)

In addition to being rich in saturated colors and precisely, nearly architecturally composed, there is a disarming intimacy to the photographs of Hojeij and Antar. None of these images are cold or clinical. All of them have immediacy and warmth. They capture life first. Added layers of meaning and tweaked double-entendres seem to creep in only after that.

"It's not easy to take pictures of people in Lebanon in general," says Hojeij. "Since Ziad is from Saida, people know him. It's not like a photographer coming into an entirely new city."

One can sense this most strongly in a portrait by Antar called "Captain," of a man with eyes closed, cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth, hand spread gingerly over his chest. He looks as if he is in the midst of telling a story about heartache and horror, and according to Antar, he is. Because Antar knows him well and considers him a friend, he has heard this story many times before. He knew he could get him to tell it again and then wait for the right moment to take his picture.

"It was a bit difficult for me. I was working in my town, where I live everyday. I wanted to see the city objectively and at the same time I wanted to create my vision of the city. The question of time was really remarkable," he says. "I mean, I used to sit and smoke nargileh for hours. I'm not searching for action." But compared to shooting videos, which Antar, like Hojeij, continues to do regularly, shooting still images was tough. "You are walking and you see an arrangement and then you have to wait for the right moment. This is the difference of photography.

"When we say 'performing images,'" he adds, "our subjects were also performing images, what they are doing in their daily lives is also a performance."

The root of the title, however, took hold more as form than as content.

"The original idea," says Hojeij, "was to perform those images," to hang them in the same streets and cafes in the old city of Saida where they were taken, "and to turn public space into private space, performing an exhibition in the city and for the people."

From October 27 through November 6, Hojeij and Antar mounted their images in the main rooms of old cafes and coffee shops. They also turned their photographs into a wild postings campaign, affixing them to exterior walls of the old city in the same manner as advertising imagery or election season flyers.

Then something strange happened. Cafe owners started asking them if they could keep the pictures and use them to replace their exiting decor. They said they wanted to retire their faded diva portraits of Umm Kulthoum and Fairouz. In some cases, they said they wanted the pictures by Hojeij and Antar that were hanging in other, rival cafes.

At the same time, some of the posters starting disappearing from Saida's streets. Hojeij and Antar had made about 200 copies and on some stretches they pasted them up in an alternating pattern, one by Hojeij, one by Antar, and so on. People were pulling down Hojeij's pictures and putting them up in their houses.

"Mine are more about people," says Hojeij with a competitive nudge toward Antar. "His are more about landscapes and objects."

But more than matters of choice, the act of taking the posters home for posterity surprised and appealed to both of them.

"We wanted to break the notion that we only hang pictures of politicians and martyrs," explains Hojeij. "We wanted people to take them, and in that sense the exhibition is still going on in their homes and this is where it belongs."

On the cover of the book is a single line in Arabic that says, roughly, "If you don't go to the picture, then the picture will come to you."

For both Hojeij and Antar, this idea is key.

"The choice to decentralize and get out of Beirut," says Antar, was a motivating factor for the project. "I'm not into these small nationalisms," he adds, whether it's Beirut, Saida, or Lebanon in general.

"We wanted to take an exhibition to the people," adds Hojeij. "I don't like closed circuits," he adds, in reference to the idea of an avant-garde community working like an island isolated from any tangible public outside of like-minded artists, critics, and curators, "where there is a huge difference between the artists and the people. I'm out of that, on purpose. And if you want to take it further, I'm against it. I think we need to take art to the people."

When asked for his own interpretation of a specific image that seems to exemplify this attempt, entitled "Give and Take," Hojeij explains, "There is a camera and a fisherman, the sun and the sea. Each one of these elements has a role to give and take. This is life. It's all built in a balanced way."

"Performing Images" is on view at Espace SD through Saturday, January 13. For more information, call +961 1 563 114