ZAGHLOULEH, Damascus in black and white. PHOTOGRAPHS, 2013-2014.

From 7 April to 5 May 2016 - Galerie Claude Lemand

  • Zaghlouleh, DAMASCUS 38

    Damascus 38, 2014. Printed on pure cotton paper by the artist, 110 x 80 cm. Signed, dated and numbered by the artist. Edition of 7. © Nassouh Zaghlouleh. Courtesy of Claude Lemand Gallery, Paris.

  • Zaghlouleh, DAMASCUS 34

    Damascus 34, 2014. Printed on pure cotton paper by the artist, 110 x 110 cm. Signed, dated and numbered by the artist. Edition of 7. © Nassouh Zaghlouleh. Courtesy of Claude Lemand Gallery, Paris.

  • Zaghlouleh, DAMASCUS 33

    Damascus 33, 2014. Printed by the artist on pure cotton paper, 110 x 110 cm. Signed, dated and numbered by the artist. Edition of 7. © Nassouh Zaghlouleh. Courtesy Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris.

NASSOUH ZAGHLOULEH, Damascus in black and white. PHOTOGRAPHS, 2013-2014.

Nadia Muhanna, Capturing the Essence.

When Zaghlouleh started studying at the Higher National School of Decorative Arts in Paris in the early 1980s, he sought to break through the stereo­type of Parisian life, cap­turing beg­gars, addicts and dropouts on film. Every day for three years, he went to the same café and sat in the same corner taking pic­tures of the clien­tele. He saw the café as a stage that intro­duces for­eign viewers like him­self to the new cul­ture they have adopted.

Holding an album full of con­tact sheets, Zaghlouleh leafed through all the por­traits he took over the years. “I take photos till I cap­ture what’s inside. A por­trait doesn’t have to be beau­tiful. What mat­ters, is that it is gen­uine.” Like a diary, the album con­tains the black-and-white records of every day Zaghlouleh spent in Paris.

In 2003, Zaghlouleh started teaching black-and-white ana­logue pho­tog­raphy at the International Institute for Image and Sound in Paris. He says every pho­tog­ra­pher should work with ana­logue for a period. In his view, dig­ital pho­tog­raphy makes a pho­tog­ra­pher care­less because he can take as many photos as he wants and is bound to get one good one out of hun­dreds of images. With ana­logue film on the other hand, you have only a very lim­ited number of photos and you can’t see the result imme­di­ately. This forces the pho­tog­ra­pher to think about the image before pressing the button.

Though Zaghlouleh’s photos were always a cel­e­bra­tion of life, the summer of 2006 marked an impor­tant shift in his artistic career to still lifes and abstract photos. Worn out by the war in Lebanon and the heat of the Syrian summer, he started using his mobile phone as a camera. While walking to a friend’s house in the Old City, he took some 500 photos in just 20 min­utes, breaking the folk­loric stereo­type of Old City photos and focusing instead on the sharp con­trast between shade and light and the abstract shapes this cre­ates.

“When I was five years old, I used to go to Souq al-Hamidiyyeh with my aunts. I was fas­ci­nated by the patches of light fil­tering through the souq’s roof and the pat­tern it made on the pave­ment. But it wasn’t until I turned 50 that I had the courage to pho­tograph them.”

Although Zaghlouleh ded­i­cated his life to pho­tog­raphy, he for a long time refused to exhibit his work, believing that the right moment hadn’t come yet. Finally, in 2007, he organ­ised his first exhi­bi­tion From Paris to Damascus, in which he show­cased 30 photos of the two cities that have shaped his life. “It took me 25 years to col­lect the right photos of Paris. In Damascus it took just 20 min­utes to find what I was looking for.”
(Nadia Muhanna,Syria Today, 01.08.2008)

Copyright © Galerie Claude Lemand 2012.

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