Two frames, a blink of a past present and future. Archaic, or is it. I begin to remember. I smell uncle Deek’s coffee, orange blossom tea…the Corniche. I don’t. They did. Mahmoud, Elsie, Abu-Ali. I am just a post-memory cell, living off empty narratives.

 

A person, from a past…at the center of each frame. Two sides. In them I find reason. It all begins to make sense…I recollect. They recollect. They begin to remember. Life slowed down to a blink, stories tucked away in memory cells waiting to implode. Dreams. Stopped. Handwriting. Changing.  Fading. In that dream I was looking through you, I was looking at me in a photo not yet taken. I count memories. I look at me looking at him looking at himself…

 

In this series I try to replace the inheritance of historical discourse with images on the look of the past in a feel of the present. I look to capture this in a double exposure, often of the image itself, and of the flip side showing diaries, faded. I ask people to remind me who they are, and through it who I am. I make a memory of today.

 

In this I found reason is a personal project.  It is a photographic narrative of the place of personal imagery in relation to societal immortality. The series looks to explore personal archival practice, placement, and meaning of image within personal spaces. It was compiled through multiple visits of various families, exploring their collection of photographs as miniatures of their world: Each, holding portraits of existence, storing them in some kind of portable Pandora’s box that verifies a more than singular past. Often mis-kept and mistreated, these photos become fragile vulnerable objects of survival. Photos bandaged, scarred, injured in a common history called exodus. Each an instance of waiting for a past, present and future in one. An album of a people; waiting, departing, in a form of unknown. A coma of a people; disposed, raped of some kind of collective memory that once upon a time said ‘you never existed’. Today it says ‘you exist, but, in the ‘now’’.

 

The work talks back to Hirsh’s philosophy of post-memory that speaks of a ‘new generation’ trauma living off the memories of the generation that encountered them in the first place. Image is prime in extending the lifespan of this phenomenon. The potency of image in disposition is evident in the Israeli army’s attack on the Palestine Archive upon entering Beirut in 1982. It was also evident in their assassination of the PLOs prime photographer and 16mm camera-man Hani Jawharieh in 1969, among other assassinations of writers, photographers, artists, and cartoonist.