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13/10/2004

Two exhibitions

The Photographers' Gallery, London

Mediterrian: Hashem el Madani
8 Great Newport Street

Hashem El Madani (born 1928, Lebanon) is a studio photographer who, for the last 50 years, has been working in Saida, Lebanon. Madani's portraits of individuals and groups were commissioned by the sitters, who sometimes would request additional refining through retouching or hand-colouring. He set up his first studio in his parents' living room in 1948, and as his business grew he opened a modern space on the first floor of the prestigious Chehrazade building in Saida in 1953, which he still uses today. As well as operating from his own studio, Madani set up a mobile studio wherever clients could be found, for example in schools, at election posts where photographic identity cards were required, and in people's homes.

Madani's studio created a site where individuals could act out identities using the conventions of portrait photography, with the poses inspired by the desires of the sitters, ranging from Vogue models to kung fu moves, Hollywood romances to pamphlets distributed by Kodak and Agfa. Often people came to the studio wearing their most elegant clothes and accessories to be photographed with. As Madani realised that people used these props to create identities for themselves he began collecting objects and outfits for his clients to experiment with, developing the idea of a studio as a space for play . These items included a radio, a wedding dress, a child's doll, fashionable sunglasses, Bedouin dress, plastic flowers, guns, cowboy hats, and even a bicycle - all of which reoccur in the photographs as individuals play out their ideal selves in front of the camera.

Motivated to expand his business, Madani set out to collect the portraits of all of Saida's families; he claims that he has photographed about 90% of the city's population. Today he is able to identify the families and individuals who came to his studio to be photographed, often recalling their poses and always remembering those who did not return to pick up their portraits. In creating such an extensive record of the townspeople in this multi-confessional Mediterranean location, Madani's archive of over 500,000 images subtly alludes to the changing political climate through his subjects' behaviour.

The studio photographer faces constant shifts in their profession, as clients' tastes will inevitably be altered by subtle changes in society and fashion. This exhibition reflects on the practice of studio photography, considering it as both descriptive and inscriptive of social identities. It both reflects how people look, but also how they desire to be seen. The success of Madani's business can be attributed to the fact that he created a representation of his clients that they wanted. Madani would 'fix' the cross-eyed, reduce a double chin, add accessories or hand-tint the pictures. Madani responded to the desires of his sitters and gave those he portrayed the freedom to act out idealized versions of their identities and to have these communicated in their portraits.

Akram Zataari and Lisa Le Feuvre
Exhibition Curators

Image: Hashem El Madani
Anonymous © Hashem El Madani / Arab Image Foundation

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Pierre Bourdieu: In Algeria

"The study of photographic practice, and the meaning of the photographic image, is a privileged opportunity to employ an original method designed to apprehend, within a total comprehension, the objective regularities of behaviour and the subjective experience of that behaviour"

Pierre Bourdieu 1

The author of more than 25 influential books, including Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, The Weight of the World and The Rules of Art , Pierre Bourdieu (1930 - 2002) was a key thinker of the twentieth century whose work has influenced and reverberated through contemporary artistic practice.

Bourdieu trained as a philosopher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and in 1956 was conscripted for military service in Algeria. Two years later he became a lecturer at the University of Algiers. This was a time of political upheaval for Algeria as it resisted French imperialism, seeking to assert its own identity beyond that of a colonized country. The Algerian War of Independence (1954 - 62) was a period of fighting and guerrilla strikes between the French army and colonists and pro-independence Algerians, with the main force being the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). On arriving in Algeria, Bourdieu became overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility to record the situation, and to give testimony of those who had no voice. Bourdieu was driven to "make [himself]... useful and decided to undertake a study on Algerian society, in order to make it a bit clearer to people back home what was happening in this country" 2.

Towards the end of his life, Bourdieu worked with sociologist Franz Schultheis and the group of artists, curators and editors of Camera Austria to archive and present a complete project on this fieldwork in Algeria, creating a unique insight into a culture on the brink of independence, struggling to release itself from colonial structures and revealing an instant where modernity and tradition collided. His methodology set out to examine the ways that people existed, and then to work out why they lived the way that they did. Initially Bourdieu was reluctant to see these photographs as having any aesthetic interest: they were produced as tools for his research, as an aide mémoire , while providing Bourdieu with a "way of looking, a way to sharpen [his]... awareness, to look more closely" 3. The photographs are impressive documents of social history showing a world of uneven development where people have still not overcome their homelessness and uprooting, resulting in an estrangement from tradition and modern times alike. Even after four decades, these photographs have lost none of their immediacy and relevance

Photography can mirror existing social hierarchies that we inhabit in our everyday life, and Pierre Bourdieu was painfully aware of his own subjective cultural position in creating this document of the Algerian people. He cautiously avoided using the objectification of the subjects as 'other', the very impression that the symbolic violence of colonialism sought to communicate. In retrospect these images not only recall a specific moment in history, but also explore the machinations of colonial power and provide an insight into the development of Bourdieu's own sociological doctrine as it developed over the next 40 years.

Lisa Le Feuvre
Exhibition Curator

The Photographers' Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street
London WC2H 7HY

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