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12/3/2008

Lucien Samaha

Sara Tecchia Roma New York, New York

Lucien Samaha, born in Beirut, Lebanon, has spent most of his life in the United States, specifically New York City. Although he maintains some family and personal ties in Lebanon, his own work has seldom addressed these roots. However, in "uneasy about Beirut," Samaha explores the complicated relationship with his heritage.

Although Samaha continues to use film on occasion, this project was the last time he used the conventional silver halide medium exclusively and rather unconventionally. In this particular experiment, he photographed the urban landscape with an intentional snapshot aesthetic to avoid formal or precious images of a city that often commands a certain expected gravity. He compounded the effects of his experiment by breaking standard rules of film exposure and processing. The resulting "poor quality negatives" were misinterpreted by a scanner, which in turn yielded images that delighted the artist with their ambiguous framing and their indexing of a photographer's movements and navigation.

Boundaries are blurred and new relationships evolve in grainy moiré. There is a darkness, a sense of noir, even menace, despite the almost snapshot quality of the compositions. With this stark imagery, he reveals a complex and difficult relationship with the city of his birth through cityscapes heavily defined by political strife and war, and the ensuing reconstruction. Samaha refers to this work as "derivative" photography. Normally a word to avoid in the artworld, Samaha uses this terminology to point out that the final images are "derived" from negatives that would have been expected to yield something formally different by a more rigid establishment.

A former nominee for the Nam Jun Paik Award, Samaha has shown at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany; the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, and the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR. With his highly organized, searchable and growing catalog of almost 350,000 photographs--all his own--the artist considers himself not only a photographer but also an obsessive visual and social archivist. He is also a member of the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation.

Reception March 13: 6-8pm

Sara Tecchia Roma New York
529 West 20th Street - New York
Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm or by appointment.
Free admission

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