Through a Lens Darkly

Camille Zakhaia in conversation with Hrair Sarkissian.

Hrair Sarkissian, Background (2013). Photographic project commissioned by the Abraaj Group Art Prize. Courtesy of the artist and Kalfayan Galleries, Athens/Thessaloniki.

With text by Camille Zakharia, photographer.

While the world is embracing modern technology and digital photography, you use the large format camera. This, undeniably, gives unparalleled results. Is this why you keep using the large format?

I think the main reason is still feeling safer with the analogue system than the digital one. The large viewfinder offers a bigger window, and I feel more connected and absorbed by the image that appears on the glass I don’t have a specific reason for not using digital, besides it being expensive. I will keep using films as long as they exist.

Any instances when you have wishes you had a 35mm camera to capture a decisive moment?

No, I have never wished this. I am a person who photographs twenty images a year. I do research beforehand on my main subject, look for it and then photograph it. I don’t look for decisive moments, I am more focused on longer time lapses, rather than seconds.

Your work reminds me of the masters from the Dusseldorf School of Photography. Do you see their influence on your work?

When I started using the camera there was no internet, no books or any other references of influential photographic schools. I had only my father, who constructed my perception and showed me how to look at things through the viewfinder. I am very symmetrical in my lines, but that doesn’t mean Dusseldorf School influences me, this is more a personal attitude.

I come across your work four years ago when I saw the Execution Squares series. The image made a deep impression on me, particularly when I read about their historical significance. Can you elaborate on this particular project and shed more light on its creation and its importance to your art career?

I witnessed three executed bodies in the eighties, these corpses were covered with white paper sheets and had open eyes with a gaze I haven’t been able to erase from my memory since then. So I used the photographic medium to wipe out these phantoms, forcing myself to be convinced of their non-existence But I failed, and kept imagining them constantly. This work has proved to me that the medium is not credible anymore, as it used to be, since it’s not revealing the reality to my own eyes.

Another project using the urban landscape to reflect your own identity and searching for what it seems your origins are, is the In Between. The images are hauntingly silent and cold, devoid of people, almost apocalyptic, yet wonderful to look at with rich details and perfect composition. Any inside thoughts to share on this?

This work represents the disappointment of the image of Homeland, an image that has been constructed in us since our childhood. An imaginary land supported by historical narratives, and inherited images from one generation to another. When I first visited as an adult, it was

a complete shock for me seeing the real ‘Homeland’, which didn’t correspond to the one I imagined. So in this series, I used the snow as a covering factor, which hides the disappointment from the viewer or visitor, and makes it look white and clear.

Many of your projects have a strong typological element to them, this is more evident in your most recent series, Preserving Place: Portraiture Studios in the Middle East published in a beautiful book. Are you looking in a nostalgic way at the disappearing past, and what were the challenges you have faced to create the series?

The project called Background was photographed in six different cities in the Middle East. I documented more than 300 images of studio backdrops, and my main interest was focusing on the disappearance of this kind of photography, which was widely spread in the Middle East, since the medium reached the region. And it was also a cultural and social gesture, going to the studio and being photographed in front of different scenes, dreamy and inaccessible landscapes. The challenge I faced is that the idea of backdrops has almost disappeared in studios. Digital ones can be added in at a later stage behind every photo, and these manipulated backgrounds are overly exaggerated and exceed our imagination and the reality we are living in now.

Growing up in a family where photography is no stranger, how did this impact your practice as a contemporary artist?

The impact on me was enormous. I consider my father’s photo lab as my academy, where I studied everything about photography and life as well. But coming to the contemporary aspect of it, I refer to this experience in every aspect of my work from travelling, to attending exhibitions, everything.

Hrair Sarkissian (b. 1973, Damascus, Syria) uses photography to engage the viewer in readings of what is visible and what is not, re-evaluating larger historical, religious or socio-political narratives. Sarkissian has exhibited internationally in both group and solo shows including the Tate Modern (London); New Museum (New York); Darat Al Funun (Amman); Mori Art Museum (Tokyo); SALT Beyoglu (Istanbul); Thessaloniki Biennial; Sharjah Biennial; Istanbul Biennial; Asia Pacific Triennial (Brisbane) among many others in 2013 the artist won the Abraaj Group Art Prize.  

Background marks the eclipse of a tradition of studio portraiture integral to the twentieth century history and development of photography in the Middle East by documenting one of its central artefacts; the studio backdrop. Hrair Sarkissian photographed hundreds of examples he found in studios across six Middle Eastern cities- Alexandria, Amman, Beirut, Byblos, Cairo and Istanbul-finally selecting one from and for each one large -scale, backlit and hung unframed, like the backdrops themselves, these photographs both monumentalize and eulogize their subject. Without the distraction of a sitter in the foreground, our focus shifts to the backdrop itself, to the tools and spaces historically used for studio portraiture. But the spaces are empty and the backdrops appear disused, like ruins or relics of a tradition that has finally run its course, the absent sitter introducing a melancholy that radiates from the emptiness’- Murtaza Vali