I went to this exhibition at the MMCA on the end of August 2018. This exhibition was gathering works of the Lebanese artist Akram Zaatri, under the name of “Against Photography”. There were three rooms introducing 5 different works of him, all about or with the media of photography. Unfortunately, I could not spend a lot of time visiting this exhibition because the museum was closing soon. That is why I will talk about the few works I remember the best which was also those ones which touched me the most.

The exhibition was presented as a route, a process into the definition of photography. It invited the audience to think about this medium and to let it make its own idea about it, to expand our definition and our understanding of the photographs.

The first room of the exhibition presented several photographs of the shadow of Akram Zaatari. Throughout his work, he seemed to tell us “I am here” or “I was there”. The act of taking a picture is something that stops time for a while. To take a picture of a shadow, is to immortalize this thing that is supposed to be ephemeral. But this is the most common thought about photography, that the camera is a tool to immortalize. That is maybe probably why those pictures were put at te entrance of the exhibition, as an introduction to a more complex reflection. For the artist, photography is not only this phenomenon.

Photography is also an object, a material. This materiality is wearing by the film, the negative. The second room of the exhibition contains enlargements of negative films which have been destroy by the time. On this picture we can see the deterioration created by the time. In the first room, the artist showed us that photographs can immortalize their subject and now, he shows us that the final object of any picture, the negative, is not immortal at all. Films die such as human and memories. In this picture, we can guess the image but it also create something very abstract that could be a painting. And what it is crazy is that this creativity in this image is made by time only. The artist didn't touch the film. He just took a picture of it. I found that fascinated that we can create something that looks like a painting just by let the chemicals work by themselves. There were a lots of pictures like this in this room. And this is also an archival work about the passed. All those films didn’t belong to the artist. He found them and collected them, as people used to it with photo album.

This photograph is the result of two negative which have been stored together in a desk for a long time. The double exposure that we can see gather people who probably didn’t know each others. This is also a social and a political work. Some of the negative there had belong to an Armenian photographer named Bakerdjian, who had been persecuted and throw out from his house in 1948.

So photography is a living object, as the subject.