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INTERVENTION BY ABBAS BEYDOUN
The young people in the portraits of Gilbert Hage are all in the same position. Yet one can’t find two of them who have the same look. Needless to say that there are not two among them who share the same ideas. This very same position, deliberately sought by Gilbert, further highlights their difference, as their association depends wholly on the camera and on the photographer's will. At the end, there will remain nothing of this staged resemblance. |
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Abbas Beydoun |
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And yet, some would like to identify with their image, identifying themselves, their community, their nation or their people, with one single image. This desire, owing nothing to reality, sometimes succeeds in eclipsing it. Can an abstract idea or an artificial image be more powerful than reality? This indeed often happens when reality is harmful, shameful or even oppressive. Is that to say that the need for a different image is a mere illusion? Could we consider as a delusion what could potentially be the driving force leading to wars and international crisis? Aren’t our ideals and our illusions also part of our reality? What would happen if ideas or ideological images swallowed all our world? What happens when the slightest differences become barriers between communities? It has been said that the Lebanese war was a war of identities, and that the Arab world, after the 11th of September, is becoming a desert of identities. Can this be discussed at all or are we facing a subject that bears no question and cannot be debated?
Abbas Beydoun
Read the full text of Abbas Beydoun's intervention in Arabic or English |
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| Abbas Beydoun was born in 1945 in a village near Sour (Tyros). He studied Arabic Literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut then taught Arabic for some years before moving to Paris to study Middle Eastern Sciences at the Sorbonne. He wrote on political issues before he moved to poetry. Beydoun is well-known in the Arab world as a poet, journalist, essayist and literature critic. Since 1997 he works as Cultural Editor of As-Safir newspaper in Beirut. |
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As a teacher, I daily face a youth seeking motivations.
I launched this project away from the myth of the photographic portrait that unveils the soul and reveals the profound interior of Man. My objective is not based on taste and aesthetic but on the whole representation tactics. I am thoroughly convinced that human face or the portrait is neither determined nor real; however, it is receptive, flexible, and subjected to changes. It oscillates between realities and illusions. Human expressions are only defined culturally and structured socially.
My project is a questioning of the medium. It depends neither on editing nor on descriptive narration between the present and absent, between steadiness and energy, between comfort and unease. Thus I intend to seize the frontier that exists only anthropologically.
Gilbert Hage
Translated by Mirna Mouzawack |
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Gilbert Hage was born in 1966 in Beirut.
He started practicing photography in Paris as a hobby, obtained his photography diploma at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik and started teaching there in 1990. Four years later, he became a professor at the Lebanese Academy of fine Arts at Balamand University.
His first exhibition was held in 1989 at the French Cultural Center. Today his work is known all over Lebanon. Hage exhibited also in Syria, France, Germany and Brazil.
In 2003, G.H. started his project “Ici et Maintenant”, still ongoing. |
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