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On Reading the Arab Image Foundation San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Faculty Publications Art and Art History & Design Departments January 2007 This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation Dore Bowen San Jose State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/artdesign_pub Part of the Contemporary Art Commons, and the Photography Commons Recommended Citation Dore Bowen. "This Bridge Called Imagination: On Reading the Arab Image Foundation" Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts (2007): 18-28. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art and Art History & Design Departments at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. jerson) ackboard mace This brid called imagination On readiing the Arab Image Fou!ndatio!n and ¡ts collection So here we are in Bg^'pt "¡and of tbe Pharaohs, land of the Ptolemies, land of Cleopatra" Here we are and here we are living, our heads more hairless than our knees, smoking long pipes and drinking cojfee on divans.What can I sajf about it all? What can 1 write jou? ^Gustave Flaubert, 1850' Bv Oorc Bowcn The journey out In the civil and criminal archives of Paris, cess. Rather than giving historical events au- one can study written notes found in the tonomy, she does precisely the opposite by pockets of eighteenth-century illiterates who turning to examine her own working hab- drowned in the Seine, Why would farmers, its—and this includes investigating the sen- barge operators, and nomadic souls with no suality of the marked documents she holds knowledge of written language have carried in her hands—as well as the maneuvering scribbled notes on their person? French that goes on in the research library for the historian AHette Farge ponders this enigma, best table, thereby refuting the notion that suggesting that these notes may have been her historical subject is distinct from herself. part of a verbal process whereby thoughts Through this interweaving of past and pres- OI37miOOI48 were whispered to a member of the literate ent, document and researcher; the subject Studio Portrait. public who then transcribed them; these becomes more relevant to "us" while the tgypt/Cairo, !945 missives were then carried by travelers with lives and events that constitute history (for Alban • Professional photographer other symbols such as good iuck charms and example, the figures who speak as a com- Mikaclian, Georges Family Collection memorabilia. Consequently, rather than being munity from the chilly waters of the past) Copyright © Arab Image Foundation a form of self-expression, Farge suggests that remain open to speculation,^ this variety of written language ought to be Keywords; Leaning back on: Man; Woman; considered an expression of the social and Multiple exposure Imagination works with discontinuity by political currents of the time and, like the Genre; Photomontage; Studio photography leaping over obstacles and lacunae m order Photographic process; travelers and ferrymen and ferrywomen who to form a picture of the past in relation to Negatif/black S white/support used the river as their mode of transport seemingly unrelated events. When history is en verre/plaque au GBAG "these written words also made the route written this way, the reader is encouraged to Size: 24» 18 cm and the voyage,"'' Aspect Ratio; 0.75 make mental associations rather than follow Condition; the linear path constructed by historical nar- Like any respectable historian, Farge ac- ratives. In a sense, then, imagination acknowl- counts for what is known of this population edges the ruptures, crises, and traumas that and of the eighteenth century in general, yet constitute the ebb and flow of temporality her associative process also suggests that the At the same time, this gesture, this "leaping minor figures who haunt the margins of the over;" while acknowledging the complexity of historical mise-en-scène cannot be detected History bears its own sense of smug cer- within the surviving documents without the tainty. The historian recuperates a moment historian's imagination. In another text, Farge past by using her imagination to flesh out the employs a variation of this associative pro- possibilities that documents merely suggest. CAMERAWORK A Journal of PtioIiigriDhlc ilrls 19 »il uThe divisive sky, taken with the partitioning tree, separates the frame into quadrants, echoing the tour figures. All ot these formal elements make up the picture. Yet, ultimately, it is the absence of youth's unease that I sense, the absence of summer and, since the photograph is dated before my birth, the world before my presence. 20 Volume 34, m Spring/Summer 2W1 And this is precisely the danger; this bridge imagination, "Were Peter to appear in per- called imagination leads the reader here and son the image would disappear"' there and back again, providing her with the sense of being an adventurer who crosses a As the word imagination suggests, this pro- divide while the ensuing story comes to take cess revolves around images—be they con- the form of a travelogue. Those figures imag- crete or phantasmatic. Since, in imagination, ined by the historian come to have a face, a it is decidedly difficult to distinguish a picture body and a context, and thus the "other" ap- from its corresponding mental image, Sartre pears with a purpose that is provided by the uses the term image-consc/ousness to clarify historian's consciousness and informed by the interdependence of these components. It his or her cultural attitudes,'' Given this bias, is helpful to think of image-consciousness as imagination seems an inappropriate tool for two sides of the same coin; the term image me, an American scholar; to use when work- falls on the side of the picture and conscious- ing with the Arab Image Foundation—an ness on the side of the viewer Consequently archive that responds to the domination image-consciousness, or imagination, refers of Western imagination by collecting pho- to a picture when it becomes enmeshed in tographs of the Arab world from the Arab a viewer's consciousness. Which sorts of pic- world,^ In addition, this particular moment— tures pnDmpt this process of entanglement? when conflicts threaten to engulf the region While different sorts of pictures prompt dif- and the United Nations is busily drawing up ferent kinds of imagination, analogic pictures, an accord for a buffer zone between Leba- particutarly photographs, encourage the non and Israel—seems an inauspicious one viewer to form a mental image of an absent to take up the Western imagination of the person. For example, when I look at photo- Middle East. And yet imagination is precisely graphs from the Arab Image Foundation, my what is at stake, what is harnessed, what is looking and musing on the figures animates taken for granted, when I, or another; read them, I sense them as sentient beings; I imag- across time and geography to consider the ine the people and the situation to which collection at the Arab Image Foundation. the image refers. What is imagination? In jean-Paul Sartre's Photographic and digital 1940 L'imaginaire (published in English as The Psychology of ¡magir]ation) he explains that imagination imagination is a form of consciousness that Looking at a Foundation photograph of two produces a mental image. For Sartre, this women and a man in the countryside, I ob- mental image is not "in" consciousness, nor is serve from the title that they were on an It an illusion ortrick played upon the percep- outing around the coastal town of Chekka, tual faculties. Rather imagination is distinct Lebanon, in the summer of I960, Since the from perception, with its own manner of re- formal clothes and comportment suggest an lating to objects and people.^ For example, arranged date among couples, I assume the while the act of perception involves grasp- photographer to be the second gentleman ing a three-dimensional object in a particular in this quartet. When I slip into the site of time and space—and with all the variety of this absent photographer I notice that the shadow and distortion this implies—Sartre woman nearest the viewing plane is looking notes that the act of imagination produces either away or toward me—I am not sure. an image from something that is not present Is she shy? Flirtatious? While the similarly to perception. Whereas in perception an ob- dressed woman behind her peeks at me ject is available for investigation (the viewer with an austere and somewhat icy gaze, I am Û088khOOO87 might for instance, walk around the object cleariy in cahoots with the young man on the Üuting around Chekka and touch its contours), when the object edge of the left frame; we have a plan and Lebanon/Chokka, I960 is absent imagination steps in to produce hence he acknowledges my look. My critical Aiumymous photographer a mental image. While the object that the eye notices a tree trunk neariy dead center Khazen, Fayza Salimel Collection mental image refers to may be dubious (like in the frame divides the man from the wom- Copyright ©Arab Image Foundation a unicorn), nonpresent (like a lost watch), en, producing a clumsy composition that is or departed (like a deceased friend), it still crowned by the man's cropped etbow on Keywords: Glance;Young man;Young woman; Plain exists in imagination. In this sense it is not the left. Stilt, the black-and-white tones are Genre: Snapshot illusory; imagination is a manner, though di- Photographic process; interesting: the tanned, white-clothed figures Positif/black & white/support papier minished, of relating to objects and people stand out from the dark gray tones of the DOP-Papier a développement à la gelatine in the world, Sartre goes so far as to state background.
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