In My Own Words.

July 2019

Federico Clavarino’s Hereafter is a poignant and immersive journey into the past told through the memories and collected archive of his maternal English grandparents, John and Mary. Structured over five chapters, the series explores the final years of the British empire. His grandfather John Phillips served as UK Ambassador in several former British colonies including Oman, Sudan and Jordan. Along with his wife, Mary, their archive of images, letters and documents play a central role in how this narrative slowly unfolds.  

I found this to be a book where the text carries more weight than the photographs, which are constructed based on Clavarino’s family archive and images he made himself while revisiting his grandparent’s home. He also managed to visit some of the locations his grandparents lived and captured a variety of open-ended images that reference the words of his grandparents and family members. But the photos that stay with me are the archive photographs — they carry the mystic of time and place, which adds to the overall feeling around the book. 

Memory is at the heart of this work — both metaphorically and literally. As a book, it is intentionally fragmented and surreal. At times, I felt as though I was floating through time and space, never really holding onto anything — like a fleeting thought. A sense of uncertainty looms across the book. I found myself pulling in to look at the details of photographs and trying to unwind bits of handwriting to try to fill in some of what I perceived to be gaps. But this is what Clavarino wants to accomplish — telling you one part of the story through the remembered or selective memory of his narrators. What remains unsaid is an intriguing question that carries through the book. 

Clavarino’s images are not intended to answer any questions. I see them as referencing the journey of his grandparents. Perhaps in part he had to go on this journey himself to feel a sense of connection to them, especially to his grandfather John, given his job at the time. His photographs marry well with the family archive because the two are open ended. You can add your own meaning to the photograph but with the context of words, that frame becomes smaller.

Given Egypt, where I grew up, is a former British colony, albeit not one where Clavarino’s grandfather worked, I was especially interested in the behind the scenes of the British operation in its colonies. Little handwritten notes and photographs of private functions were a curious look into life at the time.

I was curious by some of the descriptions and expressions used in the written correspondences from the time. It showed the political motives behind British rule in these colonies. While this may be obvious given the game of politics is always this way, seeing it in writing made this even more real. It also cast an air of doubt on the person of his grandfather. I say this with a degree of hesitation because it’s not entirely fair. But the book leaves room for doubt and uncertainty. What is being said and how much is being revealed instantly makes me wonder what is being concealed. It is a reflection of politics itself as usually what is being said is a fraction of the full story. 

Adding to the voices of his grandparents, the book features excerpts of interviews with other members of Clavarino’s family — his aunt Elizabeth, Uncles William and Robin and his mother, Susan. We meet them at the end of the book. This is where it struck me that “Hereafter” can begin where it ends — read in reverse it gives you a different emotional experience. 

The book closes with Uncle Robin’s contemplations on the legacy of one’s existence and what it means to cease to exist “…You cannot know that the soul of that individual passed through the path that you interacted with, because they have an infinite number of paths, and the sum of their histories might actually be taking a different path, and in taking that different path, you will have seen them die, you will have seen me die, but actually in ourselves we didn’t die.” 

This quote was the beginning of an extended statement by Uncle Robin that leads to the ending. It is poignant in its philosophical and poetic interpretation of death. It struck me on a personal level because death of the ones I love is a dark cloud I want to walk away from, but through these words I felt that there is value in reconfiguring my own understanding of what it means for those who experience it and those who remain behind to deal with it. I imagine this is where Clavarino found himself too. When he first came upon the material for this book, he describes the pictures in his grandparents’ home. He must have had a moment where he wondered what it all meant. Death is a wonder of the unpleasant kind and Uncle Robin’s words ease the anxiety and pain around it.

Read on Source Photographic Review website.

April, 2017

Carolle Benitah’s Photos-Souvenirs is a lyrical reminisce on memory, childhood and family. It is a sentimental book that makes me ache. The experiences, while exclusively Benitah’s, are ones that sound a painful chord on the unfinished sentences, unexpressed affections and tender sensitivities that bind families together as much as they sometimes separate them. The Moroccan-born artist who currently lives in Marseille, France, explores her history through family archive photographs where she sews and embroiders over the images with red, black and gold threads and in some cases, superimposes the images with wire and glass beads: “With each stitch I make a hole with a needle. Each hole is a putting to death of my demons. It’s like an exorcism. I make holes in paper until I am not hurting anymore,” Benitah writes. The work moved me deeply for its honesty and complexity. This is clearly a meditative act for Benitah on the threads that tie the beginnings and endings of family relationships and the intricacies in between. 

The use of color in Photos-Souvenirs is with purpose. Red plays a leading role. This vibrant yet deviant of all colors showcases its warring spectrums between love and hate, pain and joy, life and death. I carefully look at the images, some closer than others, as some images float on the white pages as though they are drifting memories. My eyes hunt across the page to find the beginning and ending of borders, to recollect the memory in order to grasp the story. The works are ambiguous. They are riddled with questions whose answers only the author can disclose.

I feel this is Benitah’s invitation to bring my own interpretation into her intimate experience of these works. As I flip through the pages, reds depart into blacks which shift into yellows, subtly mimicking the threads in Benitah’s embroidery and gracefully taking me from black and white photographs to more recent memories of color. The only hint of words in Photos-Souvenirs is in Benitah’s needled letters across the bottom of images, but mostly, words come at the end in the form of six lines of text lingering on a black page like a dogged memory refusing to fade away. 

The unfortunate downfall of Photos-Souvenirs is the choice of paper, which I find neither compliments the tactile sensibility of the content nor does it reflect the delicate nature of its experience. The pages are difficult to flip through because of the card-stock quality of the paper, making my journey through the work one of disruption rather than harmony. I hope this is an intended design feature as a metaphor of Benitah’s emotional involvement creating this work rather than a consequence of production values being sacrificed in the face of reasonable printing costs.

Read on Source Photographic Review website.

March 21, 2017

For a book that derives its title from a lapse in the state of awareness into oblivion, Anaesthesia by Valentina Abenavoli, is everything but that. I am uncomfortable. I shift in my seat, take deep breaths and swallow my anxiety deep into my belly as I recede into its pages. 

Muted whites contrast stark blacks that rip me into a visual journey through the murky abyss of time. I see the cruelty man inflicts on his fellow man. I read the words of 'God': the reflections of man - philosophers, poets, psychiatrists, artists, and reporters. From Sigmund Freud and T.S. Eliot to Arthur Miller and Carl Jung. I read the accounts of victims and perpetrators. I am staring death in the eye. Throughout the book, the sense that the images are a repetition of ones I have stamped in my memory from times past is inescapable. Is history mocking us or are we making a mockery out of it? 

Edited by the book’s author, Valentina Abenavoli (one half of the cutting-edge photobook publishing house Akina), the work is a skillfully curated selection of YouTube video screenshots showing the barbarity of war, with specific focus on Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Narrated in the words of its subjects and punctuated by statements from other authors, Anaesthesia is a rare occasion where the words can function independently of the imagery. The text conjures its own layer of complicated and thought provoking narrative.

The fact what sits between my hands is rumination on real events makes me feel nauseous. I am haunted by the weight of this responsibility. There are several moments throughout the book where I shrug my shoulders in despair: "This is not a world I wish to be a part of" I hear myself mutter.

The bitter truth of Anaesthesia is that it's real. There is no turning away because the images stay with you like a tenacious stain. This book makes me angry at the state of humanity and this is an emotion I have never experienced with a photobook.

I heard people say Abenavoli is taking a neutral position in this work. I strongly disagree. This is an opinionated body of work. To make this work to begin with is in itself an act of revolt against neutrality. Sitting on the fence and dangling ones feet seems too disdainful against what the pages reveal. Is silence in itself not incriminating? The book is a violent shriek against our anaesthetised feelings because the horrors it unfolds demand everything but objectivity. 

As one has become accustomed with all of Akina’s sleek productions, this book is not short of the precision and attention to detail that elevates a photobook from ordinary to exceptional. I smell it's paper before I open its pages. I feel its roughness before I read its words. This is a tactile book where the marriage of content and material is in utter harmony. 

I previously wrote I never thought I would describe a book as brave, but I find it appropriate to describe Anaesthesia as such. I stand by my words. This is a book that should be appreciated for its content now, but perhaps even more in the next 10 or 20 years where I dream of a world where such hatred ceases to exist. Only then can one look at Anaesthesia with ease. For now, word by word and image by image, the weight of its pages is heavier with each turn.

Read on PHmuseum website.

October 25, 2016

This is not a book. It’s a lyrical, impactful and on occasion, purposely disjointed meditation into a nation’s identity and a testament of its collective history. 

I feel an immediate sense of intimacy approaching ‘Shenasnameh’ – the name given to the official Iranian identity card issued at birth. For days that turned into weeks and then months, I resisted breaking its red-wax seal bearing an imprint of the Emblem of Iran. Sitting in the palm of my hand, Shenasnameh feels precious and fragile. I want to protect it. 

The publication is a series of predominately black-and-white mug shots of Iranian women posing for their government-issued ID. Sparse impressionistic texts written by Amak Mahmoodian sit as punctuation marks between appropriated images, fingerprints and handwritings, revealing little but not enough for you to stop probing. At intervals when you think you know what follows, the design surprises you – a torn photo, the cutout rim of a woman’s face, a confrontational double spread of a crossed out photograph – condemned by authorities for falling into the realm of the dreaded ممنوع (mamn'ou meaning not allowed). 

Shenasnameh gets me because I relate to it. The palpable weight of bureaucracy, the illogical rules of representation citizens must comply to and the sheer madness of forcing an entire generation of women to conform, settle and fit into a regime-crafted mold. I wonder how the women would have chosen to portray themselves pre-1979 – when the former leader of what we now know as the Islamic Republic of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, commanded the revolution that overthrew Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Were the women’s gazes as numb as they are here? Did they look at their image capturer with the same accusatory eyes? Did they feel equally vulnerable? 

It is behind this veil of compulsory sense of union that fingerprints stand as the distinctive markings of the women they portray. “The scar I had on my finger became part of my identity, highlighted and noted on the page next to my photograph,” Mahmoodian writes. 

Here the series unites in an act of defiance. A scream .. a chant .. a collective howl in the face of indoctrination and manufactured conformity. There are no victims here, only feisty fighters. 

I turn the pages on Shenasnameh many times over. On occasion I choose to go against its intention – flipping right to left, the way one would do a Farsi or Arabic book. Each time I discover subtleties I had not encountered before. 

I advocate all artistic endeavors are deeply personal. They must be. For me Shenasnameh is a testament of it. It is a where humility of an idea, sensitivity in design and excellence in form harmoniously marry into something beautifully exclusive – the precise quality a Shenasnameh is intended to conceal.

Read on PHmuseum website.

I remember a hot day, even though it was an unusually cold winter by Egyptian standards. It was the kind of heat that rouses your sweat glands when your nerves are beyond control; the sizzle you feel when you experience love; the tormenting yet exciting vigor you hold in your belly when you are contemplating the mysterious road ahead. 

There was a fire raging that day, so lively the entire River Nile couldn’t tame it—the “Immortal River” in the flirtatious musical masterpiece, composed by Egypt’s legendary Mohamed Abdel Wahab. 

Tahrir Square was the throbbing heart of this fire. Tahrir is a meaning you can only, truly appreciate when you say it with the “h” rubbing against the low depth of your throat and your tongue rolling like tight curls under its “r.” It is Liberation Square. The roundabout opening its veins to downtown Cairo’s bustling shopping and business district. It is a symbol of freedom in a country whose rulers traditionally governed like Pharaohs. Tahrir is the historic landmark that united Egyptians in 1977’s Bread Riots, that hosted protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and that has been the epicenter of anti-government demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Muslim Brotherhood in the past five years. 

Tahrir is not a place of coincidence. Everything that happens there is intentional. 

On Feb. 11, 2011, thousands of people were in the square. This was the 18th consecutive day in a popular sit-in that brought the country to a standstill. “Leave … Leave … Leave!” crowds stubbornly chanted in unison against Mubarak’s devastating 30-year tyranny. Mubarak, whose name in Arabic means “fortunate,” was a military man who started out humble but over the years developed the greed, arrogance and corrupt demeanor all dictators share. Rumors said he was grooming his youngest son, Gamal; something Syria’s Hafez al-Assad had done with his son, Bashar. Under Mubarak’s rule, the country was placed under a state of emergency for nearly 30 years, giving police authorities extensive powers and overriding constitutional rights. Egyptians fell subject to daily abuses at the hands of the people they paid to protect them. “Bread .. Freedom .. Social Justice.” Tahrir was the arena where Egyptians dealt their mounting grievances a collective final blow in the face of the regime.

The weight of the crowd on this day was enormous. The pillars of the autocracy had slowly disintegrated over the past days. Protests broke out across the country, workers went on strike outside their factories, newly-hired ministers frantically placed by the regime to hush people resigned days after their appointments. International leaders told Mubarak to listen to the will of the people. Many Egyptians living abroad flew in to join their compatriots. It was a matter of days, hours, maybe even minutes and Tahrir was the place to be when it happened. 

The sense of sitting on the edge of history was profound – like being perched on a cloud, dangling your feet in the air. My memories are as surreal as the day. The air smelled like firewood. The sky was painted in blue and purple. People were performing Maghrib (sunset) prayers. A cold breeze brushed across my face, its remnants shifted the makeshift tents in the camp. I stood near the north-east end of Tahrir, not far from the Omar Makram Mosque, named in honor of the Egyptian resistance leader who rose to prominence during the 1798 French invasion of Egypt. As people turned their heads to mark the end of prayer, my eye caught a group of men huddled over a small radio through a slit in their tent. I saw them jump with their fists in the air. The whole square followed in harmony. Mubarak had resigned. 

I saw nothing but red after that moment – fireworks lit the sky, flames lit people’s eyes. There was so much passion. I was on the same euphoric drug everyone in the square was breathing – an outer body experience. An incredible joy words fail to describe. The inability to control my movement in a collective dance of people high on a dream realized. I remember thinking my pictures could not capture the magnitude of this event. I had never experienced anything of this enormity. It was a whirlwind of fleeting images and sounds. There was no way to savor the moment to the fullest. Friends from all over the world, some of whom I hadn’t heard from for years, sent congratulatory messages: “Egyptians have done it! What does it feel like to be there?” 

I couldn’t really answer them. Tahrir is a story you had to live in order to tell.

September 29, 2015

This book has me sitting on the edge. The cover is an image of absolute horror or unexplainable beauty — I have no idea. This perplexing contradiction is at the heart of my experience of Grand Circle Diego.

I discovered the book at an art fair earlier this year. I initially hesitated to buy it, not out of lacking quality, but because the experience of the images was incredibly dark and surreal. I kept going back to it. I had no idea what the book was about. I purposely avoided reading any text that would clear this narrative hole. I love the mystery of this book — accentuated by a decisive edit, simple yet thought provoking layout and choice of gently textured paper to assert the roughness of the book’s visual journey — a flowing journey left uninterrupted by text, which sits in small fragments — clues — at the front and back of the book.

All around Grand Circle Diego, I feel something really bad has happened or is on the brink of happening. The images offer no answers, but rather an incessant flow of questions — some pale, others subtle and many screaming across sparsely laid out spreads of vibrantly coloured images, revealing vast contradictions side-by-side. Mostly I experience life and death competing. 'I wonder how this ends,' I hear myself probing as I anxiously flip through the pages. There are many images that I dare say have haunted/stayed with me: the image of a horned, silhouetted figure starring out in the distance with a cracked window on the opposing spread.

So many details and emotions run through this picture, which comes early in the book, opening the door to other emotions to follow. Later, there is an image of a man partially visible through a sheet, revealing his likening to a corpse, maybe a mummified body. It strikes the book with a supernatural twist, immediately followed by an image of a round pavement, almost reminiscent of a UFO sinking down from the depths of another world in a sci-fi film.

I have no idea what is going on. Then there is an image of deceptive softness — a woman undressed. I am struck by an immature sense of fragility — a sign something gentle may follow, but not really. Her pose, with protruding shoulder bone at one end and striking veins at another, stabs away at this brief innocence. There follows an image of pure redness — blood, a lot of it. Death kicks me hard in the stomach here, but in a merely noticeable part of the frame sits a patch of breathing green — a frail plant anchoring the sense of confusion I feel is characteristic throughout this book, once again metaphorically pitting a fierce competition between life and death.

Overall, the book carries a sense of finality by a dominant blackness of colour and experience. A few pages at the beginning and end of the book are blank and black — they give me room to breathe in cautiously and slowly out again, not too deep, certainly not comfortable, as I struggle to return to reality at the end of an intensely surreal, emotional, claustrophobic yet beautiful and deeply moving experience. I always find myself circling back to the beginning of this boldly intimate experience. I feel every bit of it even though its preciseness remains unknown.

I must admit even though I eventually succumbed into reading the author’s text and understanding the context of the book, the realm of mystery is where I choose to preserve Grand Circle Diego — one of my all-time favourite books/experiences.

Read on photo-eye website

Somewhere between fear and sorrow there are often tears. I have seen pools of them. Normally I put my camera down. It feels like I am imposing on a deeply private and intimate moment. Safeya Sayed Shedeed is an Egyptian mother whose son was killed by police on January 28, 2011, a day locals dubbed the “Friday of Rage.” It was three days after the start of the protests that eventually unseated former strongman Hosni Mubarak. Safeya was sitting against the summer’s scorching asphalt, dressed in black from head to toe, as is customary in Egypt when one is in mourning. Sometimes the black is never replaced by another color, a sign the heart is still in deep sorrow even though the soul is trying to recover. “I want to avenge my son,” she told me. “Who will get my son’s rights back?” Safeya was among a group of women who lost loved ones during the violent protests. 

Photographing the turmoil in Egypt was a profound experience for me as an Egyptian. I saw grown men weep like children and elderly women scream at the top of their lungs like warriors. I also met women like Safeya whose tears have seeped deep into the ground. I go back to this photograph often. I wonder about her expression, which always struck me as somewhere between peace and sadness. I ask myself how she can muster the strength. I met other mothers whose sons were killed in the revolution. One of them told me she often goes out on the street looking for her son among his friends. Another told me she catches herself having conversations with her son while she’s in the kitchen cooking or sitting in the living room. I wonder if Safeya goes through this too. Does she still wear black? I wonder how the future of Egypt will look back at hundreds, if not thousands, of people like Safeya whose lives changed forever in the course of the struggle to achieve dignity and respect for all.