As the son of an expatriate Lebanese father and a German mother,
Frederic Lezmi gave little thought to his Arab origins as a boy. His father worked for the United Nations and the young Frederic spent his early years living in African cities and Geneva before settling, at around 12, in a small Black Forest town near Freiburg.
Then came 9/11 and the extra scrutiny applied by authorities around the world to people of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent. Mr. Lezmi, now 31, experienced his share, which aroused an interest in examining his Lebanese half. “I said, ‘If you want to put me in the drawer, I will look at the drawer,’” he recounted.
Mr. Lezmi talked his father into returning to Lebanon, which convinced him to spend a period of study in Beirut, at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts. He finished his course a week before war broke out between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Mr. Lezmi stayed for a few weeks, but found that war photography was not for him.
He said he was seeking a third way of depicting the Middle East; neither in romanticized, Orientalist, picturesque photographs nor in “crisis photography” — images of destruction, fighting and privation.
“I was looking for something like hope, or normality, something like a shimmer on the horizon, acknowledging this is a region where there’s a lot of problems, but not falling into clichés,” Mr. Lezmi said.
That spirit eventually led to “
From Vienna to Beirut,” a photographic project that seeks to find an in-between world where the West and the East intermingle. “It is not a clash of cultures,” he said. “Somehow it’s a blend where something new comes out.”
In the introduction to the book, Mr. Lezmi writes: “These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They rather mean to be constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.”
Mr. Lezmi began his trip in August 2008 in the city where he lives, Cologne, leaving town in an Opel Astra station wagon and driving to Vienna, the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian empire and the heart of Central Europe. He proceeded through the Balkans, where the Ottomans held sway for centuries and implanted an Islamic influence, passed through Turkey and Syria and arrived in Lebanon. Mr. Lezmi spent many nights sleeping in his car or camping. Friends joined him for several stretches.
He tried to avoid taking pictures that made an obvious point, and he is wary about hunting for symbolism. “I was not looking for Ottoman traces,” he said. “I was looking for situations with small twists.” The meaning of the pictures, he said, must come from viewing them cumulatively.
Drawing on a cache of 10,000 frames, he produced a book of 29 images that he makes by hand and sells individually. The book is constructed accordion style, so the pictures can be laid out in a long line.
The journey starts in with a look into a parking garage entrance that spirals downward, as though the viewer were entering a tunnel (
Slide 1). The last frame, shown at right, puts the viewer into the sky. It shows some Beirut teen-agers in a gondola, over a city under reconstruction.
In between, signs of cultural mingling are subtle. In a picture from Sarajevo (
Slide 4), a palm tree is reflected on a car. The word “Miami” can be made out. Women in Soviet-era frumpy dress stand in front of an Italian-style fashion store in Bucharest (
Slide 6). The scene is glimpsed through a torn — Iron? — curtain. Western-style graffiti covers an ugly Stalinist bridge in Pristina (
Slide 5).
The first Islamic element emerges in a picture from Istanbul (
Slide 11). A minaret rises on the edge of a frame, above a wall on which a rakish man sits. The wall separates him from a woman who looks like a Western tourist and has what Mr. Lezmi called a “colonialist” air.
Another minaret appears in a whimsical picture from Mahmatlar, Turkey (
Slide 15), but it emerges only with scrutiny. The focus is a rusty and rickety metal rocket, echoed by the minaret, thrusting upward from a dirt patch. A bed of apples lies on the ground nearby. Maybe the rocket runs on apple fuel, Mr. Lezmi mused.
The tensions between secularism and a religious Islamic society in Turkey serve as another subtext. A street shot from Istanbul (
Slide 12) shows the head of a sensuous model gazing at the viewer from an ad, with two companion views next door behind window bars, as a woman walks by across the street in a head scarf. The wearing of head scarves is a major source of debate in Turkey. Another Istanbul shot shows the lower half of three women set apart from men strolling across the street. The women are faceless. A vertical part of a window frame divides them.
http://lezmi.de/id235aid15o0_vienna-beirut.html
Vienna to Beirut; Siena to Ft. Hood
Originally Posted by NYT
Reply With Quote
Re: Vienna to Beirut; Siena to Ft. Hood
Bookmarks