In the late 1980’s, in the midst of the “hot” Lebanese wars, I committed myself to producing photographs in Beirut. I titled this commitment Sweet Talk and referred to the various photographic self-assignments as “Commissions.” Sweet Talk concentrated on Beirut’s residents, its buildings, streets, storefronts, gardens, and other objects, situations, and spaces.

This project was also shaped by the ending of the Lebanese wars in 1989. By 1992, the security situation had calmed enough in Beirut to ensure that a large part of the city became accessible to its residents in ways it had not been for the past 17 years. It was not long after this that the reconstruction of the Beirut Central District (Beirut’s ravaged downtown area) was under way, announcing within and beyond Lebanon’s borders the possible rise from the ashes of the country itself. Sadly, the country never rose from its ashes. Instead, ashes piled up on more ashes, blood and despair as Israeli incursions and invasions never ceased; as Syria’s political, military, economic and security grip on the country tightened; as frequent bombings and assassinations paralyzed the city again and again; and as the stagnant stench of political and social discord thickened and continues to poison the air we breathe.

My ongoing commissions consist of hundreds of negatives and digital files, and each was produced over a period of a few weeks to a few months, beginning in 1987. These are bracketed less by the years of their production and more by the formal, technical and conceptual parameters that shaped their creation. My original intention was to produce images in a city that was in the midst of radical urban, economic, political and social transformation. Over time, I found it increasingly difficult to print and display my images. It became clear to me that the frames I was exposing were less and less referential of the persons, situations, objects and spaces that faced my lens at the moment of exposure. For example, I would photograph crowded streets only to realize that they appeared empty in the resulting images; open storefronts appeared shut; faces as backs. In some instances, a photograph of a building in one section of Beirut was also a photograph of two other architecturally distinct buildings in two other parts of the city. Initially, I dismissed these ideas as fanciful conceptual conceits, yet-more tired reflections on the question of photographic mediation. But I was never able to abandon the idea that something very unusual was happening in Beirut. I could not stop thinking about the possibility that the individuals, streets, buildings and storefronts that I was photographing were not in rapport with photographic time. Eventually, I became convinced that a fraction-of-a-second long exposure of a building in Beirut was equivalent to a seven-decade-long exposure elsewhere. Beirut was moving at a significantly faster speed than the one marked on my shutter.

Throughout the last two decades, I continued to document even while great doubt surrounded what exactly was being documented. I resigned myself to a practice that produced a record of Beirut for posterity. Unbeknownst to me, the writer Jalal Toufic was just then creating in his book Forthcoming a collaborator, a double in the form of a photographer who views “things at the speed of war.”1 Toufic’s book also outlines the seemingly futile necessity of recording that I instinctively and at times despairingly followed for now more than twenty years, “We have to take photographs even though because of their referent’s withdrawal, and until their referents are resurrected, they are not going to be available as referential documentary pieces – with the concomitant risk that facets relating to the subject matter might be mistaken for purely formal ones.”2

This fortuitous encounter with Toufic’s photographer alongside equally generative encounters with other artists and writers, with concepts and forms permits me today to bring in this exhibition in Graz dozens of photographs from Sweet Talk: Commission (Beirut). These photographs represent a fraction of the ongoing project. They not only document some of the spaces and residents of the Beirut of the past twenty years, they also evidence forms, lines, and colors created by a city, its residents, spaces and speed, and my efforts to find the appropriate photographic tools to engage them.

1 Jalal Toufic, “Forthcoming”, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, Los Angeles: Redcat 2009, p. 35.
2 Toufic, p. 30-31.