The Print Sales Gallery at the Photographers’ Gallery is a commercial operation. It hosts small displays of beautifully made prints of photographs by leading photographers, British and international, which are for sale at (eye-watering) prices (the cheapest print here is for sale at £3,400 plus VAT). But you don’t have to buy anything, the gallery is free to enter and walk around (it’s one fairly small room downstairs next to the shop). The Print Sales Gallery is currently displaying 11 works by acclaimed Lebanese photographer and film-maker Fouad Elkoury with the exhibition title ‘Fouad Elkoury: Preserving Time’.
Umm Kulthum Cafe, Luxor by Fouad Elkoury (1990) £8,500 + VAT
Born in France in 1952 Elkoury spent his formative years in Beirut. In the late 1970s he studied architecture in London and, although he turned to photography soon after graduating, the shape and structure of the built environment often controls and defines his compositions.
Elkoury was 23 when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975. It was to last 15 years and devastate the country, tearing communities apart and permanently undermining civil society. Some of his work captures the devastation of his home city, with bombed-out apartment blocks or civic buildings pockmarked by shellfire. His photos contrast the ruined cityscape with people getting on with their lives as best they can, enjoying food, company, sunshine and swimming.
The Football Match, Beirut by Fouad Elkoury (1980) £4,200 + VAT
This is an interesting photo because we are used to having the subject centre and front in a photo. Here the subject of the photo is the building, or the building material, presumably render over concrete. The slumping youth at bottom right and the dangling legs of the spectators emphasise the emptiness of the central space. Partly it reflects his interest in architecture and the built environment. Maybe it’s a reference to the arid emptiness of the desert in the interior of the Lebanon. it certainly radiates Mediterranean heat and laze.
Just as interested in architecture is this wonderfully carefree image of two young women sunbathing in the cool of a public fountain. In the distance are the nondescript concrete blocks which blight many Arab countries, and on the right some industrial towers letting off spumes of pollution. But for this moment the modernist pillar and cone waterfall creates the equivalent of an oasis in the desert, a space, shapes a space and moment of freedom and relaxation.
Portemillo by Fouad Elkoury (1980) £8,300 + VAT
In the 1980s the conflict eventually drove Elkoury to settle in Paris from where he made forays to other Mediterranean countries, including a project to follow in the footsteps of the famous French novelist Gustave Flaubert. But when the civil war finally ground to an end, in 1991 Elkoury returned to the home of his youth, tasked with recording the city where a uneasy peace now reigned, which resulted in his best known book, Beirut City Centre.
Whereas the joy-of-the-moment photos are always pinprick-clear, the wartorn city photos often use out of focus, ore often than not of the people, as if the ruined buildings will stand for thousands of years, like the ruins of Greece and Rome, while the people are blurred phantasms, passing through.
Man With A Radio, Beirut, 1995 by Fouad Elkoury. £3,400 + VAT
And yet next to the ruin photos are images whose frivolity or untroubled poetry harks back to a different world, to idyllic images which seem to come from the 1940s or 50s. A couple of these images reminded me of the great Mexican photographer Manual Alvarez Bravo. This jokey one is, apparently, of his own wife. It looks like a joke by Cartier-Bresson from the late 1940s but it’s from 1990.
Kuchuk Hanem, Cairo 1990 by Fouad Elkoury. £12,000 + VAT
As to the show’s title and ‘preserving time’, surely all photographers do that? But Elkoury is quoted as saying that passively recording what happens isn’t enough, not for him anyway; you have to make an extra effort to capture something meaningful:
‘If my images just show the event happening in front of me, the meaning of it will die when the event dies. For my pictures to be preserved in time, they had to be more symbolic.
You can see what he means. All his images, in whichever style, go beyond capturing the moment to convey something deeper: the more you look at the guy walking through the ruined city with a boogie box on his shoulder the more poignant, pregnant and subtly powerful it becomes. Each of these 11 photographs really do glow with what the curators describe as a ‘defiantly poetic sensibility’, testament to human endurance, sunbathing amid the slaughter.
Related links
- Fouad Elkoury: Preserving Time continues at the Photographers’ Gallery until 9 July 2023
- All the photos in the exhibition on the Photographers’ Gallery website
- Fouad Elkoury’s website
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