Queer Visual Excavations: Akram Zaatari, Hashem El Madani, and the Reframing of History in Lebanon

In his coedited book Hashem El Madani: Studio Practices (2004), the Beirut-based Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari selects, reprints, and arranges the photographs of Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer from Saida (Sidon), Zaatari’s coastal hometown in south Lebanon. The book was created to coincide with the first exhibition of El Madani’s work in the United Kingdom, which was cocurated by Zaatari at the Photographer’s Gallery in London in 2004. El Madani opened his Studio Shehrazade in Saida in 1953 and over more than fifty years created hundreds of thousands of images of Saida’s residents: brides and grooms, wrestlers and babies, and Palestinian and Syrian resistance fighters in the 1970s. The images in Hashem El Madani date from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s and tell of everyday life and the self-representational practices in the mid-twentieth-century city....