Time Regained I - Levant
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan 2003-2008
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan 2003-2008
The photographs presented here are a personal reflection of my ten-year stay in the Middle East. In August 2002, I moved from London to Beirut to work as an art director in an advertising agency and spent a full year observing the country and its people before actually picking up the camera. Initially my aim was to portray everyday life in Lebanon, but over time I became obsessed with discoveries of remnants of another time, a time that coincides with my childhood, in an entirely different corner of the world. After moving to Dubai in 2005, I continued to seek similar themes as I travelled across the region and beyond.
The pattern that was gradually emerging over the years was that of a personal journey into memory - an attempt to retrace my childhood lived in Tito's, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, socialist-yet-pro-Western Yugoslavia of the 1970's and early 1980's, but in a different time and different geographic space. The unusual mix of urban and man-altered natural landscapes, references to contrasting religious iconography and worship rituals, political and patriarchal authority figure portraits, vintage American cars, street scenes and period interiors are a testament to the prevailing spirit of the times.
Ten years on, it became apparent that the project is perhaps less about reliving childhood than the incapacity to escape it, wherever in the world I happen to be - an introspective lament to Yugoslavia's idealised 'golden era', the laid-back, comfortable lifestyle, the welfare state, the security and apparent general prosperity that people of my generation grew up with and lost with the break-up of the country and the subsequent devastation of economic, social, moral and cultural values.
Or alternatively, it's just a figment of my imagination.
The pattern that was gradually emerging over the years was that of a personal journey into memory - an attempt to retrace my childhood lived in Tito's, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, socialist-yet-pro-Western Yugoslavia of the 1970's and early 1980's, but in a different time and different geographic space. The unusual mix of urban and man-altered natural landscapes, references to contrasting religious iconography and worship rituals, political and patriarchal authority figure portraits, vintage American cars, street scenes and period interiors are a testament to the prevailing spirit of the times.
Ten years on, it became apparent that the project is perhaps less about reliving childhood than the incapacity to escape it, wherever in the world I happen to be - an introspective lament to Yugoslavia's idealised 'golden era', the laid-back, comfortable lifestyle, the welfare state, the security and apparent general prosperity that people of my generation grew up with and lost with the break-up of the country and the subsequent devastation of economic, social, moral and cultural values.
Or alternatively, it's just a figment of my imagination.