Jack Dabaghian - Cèdre de Tannourine - Liban

Lebanon - Photographer Jack Dabaghian - Fine art photography in wet collodion. Cedar of Tannourine, in northern Lebanon (502). October 2021. Signed photograph, second print of five. Collection "Sentinels". (Catalogue price 3,500 euros)

The Franco-Lebanese photographer Jack Dabaghian blends ancient techniques with a dreamlike vision to create experimental photographs that explore memory, fragility, and our link to time, to light, and to living beings.

Jack Dabaghian was born in Beirut in 1961. Passionate about image and photographic practices, he has alternated between war reporting, head of Reuters’ Middle East photo service, and fashion photography, and for 30 years has served the press and the image. Dabaghian has covered numerous conflicts: Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Rwanda, Zaïre, Algeria, whose images have been published in Newsweek, Time Magazine, Paris Match, The Economist, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times. In response to a desire to question contemporary photographic practices and their artistic and conceptual charge, he began, since 2017, a radically opposed approach to which he has devoted himself entirely. His approach draws on the sources of the history of photographic processes to develop a work that is powerfully evocative and dreamlike. Photographic experimentation, alternative and ancient processes play a central role. Between reality and illusion, his images question the mechanisms of representation and, through them, humanity’s relationship to imagination, to the tangible world, and to its fragilities. Time, the photosensitive material, memory, living humans and non-humans, the destruction of ecosystems, the beauty and strength of the elements all traverse this new writing with ambition and sensitivity.

2021 ‘Sentinels’ - Solo exhibition Saleh Barakat Gallery/ Beirut - 2024 - Exhibition Galerie Esther Woerdehoff/Paris