Randa Mirza’s series Atlal (Ruines), winner of the Prix Camera Clara 2025, will be on view at the BnF, François Mitterrand site, until March 29th 2026, as part of La photographie à tout prix, a year of photographic prizes at the BnF.
Guillaume Piens, president of the prize jury, wrote:
“We were struck by Randa Mirza’s poignant large-format view-camera photographs of ruined towns in southern Lebanon, made in 2024. These images of ruins (“Atlal” in Arabic) possess a powerful formal quality that carries them beyond the documentary. They become a theatre of memory an act of denunciation and of repair in the face of the devastating tragedy of the war”.
In Atlal (Ruines), Randa Mirza depicts the villages of southern Lebanon, bombed by the Israeli army between August and December 2024. The title refers to the prologue of pre-Islamic Arabic poems, recalling that remnants and rubble have been fundamental pillars of ancient Arabic poetry as well as of Lebanon’s iconographic representation in recent decades. The atlal are heaps of stones wounds in the landscape that underscore the cruelty of human nature and the ravages of war. They also symbolize nostalgia for lost love, perpetual change, departure and separation, as in the ancient poem by Antar “Have poets left any space to compose? Have you recognized the imagined dwelling?”—or, more recently, in the lines of the Egyptian poet Ibrahim Nagi, sung by Oum Kalthoum in 1966. Building on the distinction made by art historian H. W. Janson in the mid‑20th century between the ruin a well-framed window onto the past and debris, an amorphous mass of fragments, Randa Mirza observes that destroyed houses are no longer even ruins but merely meaningless materials, destined to be cleared away and consigned to erasure. The artist then seeks to restore their presence as vestiges and to re-establish a historical continuity in the face of war, a machine of rupture. Her large‑format Crown Graflex 4×5 view-camera shots require lengthy preparation before each exposure and thus echo the ancestral tradition of composing verses in front of ruins.
Prix Camera Clara
www.prixcameraclara.com
Randa Mirza : Atlal (Ruines)
until 29 March 2026
BnF
Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris, France
www.bnf.fr
