In my series „Beyond Borders“ I have been searching for the “in between” – whatever lies either geographically or culturally between my world here in the heart of Europe and my long-term focus of interest in the Middle and Near East. Being half German and half Lebanese, I have always sought to understand and connect the extremes of my own heritage. Consequently, nearly all of my previous series have dealt with the documentation of cultural interfaces between the Western and the Arab world.
From August to December 2008 I traveled by car between Vienna and Beirut. I encountered people whose circumstances varied endlessly. Depending on the situation, it came naturally to photograph either real people or faces on billboards, inside buildings or on the street, in public private spheres. In my photographs, people emerge either as blurry passersby or as clear, lingering figures, as subjects or objects of the viewer’s eye, moving about in their urban or rural environments. These are distanced views in which locals and tourists travel on similar paths, randomly congregating and forming elusive compositions. These pictures represent neither precise documents nor do they create artistic worlds. They are constructions of multicolored, fragmented impressions, like looking through a kaleidoscope.
Using various superimposed layers and conditions, I often portray architectural monuments together with the social environments they host. Through reflections and fragmentation within the images, the viewer’s gaze is being multiplied, inverted and divided in order to call into question the perception of cultural differences and their importance for the “present” and the “past” of our society. My pictures reveal an ambivalent point of view beyond current clichés and existing borderlines. In my photographs, symbols of the Orient and the Occident overlap each other, and are further blurred by ever-growing globalism. Photography in this case serves both
as a visual hinge and as an interface between these multi-faceted worlds where the space between East and West is either expanded or reduced.
„Beyond Borders“ has been published as a book and is designed as a 11-meter accordion fold-out, hand-folded and glued by the artist. In choosing this unusual format, I wanted to enforce a reading process equivalent to the slow and sometimes uneasy transition between cultural symbols and values as one travels from Europe to the Orient.
Frederic Lezmi
Des Méditerranéens
Collective exhibition, photographs of Jean-Luc Amand Fournier and Frederic Lezmi
September 11 – November 9, 2012
École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
Bibliothèque Denis Diderot et galerie «La Librairie» site Descartes
15 parvis René Descartes
69007 Lyon
France
