• 1 Flusser, Vilèm. Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000, p. 27. Trans. An (...)
• 2 Ibid., p. 26

1Vilèm Flusser compared the activity of the photographer to that of a chess player.1 Both are involved in a kind of combinatory game – a programme, in other words – since the photographer, according to Flusser, plays at exploring the pre-programmed possibilities contained by her camera.2 As a child growing up in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, Paola Yacoub invented games of her own. Whilst sheltering from the fighting, she relieved her anxiety and boredom by throwing candy into a salad bowl and estimating the ratio of successful shots. In this repetitive gesture of throwing candy and in the dry sound of the sweets hitting the bowl, we can of course recognise the echo of the gunshots. Yet there is also here perhaps a prefiguration of the automatic click of the shutter on a photographic camera, a machine that would later become Paola Yacoub’s preferred artistic medium.

• 3 Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London/New York: Verso, 201 (...)

2Rather than resigning herself to the automatic nature of photography, however, Paola Yacoub has developed a rich reflection as to the possibility of reaffirming the photographer’s artistic agency and intentionality without however giving in to the mirages of subjectivism. This position has a specifically political valence for Yacoub, an artist and researcher whose work focuses mainly on conflict zones. She belongs to a generation of post-war Lebanese artists, made famous by The Atlas Group, who developed an approach characterised by the fictionalisation of both the author and the archive.3 In contrast with this kind of scepticism, however, Yacoub foregrounds the documentary nature of her work. Her encounter with archaeology was a decisive one in this regard. Following her initial training as an architect, in the 1990s she took part in archaeological excavations in the centre of Beirut, which was still undergoing reconstruction. From this experience she drew a particular way of situating her point of view: from above, directed toward the ground, but without ever assuming a position of power; involved in the terrain whilst still maintaining a distance from it.

• 4 Yacoub, Paola. It Was War, Berlin: René Schmitt Editions, 2024
• 5 See « Artistic Research Practices » (ARP), a research program directed by Paola Yacoub in dialogue (...)

3Her latest body of work, It Was War (2024),4 is a perfect example of this approach. It is a portfolio featuring photographs taken in a dynamited building in the Lebanese region of Chouf, on the site of a 1983 massacre. Dispelling the aura of romanticism surrounding ruins, Paola Yacoub established a rigorous protocol in order to document the unrepresentability of violence. Her work was carried out in two stages: the images were captured in 1988, and then rediscovered – exhumed – by the artist in 2024. The time that elapsed between these two moments, underscored by the past tense of the series’ title, introduces a first distance from pathos. To this Yacoub adds terse captions that convey in a straightforward fashion her shock when viewing the photographs again. These exclamations are interrupted by yet another kind of scansion in the form of the notes in which Yacoub recorded her position and each of her gestures at the moment in which the photograph was captured. The aim, however, is not to incite the viewer to relive Yacoub’s emotions, nor to cast doubt upon what is being shown. Far from any kind of gesturalism, the artist – who, in collaboration with Michel Lasserre, has constructed a body of research on “extended actionism”5 – instead emphasises the fact that artistic creation is also an action, however slight that action may be, and that as such it always involves a form of responsibility.