This talk will be held on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition “An Uncanny Impulse: The Mohsen Yammine Collection at the Arab Image Foundation of Beirut” as part of the PHotoEspaña festival. The opening event for the exhibition will take place in the form of a conversation with both guests on the art of collecting and its relationship with photography. More specifically, they will discuss how the context of the war in Lebanon and the country’s contemporary history have been closely linked to the work by this collector in particular.

Similarly, we will get to take a closer look at the work performed by the Arab Image Foundation, which, over its twenty years in existence, has been an essential institution for preserving the visual memory of the Middle East. Throughout all these years, indispensable names in the region’s photography, including Fouad El Khoury, Akram Zaatari, Samer Mohdad and Zeina Arida have undertaken a series of research projects along with Mohsen Yammine, delving even further into this unique private collection. The collector’s viewpoint and decisions have therefore been combined with those of the Foundation members throughout these years to select and build a collection that would be added, on loan, to the collection of the Arab Image Foundation.

After the talk, at 8:00 p.m. we will hold the official opening of “An Uncanny Impulse: The Mohsen Yammine Collection at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut.”

Mohsen Yammine
As well as collecting photographic objects, Yammine has also been a journalist. He has written articles and books on his passion for the region’s photography and history. Writing for several newspapers provided him with new opportunities to develop his passion for photography. At present, Mohsen Yammine continues to live in Zgharta (northern Lebanon), where he is still building on his collection and personal research projects. To date, he has had twelve titles published with his name, and just five of them deal with photography: Loubnan Al-Soura (Lebanon the Image), Jarrous Press, Tripoli, 1994; Souwar Hamima (Intimate Images), published in 1998 in Arabic and French (with the title Histoires intimes) by the French publishing firm Actes Sud, with the cooperation of the Arab Image Foundation; Bareed Al-Sharq, published in Arabic, French (Un monde en transition) and English (A World in Transition), Fransabank, 2003, which examines five hundred postcards from his collection; Yaqazat Hajar (Dream of Stone), published in Arabic and French (Rêve de pierre) by Annahar in 2004, and Zgharta fi Ayyam al-Maja’a (Zgharta During the Famine), published in 2016.

Image credit:
Untitled,
Frederic Elias Dakouni
Self Portrait – Multiple exposures, Beirut, Lebanon
Ca 1940
Gelatin silver developing-out paper print
8.9 x 14 cm
Mohsen Yammine Collection
Courtesy of the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut