Akram Zaatari’s infinite frames

Akram Zaatari embodies the very idea of an iconophile, a word stemming from the Greek eikṓn (image) and philos (loving), quite literally meaning “lover of images”. Over the years, his fascination with both still and moving images led him from looking with inquisitive eyes to creating his own photographs with passion and dedication and eventually collecting those of others with care and subversion. Images – whereas the ones we can see or the ones that live in our heads – became his life’s work and, in turn, they shaped him. Indeed, today, he can claim more than 50 films and videos, a dozen art books, and countless installations of photographic material.

Zaatari was born in 1966 in Saida, South Lebanon, just before the Six-Day War. He came of age amidst the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), a conflict later captured by contemporary writers such as Elias Khoury in Little Mountain (1977) and Etel Adnan in The Arab Apocalypse (1980). In 1990, in a basement apartment under fire in Beirut, author Hoda Barakat wrote in The Stone of Laughter: “Whenever the sound of the bombs and rockets exploding got really bad, they used to put their heads down between their shoulders […]. Then they would tell off the children, who were quick to go back to playing their games, […] … it was as if the children, who were the only ones over whom power could be exercised, bore the brunt of people’s feelings of powerlessness in the face of what was going on outside.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here

As a child (and later a teenager) in the first half of the war, Zaatari likely learned to hunch his shoulders at the sound of danger, only to return moments later to the world of childhood games. Yet, one of his favourite pastimes would take a different form—cutting, collecting and preserving newspaper clippings, piecing together a record of “what was going on outside”, as Barakat once wrote. Today, Zaatari reflects on those times, saying, “At 16, you’re too young to process all of this, but it was carved in me.”

He got his first camera in the late 70s and early 80s, and eight of his earliest photographs – depicting Israeli tanks and destroyed houses – would later become part of his series Learning Photography (2009). Yet, it was cinema that left a lasting mark on him. One of his earliest memories is of briefly visiting Cinéma Capitol in Saida with his cousin at just four years old, where he fell in love with the theatricality of the dark room and the luminescent screen. He would also confess to being a “TV addict” as a child, captivated by the news and staged images. When asked about his love of film, Zaatari admits, “I’m a film person more than anything else. Film is a reorganisation of photography, history and storytelling all at once. It is over 100 years old, and yet still largely unexplored.” 

These formative years were also shaped by visits to Studio Soussi, where the sharp scent of developing chemicals filled the air, and the chill of the studio pressed in as he posed for the camera. Everything in Zaatari’s early years seemed to align to shape him into the iconophile he would become, paving the way for his emergence as a renowned visual artist.

In 1989, at the tail end of the war, he graduated in architecture from American University of Beirut (AUB) and worked as an architect while teaching photography classes, sharing his passion for photographers like William Klein, Robert Frank, and August Sander until he left for New York in 1992. Here, he pursued a master’s in media studies while immersing in local cinemas and galleries, discovering the works of French conceptual photographer Suzanne Lafont, painter and performer Lucas Samaras, and artist Andres Serrano before returning to Beirut in 1995. The city that, as Zaatari put it, was “where you want to be”—a place that made New York City seem pale in comparison. “It was amazing being in Beirut in 1995,” he recalls.

Back home, he resumed teaching and began making films using the cameras available to him while co-producing a TV morning show. In just three years, he created an impressive body of short films, editing after work hours and well into the night. In 1995, for instance, he made Reflection, a 10-minute-film set in the historic district of Saida, his hometown, where a boy walks through the streets holding a mirror—an act that echoes Zaatari’s own early fascination with reflections of sunlight, capturing the essence of play in the act of photography and the idea of framing through mirror.

Before making films, he would immerse himself in research, encountering compelling and intriguing images – doing the work of iconography – as a starting point. He also critically explored the discourse of the Lebanese and Islamic resistance movements in South Lebanon, recording testimonies of detention time and restaging them with actors as in All Is Well on the Border, where he attempted to grapple with Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon following the 1982 war. During that time, Zaatari also created provocative and radical films such as Majnounak (Crazy of You), which was a critique of male discourse, through interviews with young men about their carnal encounters with women. At a time when alternative identities were still deeply taboo and frowned upon in Beirut, the film boldly subverts the normative pressures of heteronormativity, revealing the perversion latent in the acts of conquest of the other gender.

The intertwining experiences of war, destruction and disappearance – set against a post-war moment of reconstruction in Lebanon – gave rise to a unique context in which the preservation of culture and heritage became an essential conversation. It was on this fertile ground that the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) was born in 1997, founded by Zaatari alongside photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad. Since then, the AIF founders and their close circles (Yto Barrada, Lara Baladi, and Negar Azimi included) set out to trace, collect, preserve and study photographs from the SWANA region and Arab diaspora, approaching these images through an artistic lens. “‘Arab’ is the foundation, not the image,” as Zaatari jokingly shares. But in setting up the AIF, they challenged the naive and simplistic narratives surrounding the history of photography in the region, and embarked its founders and members on a learning curve in the complex terrain of photography’s authorship, rights and integrity.

Departing from classical notions of archiving, Zaatari complexifies the layers of authorship, declaring today that “his research is his artwork”, seamlessly intertwining collections with his own practice. In doing so, he became part of what the prominent American art historian and critic Hal Foster would later describe in 2004 as the “archival turn” in contemporary art. This turn marked a moment in art when artists increasingly engaged with archives, documentation, and historical materials. The “archival impulses” of contemporary artists were rooted in broader socio-political concerns: the erosion of historical narratives, the destruction of cultural artefacts, and the looming threat of losing collective memory. A prime example of this is his project with Walid Raad, Mapping Sitting (2002), which worked with tens of thousands photographic portraits that Zaatari had researched and brought to AIF’s archives between 1997 and 2002.

Since the 2000s, Zaatari, the iconophile, straddled the roles of artist, archivist, filmmaker, collector, historian, curator and bookmaker—so long as images remained at the heart of his work. But just as crucially, he resisted being defined by any one discipline, unwilling to belong to a singular “world” – whether photography or cinema – thriving instead in the spaces between, where possibilities are stretched. Perhaps this freedom finds its roots in his mother tongue of Arabic, in which there is “no differentiation between a photograph, picture and image”, he explains. They are all the same word: sūrah. 

Images, his preferred tool for creation and research subject, become the tangible translation of his thoughts—ideas and stories. Above all, for Zaatari, images – whether family albums, press photographs, or photographers’ archives – serve as a means to unearth historical narratives that might otherwise remain untold. When asked about recent history, particularly that of Palestine and Lebanon since October 2023, he acknowledges that it is still too soon to create work. Yet, once again, he recognises the power of images, especially those circulating on social media, as vital witnesses to the present and urgent modes of communication.

As a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist, Zaatari has continually reimagined the tools of his practice. Now, he is thinking of turning his gaze toward AI, questioning how it inscribes itself within the legacy of the readymade, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp, who transformed mass-produced objects into artworks in the early 20th century, challenging the role of the artist and the very definition of art. 

If Zaatari were to start creating AI-generated readymades, it would be a natural extension of his radical approach to image-making—one that favours selection, appropriation, and recontextualisation over traditional authorship. AI could potentially push further his interrogation of archives and photographic truth, treating the algorithm as an ever-expanding repository from which to extract and subvert images, much as he has done with historical photographs, press clippings, and found materials throughout his career. All that remains is to wait and see how the iconophile will next transform his practice, ever reinventing language with images.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here