HASSAN ABDELGHANI

“A photograph does not remind us of the past. The impression which it makes on me is not a restoration of what was abolished by time and distance, but rather a testimony that what I see was really there. A photo does not say what is no more, but only and certainly what it was. The punctum is: he is going to die.
I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photography tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.”

Roland Barthes, „Camera Lucida. Raflections on photography“

Encouraged by the resurecting spell of the camera that, like a magic box with two oppositely
placed mirrors, possesses the power of inprinting past reflections into infinity, the photographer follows the cities of the dead as marcation points of the countless backwaters of the river of life that flow intertwined on the large map of the world.

Portraying long foregone faces from various necropolis, more and more cleary he departures
into the pulsating bloodstream of the neighboring towns of the living. So that, with his camera as his sail, he continues to navigate the currents and winds of vast new spaces.
Although the geographic coordinates significantly move, nonetheless, without fail, the same
rule is always fallowed in them- the human craving for arresting the perishable, friable, individual life. In their eternal desire to be rescued from drowning in anonymity and generality, thousands
of portraits flicker in front of the photographer. Still awake and smiling, solemn and serious, persistently they live above the indifferent bones of their respective owners, rotting under their own past. In the hope that they succeeded in inscribing a trace of their existence, their live images last. Those which a wise man once thought of as reflections of the self that yearns for confirmation even
beyond the grave, defying the laws of disappearance in time and death.

Photographing always the same image of liveliness - portraits of the deceased, here he
writes an ode to the most human of all phenomena- hope.

Hope that they never cease to exist than that they could no longer be.

Portraits of portraits from the dead cities that slowly fade away on marble slabs, leaking
from the ceramic bases swished by winds, rains and sun of the passing of time, saying the same thing as all the cries of parting life. Dissipating slowly from the visibility field, as grains of sand which slide through a never satiated throat of the sand clock, they are talking about the fear of annihilation, slipping off from the space-time continuum. Therefore, by photographing them, the photographer reiterates his circle of recognising patterns.

While he captures all these gazes with the lens, he recalls the story that all the photos of this world form a maze, in the centre of which stands nothing else than a single shot - very personal, individual, particular, an image irrelevant to the generality. And that picture vibrates loudly in the maze of congruences of individual destinies, no matter how distant the existences were in time and space.

And while questions swarm, about the meaning of the germination of matrixes, about the inevitability of repetition of so much different and yet matching amulets of the river of the one great end, fraternizing even the portraits of portraits from the most remote cemeteries with his march through the lenses of the magical apparatus, the photographer now reads more clearly the cities of the living on the large world map.

From a distance that is not that anymore, which has abolished itself, he understands that death is so universal that everyone in front of it becomes
united in hope. Those who departure under the sign of the cross, the star, the moon, as well as those under great ignorance or nothingness, literally all of them want to mark down that they once existed, and that they were exactly them. That behind them a trace still remains.

Death as the ultimate experience of life overrides virtually everything.

All the religious dogma in which man believed, by which he lived and hoped, philosophical and spiritual structures he was guided, comforted and cheered by, literally everything disappears when facing its finality, ephemerality and the expendability of all beings.
And in the end, what are the oximoronic faces of the living death substantially telling us?

What are the portraits of people deceased long ago saying?

Faces of ancients shout out the desire that in his own reflection, hijacked from everlasting death, man outlives himself. That it becomes confirmed, at least through a gravestone portrait, that nevertheless he once existed. Just like that. Right there and right then.
That he was there just as we now are, and that he lived his life somewhere exactly as we live
it here. We who will also one day, certainly, in the same way unqestionably disappear.

Exactly as, with the Renaissance discovery of a new point of view in the humanistic three-dimensional perception of the world's space, the painter Masaccio inscribed on the famous tomb of the Holy Trinity in Florence, as a memento mori for his client:

„IO FUI GIA QUELLO CHE VOI SIETE E QUEL CH'IO SONO VOI ANCOR SARETE“

„I once was what you are now, and what I am, you'll once be.“