The Company of Silver Spectres

2021 | Photographic Series | Acrylic | Variable dimensions

With the advent of photography in the modern age and its gradual spread into the nuclear family unit, a culture of imbibing these documentary records of one’s familial history with a deeper meaning and a firmer notion of identity began to take hold. It came to be that as if without these printed pieces of paper, one does not have a memory or even have a sense of self at all. This is the unfortunate fate that befell Raed Yassin: many of his family photographs were lost during the civil war in Lebanon. In order to overcome this initial trauma, he began buying and collecting the family photographs of others in bulk, especially those from the Arab world where much displacement and upheaval took place over the last decades. The personal nature and preciousness of those captured moments were making up for the artist’s own loss, as well as helping him reconstruct a mental picture of his domestic upbringing. But with time, these treasured items transformed into some kind of burden, as the number of the persons inhabiting them grew and metastasised. After all, at its most basic form, portrait photography is a record of a moment of existence of an individual behind a lens, and it is this presence that grew to be intimidating and sometimes even haunting.

So the artist started to erase the images of those people by spraying their photographs with paint, leaving only a faint trace of their bodily outlines within the frame. The result is an abstracted spectre of characters, all impossible to see with the naked eye, but still affirming to us that they once existed through their invisibility.