The photographs taken by Frederic Lezmi in Lebanon and Jordan aren’t any touristshots
in the usual sense but sketch-like documents of a transition whitch is taking
place in the actual countries. Porous graphic compositions of a fragile world:
bedouin like backrounds – between nomadic restlessness of old days and
prosperity of modern times.
Lezmi provides the viewer with panoramas and insights of a tentatively calm zone
of peace and prosperity at the edge of a continuously looming Israel/Palestine and
Syria/Iraq crisis. Between Beirut, Amman and Baalbeck a landscape restoration of
former splendor and a recent, hopeful economic boom.
Antique and modern cubes of houses are nestled together under an oversized
national fl ag in the sun. A journey, whose natural movement goes on right into
the pictures, into the perpective of depth, the paradox visual angles and diagonals
across the pictures, light and dark contrast and a delicate chromatism. Under a
spotless sky between the desert valley of Wadi Rum and the mediterranean sea at Tripoli.
Peter V. Brinkemper