November 2020
The Absent Album (2010 - 2015) by Raed Yassin, recent recipient of the first edition of the Tosetti Value award for Photography. Yassin will take part in Perspective: The Economy of Images with an exhibition project held at the headquarters of Tosetti Value in 2021
The Absent Album (2015) is a series of blown-up polaroid photographs of scenes from Egyptian films. Acting as replacement mechanisms, the shots recreate family settings and memorable moments of the artist's personal life. Throughout the duration of the civil war in Lebanon, he and his family were forced to move from place to place, which often resulted in the loss or destruction of cherished family photo albums. In this desperate situation, Egyptian cinema transformed itself into a factory of images, which the artist used to manufacture and fill-in the gaps of his paperless memories. Here, the polaroid behaves like the instant medium typical in familial settings, but it also simultaneously contradicts that intimate quality with mass-produced cinematic subjects.
