Walid Raad: This series is titled We are a fair people, we never speak well of one another. And they're mostly composed of two kinds of images.
First there's color slides that were produced by a family member who was originally Syrian. He made the images in the 1950s and '60s. He was an amateur photographer and an avid traveler in Lebanon and Syria. I never experienced the Lebanon that I was told was the Switzerland of the Middle East. And these images were taken during that period.
And the second kinds of images are images that I've collected in various Lebanese photographic archives. And they are images of the assassination of Lebanese and other political figures in the past 30 or 40 years.
The modern state of Lebanon, like many states in the Middle East, it's an artificial creation created by France and England, just after World War I. By the time the civil war erupted in 1975, it was almost anticipated. The traces of future conflicts were always there to be seen. It's as if the landscape had always been populated with future assassinations, future wars that are forthcoming. We can say that those bodies belong to that landscape.
I rarely know what the story is when I'm making an image. I just have a number of images, and I don't make a difference between images that I produce myself or images that I find. They are the same. And so I'm composing an image. And once the image is produced, I just sit with it for a bit. And usually later, the story comes about.