Rabih Mroué

When protests against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad erupted in 2011, Rabih Mroué became interested in the cellphone videos people were posting online: “I found out that some of the activists were circulating instructions…on how to shoot a demonstration in a secure manner.” In response, he began The Pixelated Revolution, a multi-part project including a display of seven large-scale photographs titled, The Fall of a Hair: Blow Ups.

In each photograph, a man stands pointing a gun. Mroué pulled these images from cellphone videos at the moment when the gunmen and the protesters recording them made eye contact. The resulting stills resemble surveillance camera frames, but in this case the surveillance is mutual as both the gunmen and the protesters were watching each other. The consequences of being seen differ dramatically, however: for the protesters it often meant getting shot. Long interested in how death is presented in images of war, Mroué was prompted to make this work when a friend commented that the protesters were “shooting their own deaths”—a phrase evoking both firing guns and filming or photographing.