01 Work, MIDDLE EAST ARTISTS, The art of War, Maher Attar's Samar Baltaji, with Footnotes

Maher Attar

Samar Baltaji

Photograph

Private collection

Samar Baltaji is the one-legged mother in the photo, holding the hand of her maimed daughter, Nisrine, as they walked through a landscape of Beirut at war.

In June 1985, during the war in the Palestinian camps — which pitted the Amal party against the Palestinians — he captured a photo that made the front page of the New York Times and immediately launched his international career. On the back of it he spent 17 years with the Paris-based Sygma agency, criss-crossing the globe.

Paradoxically, though it was violence that first brought him to the art of photography, what Attar is most interested in capturing is tenderness. “There’s a tender violence in my images,” he says. “I’ve always sought tenderness. That’s what I wanted to document in my photos.” For after all, tenderness is light, and light is tenderness. Will he still be able to find it in Beirut, which the poetess Nadia Tuéni once characterized as “the last sanctuary in the East where man can dress in light?” More on this photograph

Maher Attar is a highly renowned Lebanese photographer with 30 years of experience at international photo agencies including AFP, Sygma and Corbis in Paris. He set up his own agency in 2002. In 2006, he founded Art&Privilège, a publishing company specialising in photography, which has published a number of books, and became an Epson-certified “Digigraph“.

Maher’s Bonheur project, inspired from the backstage of famous cabaret Le Lido de Paris, blossomed in the summer of 2006 in the form of a series of exhibitions and a book. Following that, he published Once Upon a Time … Souk Waqif, capturing the mystery and the spirit of the old market in Doha.

Since May 2013, he is devoted to the project Challenges & Reality, sponsored by Education Above All foundation, witnessing the day-to-day circumstances of the children in the hope their right for education. The work was launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York and exhibited at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

In the corporate world, Maher Attar works in the field of luxury products. He has worked with, amongst other, Cristalleries Saint-Louis, which belonged to the Hermès company, and for the Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava. More on Maher Attar. More on Maher Attar

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, 365 Saints, 365 Days, and Biblical Icons, also visit my Boards on Pinterest

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