E R I C    G O T T E S M A N

selections from
STUDIO KARMEN
Project Statement

(see video from Studio Karmen here)

In 2006, I met Ahmad in Amman, Jordan.  We were both photographers.  Besides that, we had little in common. He was dressed in a suit and asked me questions like “What are the rules of photography?” and “What is a correct photograph?”: the questions of a shopkeeper, someone for whom photography was a way to make a living. I had never considered photography to be so governed by rules, to be so limited.

A few years later, involved in my own questions about how to relate to photography, I decided to track him down. I found Ahmad in his studio in Zarqa, 45 minutes from Amman.

Studio Karmen, established in 1970, began with a desk on the ground floor, where Ahmad met his clients. Lacking backdrops, Ahmad bought a catalog of Spanish backdrops and, in his own hand, began painting these backdrops and mounting them on rolling wooden doors for Zarqawis to pose in front of. These backgrounds offered a sort of fantasyland. Customers stood in front of fake hanging gardens, a library, a plastic Donald Duck, a classic full-sized car but most importantly: a hand-sculpted recreation of Sefferin, Ahmad’s childhood village in Palestine. 

Since then, Ahmad has amassed over 800,000 negatives. In the 1970s and 1980s, parents lined up to have Ahmad take pictures of their children. 

On the faux-stucco wall of his Sefferin recreation hangs various objects Ahmad brought with him from Palestine and that he describes as “very very old.”  To reiterate the imaginary age of this constructed structure, he has taken a chunk out of the false surface and exposed the “mud” wall underneath the “stucco.”  Even in his long-displaced memory of Palestine, a history is revealed that predates his memory and is submerged beneath. 

Studio Karmen offers the opportunity to be photographed in the “old” places, and in the places Zarqawis dream of going.  Ahmad longs for the time in his life when he could visit Sefferin, the Palestinian town in which his family still maintains a home.  As a photographer, he daydreams of the days of analog photography. 

He was an expert retoucher of color negatives and thinks digital photography makes faces (his specialty) look plastic and “without blood.”  The studio feels abandoned now, voices echoing through the empty halls.  He may turn it into a hair salon as a way to make a profit. 

In other projects about studio photography, notably Akraam Zataari's work with Hashem el-Madani, we see the studio photographer as a visionary chronicler of people in a specific place and time. This project is a portrait of a studio, a visual meditation on a space constructed from the nostalgic imagination of one man, a refugee from Palestine and a refugee from his own time.  As the memory of Sefferin fades, as digital tools offer potential clients more variety, as cameras become more prevalent, the public need for studio photographs has decreased.  The traffic in Studio Carmen has slowed to a trickle.  What will become of this space of imagination and photography?