Houses of Uncertain Stories
Light Work Contact Sheet 228 - Nabil Harb
2025
Light Work Contact Sheet 228 - Nabil Harb
2025
Inhale. Absorb. Exhale. Absorb. Here’s another one in humidity, exhale. Throat almost cleared, voice cracks.There’s another one, inhale. Deep voices crack. Two weeks of phlegm, two weeks of him, too weak as we are preparing to leave the country, preparing to leave this house.
As we leave, Camels burn, black swans circle, and sinkholes penetrate. The orange groves that shade the nude are murdered in monochrome next to the prison, and the houses of uncertain stories next to the man-made lake are waiting for the intruders from above.
My great-aunt and great-uncle moved to Florida in their autumn years—my great-grandma followed. When I met them, years before their migration, they lived in the town over from where Walker Evans made his masterpiece with the steel mill and the concrete cross, prophesizing the future in silver. Giving them hugs as a four-year-old was the first time I smelled menthol cigarettes embedded in flannels, and not just the smell of someone who smokes but the smell of someone who smokes inside. You know, and if you don’t, then I’m sure you don’t like pleasureand I’m sure you don’t need your BetterHelp subscription.
When my great-grandma returned north as her sun was setting and Bush Jr.’s was rising, she said it was the trip from hell. As soon as she arrived home to Pennsylvania, she died. That was the first cold body I saw, in my grandparents’ living room, hovering over top of the blue carpet with white trees and flora hugging the edges of the frame. This was, and is, a living room that is not touched outside of family portraits and staged for visual class performance for visitors takinga piss in the bathroom next to the piano that I would get yelled at for hitting too hard with absolutely no harmony—I’M JUST TRYING TO ROCK GRANDMA—it clearly wasn’t the right tool for me.
What is the right tool here? Right now. Not then, not for me, but for Nabil, because he is why we are here. I know in this setting of some arty essay, talking about gear is taboo, and to the people who think we shouldn’t talk about it, I wanna say, go fuck yourself. I love cameras. There, I said it. The meeting of mind and body in a specific place and time along with the chosen machine,creating problems to be solved visually, is the only reason we’re looking at this experience torn between worlds in Nabil’s silver harmony. You need to know your tool in order to forget it and move on through the landscape becoming the air. Nabil’s black-and-white photographs are classical in form, no frills, just faith in light and air, and that’s actually perverse, deceptive, and radical in the destructive saturation of 2024.
In this shared air Nabil is a landscape photographer, even when he’s photographing queens in a horizonless shack escaping their 9-to-5 finding fleeting communion, or a stiff bunker housing military equipment waiting to be repaired. Landscape photographers use big rigid cameras trying to assert their dominance over god and make up for what god didn’t give them—look at how that turned out for Atlas. But that isn’t Nabil, he uses a silent Sony, camouflaged as a consumer camera no one would ever expect to be sculpting a rebellion from reflected particles meeting the lens. When we think we’re alone, the shutter stays open, knowing we’re not alone. Holding its hand out, the lens waits to greet, to absorb. Here, absorption is connection, absorption is power when we feel powerless. The lens opening, taking in particles which travel across the sea, unite the final image with twoworlds—Palestine and Florida. Even though the body can only be in one, the blood pulsates from both.
Camels burned, black swans left, orange groves frozen from the unseasonal frost ruining the harvest, but the houses still stand for now, still waiting for their next story.
Now, we are back, standing next to the man-made lake, cursing the midday light as we continue to speculate about the number of stories. The houses look like they’re one story, because they’re a long story. Stories made before US and without us, yet what we were born into. Now, as we circle the lake, we’re left writing our story, meeting the story fed to us, fragments, as memory goes on this shared plate.
As we leave, Camels burn, black swans circle, and sinkholes penetrate. The orange groves that shade the nude are murdered in monochrome next to the prison, and the houses of uncertain stories next to the man-made lake are waiting for the intruders from above.
My great-aunt and great-uncle moved to Florida in their autumn years—my great-grandma followed. When I met them, years before their migration, they lived in the town over from where Walker Evans made his masterpiece with the steel mill and the concrete cross, prophesizing the future in silver. Giving them hugs as a four-year-old was the first time I smelled menthol cigarettes embedded in flannels, and not just the smell of someone who smokes but the smell of someone who smokes inside. You know, and if you don’t, then I’m sure you don’t like pleasureand I’m sure you don’t need your BetterHelp subscription.
When my great-grandma returned north as her sun was setting and Bush Jr.’s was rising, she said it was the trip from hell. As soon as she arrived home to Pennsylvania, she died. That was the first cold body I saw, in my grandparents’ living room, hovering over top of the blue carpet with white trees and flora hugging the edges of the frame. This was, and is, a living room that is not touched outside of family portraits and staged for visual class performance for visitors takinga piss in the bathroom next to the piano that I would get yelled at for hitting too hard with absolutely no harmony—I’M JUST TRYING TO ROCK GRANDMA—it clearly wasn’t the right tool for me.
What is the right tool here? Right now. Not then, not for me, but for Nabil, because he is why we are here. I know in this setting of some arty essay, talking about gear is taboo, and to the people who think we shouldn’t talk about it, I wanna say, go fuck yourself. I love cameras. There, I said it. The meeting of mind and body in a specific place and time along with the chosen machine,creating problems to be solved visually, is the only reason we’re looking at this experience torn between worlds in Nabil’s silver harmony. You need to know your tool in order to forget it and move on through the landscape becoming the air. Nabil’s black-and-white photographs are classical in form, no frills, just faith in light and air, and that’s actually perverse, deceptive, and radical in the destructive saturation of 2024.
In this shared air Nabil is a landscape photographer, even when he’s photographing queens in a horizonless shack escaping their 9-to-5 finding fleeting communion, or a stiff bunker housing military equipment waiting to be repaired. Landscape photographers use big rigid cameras trying to assert their dominance over god and make up for what god didn’t give them—look at how that turned out for Atlas. But that isn’t Nabil, he uses a silent Sony, camouflaged as a consumer camera no one would ever expect to be sculpting a rebellion from reflected particles meeting the lens. When we think we’re alone, the shutter stays open, knowing we’re not alone. Holding its hand out, the lens waits to greet, to absorb. Here, absorption is connection, absorption is power when we feel powerless. The lens opening, taking in particles which travel across the sea, unite the final image with twoworlds—Palestine and Florida. Even though the body can only be in one, the blood pulsates from both.
Camels burned, black swans left, orange groves frozen from the unseasonal frost ruining the harvest, but the houses still stand for now, still waiting for their next story.
Now, we are back, standing next to the man-made lake, cursing the midday light as we continue to speculate about the number of stories. The houses look like they’re one story, because they’re a long story. Stories made before US and without us, yet what we were born into. Now, as we circle the lake, we’re left writing our story, meeting the story fed to us, fragments, as memory goes on this shared plate.