If there’s anything I have gleaned over the course of my engagement with the work of lens-based artist, Nabil Azab, it is that there is a liberatory quality in the act of denial. Azab’s approach to photography rejects the long-canonized idea that the photograph is a neutral documentation of truth, or of the world “as it really is.”  Azab’s approach is an eschewment of the idea that the photograph has to of anything recognizable—a refusal of the notion that the poetic quality of the photograph has to emerge out of an imagined naturalism, which operates as a stage for the interplay of recognizable signs and symbols. In short, it is a turn away from the photographic image as a kind of concrete language.

In their practice, large-scale prints take up a painterly quality through a litany of means; from the use of ecstatic-impulsive snapshots, to repeatedly projecting and re-photographing archival images, and the use of over exposure. At a formal level, abstraction, monochromatic compositions, superimposed marks, and canvas stretchers make frequent appearances. On occasion, the subjects captured by Azab’s camera hover at the edge of discernability. In other cases, we are presented with surfaces suffused with varying washes of color bleeding into one another, calling to mind voices from the Color Field movement. This is not at all to suggest that the artist is interested merely in using photographic techniques to arrive at the painterly. Although the dialogue between painting and photography have been closely interlinked since the onset of the latter’s appearance in the 19th century, in Azab’s case (despite the influence of painting on the artist’s sense of composition) the painterly effect is a byproduct of the artist’s use of the camera—not as a technology of imaging the world, but rather for obfuscating it. And, it is precisely this mode of veiling or obscuring that produces a set of questions regarding the medium as a whole.

Since our first studio visit in 2022—which coincided with Azab’s participation in Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival—we had been floating the idea of recording a conversation together. This October, three years later, I had the pleasure of speaking to Azab. Since that first meeting, they have begun an MFA at the University of California, Riverside, and held exhibitions at Franz Kaka (Toronto), The Visual Arts Center of Clarington, Afternoon Projects (Vancouver), DRAC (Drummondville), and AprilApril (Pittsburgh), among others. In the conversation that follows we discuss the impetus behind their non-objective approach to photography and its political stakes, their use of archival material, their interest in articulating the affective experience of taking a photograph, as well as their recent engagement with capital ‘p’ Painting.

 

 

 

Even when I’m working toward abstraction or non-representation, there’s a political charge there, a negotiation with what photography has historically done. Photography has always been bound up in conversations about power, about legibility, documentation, control.

 

 

 

I wanted to open up by asking about your work’s interest in non-objectivity and photography, and if you could walk us through your process. For me, what differentiates your work from many others is that you seem to be concerned with the non-objective as a formal decision—as something you set up as the endpoint for the final work—especially considering you often begin with so-called legible or clear images that you repeatedly mediate in your process. I think this splits you off from many other artists who work in the expanded field of the photographic—for example, Liz Deschenes or Walead Beshty—whose work arrives at abstraction as a natural byproduct of investigating the physical conditions and constraints of the medium.

Yeah, it’s a really good question. I think it’s something I constantly struggle with: making non-representational works within the context of a representational medium like photography. It’s inherently a kind of struggle I’ve chosen for myself. It’s this really fascinating conversation between audience and artist, because I’m choosing to cover up some things, you know? In some studio visits, frustration comes up for some audiences. There’s this sense of them wanting to know what it is at the root of everything. That brings up a question of authorship—of how much I’m willing to give up for an audience to understand the work better, in terms of form or original images.

My process has changed a lot and it depends on the project. A few years ago, I became really obsessed with re-photographing my family archives—projecting them on a wall, taking them with an analog camera using long exposures. I think of them as a kind of “light painting.” It really became about the affective nature of these memories—the tangibility of memory and the relationship photography has to that, photography’s inherent relationship to a moment that’s just a fraction or a second off reality. I’m interested in that fraction, that sliver, rather than the whole, didactic representation of what’s there—that is, in indexing the emotional and affective moment of taking the photograph, or encountering the image. That little moment of the ecstatic is really where my practice lies, in some ways.

I think it also comes from the history of being a racialized person, living in colonial societies. A lot of the time, we have this covering-up that we have to do, and at the same time this uncovering of our own histories. That process of revealing and covering up comes up often in the final works that I show.

I think it’s really interesting when you talk about this ecstatic or experiential thing. I feel when artists like Deschenes or Beshty explore photography, they do so through the apparatus—through the material constraints of photography. I’ve always thought of your work as investigating photography as a system of meaning or communication. It’s compelling that you bring up this experiential quality—this phenomenological or affective moment that occurs when you take the picture—an index of what the photographer is experiencing at the time of taking the photo. 

I think that’s correct in some ways. A lot of my work is about replicating or trying to replicate this experience of the photographer—that moment of ecstasy, and the complicated nature of doing so. That’s not to say I’m not invested in the material conditions of photography. As I move forward, I’ve become increasingly concerned with them. In my last show, Thought Pictures, at Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, there were so many material concerns about the photograph, about film. But, I do think it’s correct to position the work as being about the person taking the picture as opposed to the picture itself. I like that. Not in an egotistical way, but in acknowledging the complicated relationship we all have to this tool. That’s what guides my fascination. Even now,  I’ve started teaching and seeing how people interact with the medium, and how it changes over generations. A lot of it is about recovering that ecstasy of taking an image. Photography has become so saturated. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s hard to understand the magic of it anymore. But that magic, as corny as it sounds, is real.

Can you expand on this idea of “magic”?

I have a tough time verbalizing it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth mentioning. But I think it’s in conversation with the surreal. That’s why the Surrealists were so involved with photography; there’s a kind of magic that comes from its ease, the ease of reproducing reality around you. I use a lot of analog equipment, and there’s a physical nature to it: working in the darkroom, laying prints in a liquid bath and watching something appear. That moment between taking a photograph and waiting for it to process—I’m curious about that delay in memory, where the camera holds something we don’t yet have access to. It’s an anomaly of the camera. Not to sound like a Luddite, but I do think that’s changing a lot with new technologies. Our relationship to that magic is evolving—and dissipating.

Are you saying that with older forms of photography, part of the magic is that there’s always an irreducible gap—something in the process in which control is lost? 

Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Analog equipment has such a strict aesthetic tied to it. Its material nature funnels things into looking a certain way, whereas with digital photography, the palette is so huge that it’s almost overwhelming. I’m interested in combining those material qualities of delay and process:  in stitching together sequences that embrace that gap.

Totally. I think that when you consider analog photography as being suffused with the labor and actions of the photographer, you’re approaching photography as something really personal. Like, in a classic art-historical sense, one of gestural abstraction’s “things” was indexing the artist’s hand. It feels like you’re approaching photography that way—marking it with human presence—which runs counter to the idea of photography as impersonal, cold, or neutral.

It’s something I struggle with a lot. I’m often trying to make photography unique, to decouple it from that coldness and give it energy again. I’m interested in making it personal, in gesture, in marks. The material qualities of photography become crucial here; how we care for photographs, how they get stored, converted, touched. I’ve made work that magnifies marks of time as a kind of labor of love—how we hold on to memories. Maybe that’s a digression, but photography both enamors and frustrates me. Now that I’m teaching, I realize my training came at an in-between time—fully analog, but then having to learn digital on the go. Many in my generation feel that. We straddle two eras of technology. I’m in this weird space of romanticizing analog but also being fascinated by the new. It feels like a fool’s errand, but it’s something I’m doing.

You do a really good job of it, but I get the wariness—it can veer into sentimentality. An inch too far, and you’re veering into late aughts “hashtag 35mm” territory.

(Laughs) Totally. In my last project I started using a pinhole camera that I built. It really reduced photography to something that could’ve been done in the earliest days of the medium. There’s something valuable about reconnecting to the roots of the technology—to understand its core mechanisms. It’s basically a box with a pinhole and film in the back, exposed to light in a very rudimentary way. That physical understanding of light—its volume, its dimension—is important. I want to take stock of the ramifications of the shifts in the photographic process.

 

 

 

 

 

 

That leads nicely into the next question. In your interview with Radio Vilnius, you mentioned your work is influenced by early histories of photography, which brought to mind a couple thoughts. One was that it reminded me of a lecture I saw years ago by the filmmaker Mark Lewis in which he discussed how early cinema, typified by the Lumière Brothers, formally consisted of short vignettes void of theatrics and narrative. Lewis said something like, “There’s no ontological reason that the moving image had to be inextricably bound to sound and a three-act Aristotelian structure rather than short, silent vignettes of everyday life,” which emphasizes how developments in mediums become naturalized to the point of invisibility. 

The second thought was about how early photography developed so closely with systems of legibility and power—for example, the mugshot, invented by Alphonse Bertillon, which mobilized photography for the sake of classification and classification in the service of law enforcement. I was thinking of your interest in retracing early histories of photography, given your engagement with familial archives and memory. Especially now, considering current events, like the genocide in Gaza, I’m thinking about how the archive and memory are bound up with both violence and representation, occlusion and presence. I do think the way photography immediately became embedded into systems of power is worth thinking about. 

Photography’s relationship to power dynamics—especially empire—is fascinating. I’ve become really interested in histories of portraiture from places like the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Palestine. Look at how photography was exported from the tradition of landscape painting—from Orientalism—into photography itself. There’s this through-line of the “anonymous subject,” these depictions of landscapes and bodies that are completely removed of their indigeneity, their history. I think your point about retracing earlier histories connects directly to the political bent in my work, particularly in how I use archives. Even when I’m working toward abstraction or non-representation, there’s a political charge there, a negotiation with what photography has historically done.

Photography has always been bound up in conversations about power, about legibility, documentation, control. So, for me, working with or against that lineage means thinking about what art is doing in this moment, what photography is doing now. We’re being saturated with images of genocide, of horror, of documentation—and it’s hard to know where to go after that. It’s hard to know what making images means after such constant visual witnessing in increasingly instantaneous and detailed modes. It’s disorienting. 

There’s no point in reproducing those images one-to-one. It’s not about re-presenting violence.

When I think about contemporary photography engaged with the so-called political—especially in biennial or institutional settings—it often tends toward clarity or didacticism. The meaning is pre-determined, foreclosed. Your work seems to move in the opposite direction. You take archival materials and completely obscure or rework them, opening up their possibilities for reading rather than foreclosing them. For example, I’m thinking about when you were working with the Archive of Modern Conflict in Toronto.

It’s a relevant conversation at this moment, especially being in America and making work that touches upon identity. There’s this kind of McCarthyist rebirth happening. It’s disheartening. Artists are now using systems of codes to make work legible to some audiences and illegible to others, trying to skirt around power structures that reject certain works because of what they say. As someone who works with archives tied to histories and subjects that are being denied and disregarded by humanity, it’s a really tough moment. You want to stay true to your ancestors, to make work that honors them, that holds integrity.

When I was searching for images of the construction of the Suez canal, which my great-grandfather helped build, I kept being confronted by images representing the colonial legacy of the project. European soldiers filtering through the canal into North Africa, and ultimately the toppling of colonial statues during the coup. Rephotographing and reworking these images felt like a way to include our oral histories in the project, rather than a stripping away which their blurried contours might evoke. 

I was talking recently with another artist about Félix González-Torres, about his ability to make work that operates on multiple levels. Everyone can understand it on one level, but it resonates so deeply in different ways for different communities. It's an amazing thing to make work that does that.

I think that’s a really beautiful comparison. Could you walk me through your history of working with archival material, where you’re at now, and why? What’s at stake for you in using archival images or objects?

Yeah. It’s an interesting moment for me right now because I’m really experimenting materially while I'm researching. Working with archives is daunting—emotionally, politically. What’s at stake is trying to stay true to what those archives are saying, to their histories. Those things can diverge. The emotional toll of working with archival material is heavy. It’s a hard time to make work for everyone I think. 

In my last show at Franz Kaka, I zeroed in on this newspaper I had found in Toronto which had the headline “Thank you for this beautiful world.” It was published at the turn of the millennium, and I felt like there was this haunting optimism that really spoke of the depravity of images to come, and how they would build the political world around us. My parents were both broadcasters in Egypt. Both of them worked in radio, and I think hearing their stories has really guided my understanding and interest in media and archives. When I was working on that show, I kept hearing this Neil Young song everywhere I went. In it he says “I went to the radio interview / but I ended up alone at the microphone.” That kept ringing in my head for some reason. Again, this relationship to an audience that an artist has—it’s very complicated. 

I’ve gathered all this material and archival resources in the studio. I have this big stack of images I’ve picked out of crowds and gatherings that I’ve always been drawn to. Like my first large scale piece at calaboose, and the most recent work at Franz Kaka—which was a response to Atget’s image of a crowd gathering to observe an eclipse, which was taken not far from where I was born. I often sit on things for a very long time before I understand how I should deal with them. That gap is important, perhaps it allows for some subconscious thought. As artists and researchers, we’re always waiting for a coincidence of some sort, whether materially or conceptually. 

 

 

Photography is full of contradictions. From a young age, I’ve been uninterested in the norms we’ve built around photography to uphold its value—this obsession with immaculate preservation. I think photography can be more dynamic, more magical, more surreal.

 

 

 

Maybe this is a good time to talk about your show at the Visual Art Centre of Clarington, because it sounds like some of these shifts happened there. I’d like to hear about your decision to install prints on the pillars—which left the supports of the canvases exposed—and to scatter film canisters around the space. It seemed like a new approach for you, calling attention to the image’s objecthood in a way I hadn’t seen in your previous work.

Yeah, that show was definitely about material and spatial negotiation with the space itself. The Clarington gallery is such a unique site—it’s an old barley mill that burned down. There’s something really exposed about it. In the winter, it’s freezing; there are all these archival concerns—humidity, light, temperature—that make it non-ideal for photography. But I found that interesting rather than something to avoid. All these flies perish in the ceiling and fall to the ground, and I asked the staff to keep them there. 

They told us we couldn’t drill any holes in the walls. As an artist, that’s initially a shock—like, “How are we going to do this?” But it became an exciting challenge. How do you make work that lives in the space without modifying it? So, I leaned into it. I made large canvas works that could withstand the environment better than photographic paper. They obviously have this relationship to painting too. Everything was exposed, really exposed, which was scary but exciting. The whole show was naturally lit; no artificial lighting at all. Sometimes beams of light would fall directly on the canvases, changing the image completely. At first, I panicked—“Oh my God, the work’s changing!”—but it felt right to let the space interact with the images. To fight against it seemed futile. The works were collage-based, thinking about the history of the building, the history of early pinhole images, and I wanted to inject vibrant color—a shift from the dark wood of the space.

As for the film canisters, that was a gesture that my curator, Danica, was initially surprised by. But I was interested in shedding my archive, making it vulnerable. I scattered film rolls from the last several years throughout the space in these little canisters. People could see them, touch them. It was therapeutic—going through all those photos I’d taken, bottling them up, then re-exposing them to light, compromising their integrity. It was about that tension; exposure, vulnerability, light, ruin.

That’s awesome. This participatory quality strangely brings to mind Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography, in which she really hones in on the political stakes of photography as a polyphonous and multi-faceted encounter between viewer, subject, and photographer, and how it constitutes of certain form of citizenship outside of the state.

I love Azoulay. There’s a line—or maybe it’s in a poem of hers—where she says, “Shake the photograph as craft.” That phrase sticks with me. 

I was thinking about your work as marked by a kind of poetic and reckless openness. You expose the photograph to so many elements—light, architecture, time—allowing it to be remediated again and again. Even in your formal abstraction, you resist over-determining meaning. You let the image sit open, muddied, opaque, and open to interpretation.

It can be reckless sometimes! But I think you put it well. Photography is full of contradictions. From a young age, I’ve been uninterested in the norms we’ve built around photography to uphold its value—this obsession with immaculate preservation. I think photography can be more dynamic, more magical, more surreal. That’s harder to read, and that’s okay. The frustration and the reward are intertwined. I’m fascinated when people call a work “generous.” It says something about the artist’s relationship to the audience. I’ve been thinking a lot about that—how people perceive work, what they get out of it, and what art should do in society.

So you’re kind of talking about the participatory nature of photography.

Yeah, absolutely. Photography is deeply participatory, not only because the photographic image folds in so many participants into its orbit but because we all do it. It’s ubiquitous.But people are less comfortable making their own meaning out of it. They’d rather be told what it means. I’m interested in the opposite—in images that can live on their own, with autonomy.

I like this idea of autonomy. There’s a kind of dialectical negotiation of the medium happening in your practice—a rejection of the photograph’s mimetic reproduction of life for a mode that leans into an emotional register that comes through via an obfuscation of the pictured subject. I think emphasizing the fact that a photographic image is always “missing” something—whether it's something which lies outside the frame or the context of its reception—is important now. Even in the age of AI, misinformation, etc., people still believe in photographs as didactic and straightforward at the level of meaning precisely because they reproduce reality. Your work reveals the contradiction—that even “natural” images are primed with gaps in their interpretability, always mediated, always withholding something—by formally pushing it in the opposite direction.

Yeah, totally. Even in the clearest image, something’s withheld. I like leaning into that—pushing it to the nth degree.

One thing I wanted to ask about is your use of frames in conjunction with your photographs. Sometimes they’re inscribed with text, sometimes they have a reflexive function. I’m thinking about the silver band running along the edge of the magenta work from Open Channel (2022). 

Yeah. Framing is funny because it’s so basic yet so under-discussed. In photography, it’s often treated as purely functional, which I think is a missed opportunity. For Open Channel, I actually designed those frames myself with a framer in Montréal. I drew them out, and we figured out this acrylic lip system: the photograph is mounted onto aluminum, which is attached to a wooden subframe, and then a clear acrylic lip is drilled in around the edge. So there’s nothing in front of the photograph—no glass. That was deliberate. I’ve always hated anti-reflective glass; even when it’s good, it still feels like a barrier.

The show title Open Channel came partly from that idea: creating an unmediated encounter, like being directly in front of the work. Ironically, that’s rare in photography, which we almost always experience through layers—the glass of a frame, a phone screen, a monitor. That desire for immediacy also drew me toward printing on canvas, using inkjet and emulsion. Canvas can support itself without glass, and you can actually see the texture of the material right in front of you. For Pumice Raft, I made huge canvas works with wooden frames with drawings and automatic poems engraved into the sides. They related to the images and their archival sources, tying back to ideas of authorship and gesture. Some inscriptions were legible, others asemic—echoing the conversation we’ve had about legibility and photography.

That’s great. Often, the frame is relegated to a kind of non-space that marks the boundary between the artwork and the world, but in your case it becomes incorporated.

Exactly. Instead of being a historically charged box, the frame becomes part of the work.

It’s interesting, too, because painting (and sculpture, as famously articulated by Michael Fried) has wrestled with its relationship to objecthood since the ’60s. But photography often still tries to suspend it—to deny that photography’s materiality, its object-ness.

Totally. After that Clarington show, people didn’t know how to read the pieces—as paintings or photographs. And honestly, I don’t care.

Same—I had to look up the materials list! (Laughs) Could you tell me more about your recent explorations in painting? I’m curious how you see the discourse of painting informing photography in your own work, and vice versa.

That’s a great question. Honestly, I’ve always painted, I just left it out of the institution. I was trained as a photographer, so painting felt like something I did privately. But painting has always shaped my sense of composition and color. When I go to a museum, I’m drawn to paintings first.

In a historical sense, a lot of early photographers pulled photography toward painting to legitimize it. For me, though, it’s more intuitive—those compositional instincts just seep in. For years, painting and photography felt like parallel lines that never met. Lately they’ve started to merge. I’ve been experimenting with using cyanotype, photographic emulsion, and tinted dyes as paint. I’ve been printing on transparencies, layering, solar-tinting—almost like screen printing. It’s about taking photographic materials and using them to start a composition from scratch, treating them as painterly tools. It’s exciting. It feels like all the vocabulary and material knowledge I’ve built through photography are feeding into a new language—one that’s painterly but still grounded in the photographic.

What are you reading and looking at right now?

Mostly nonfiction, which might be a problem. (Laughs) Actually, it’s funny you mentioned Ariella Azoulay earlier because I’ve been doing a deeper dive into her writing this summer. Her work is really important to me. I also just read Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear—moving to L.A. I’ve been thinking about the apocalyptic landscape here, the fires, the tension between nature and urbanity.

There are so many great movie theaters in L.A. I’ve been seeing as much as possible, especially horror lately since it’s Halloween season.

Reading-wise, a lot on Dada and Surrealism, a lot of photographic theory last year—Barthes, Sekula. It’s interesting to revisit theory after some time away. I want to reread The Undercommons now that I’m back in school.

And just seeing as much art as possible—there was a great Bruce Nauman show at Marian Goodman recently. There’s always something happening here.

I have one other question. This one comes from our friend Emily (Zuberec)—she told me to ask you about propaganda.

Propaganda?

It was posed in an open and enigmatic way—on brand for a poet.

That’s such a psychotic question. (Laughs) Okay—if we psychoanalyze it, maybe it ties to what we’ve been talking about already.

To call something “fascist” or “totalitarian” is probably too strong, but there is something insidious about over-determined images—images that are too clear, too prescribed. Propaganda flattens meaning. It leaves no space for contradiction.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, especially living in the U.S., looking at how artists historically reacted to fascist regimes and propaganda. Actually, I’ve started making a video—my first real video work—about that. It’s based on a childhood memory from when France won the Euro Cup while I was living in Paris. I remember everyone celebrating on the street, and I’ve been thinking about flags—how flags function visually as tools of manipulation. Here in the U.S., there are flags everywhere. The video connects that memory to now: looking at how sports and daily life intertwine with nationalism, how visual symbols like flags replicate empire in subtle and overt ways.

Yeah, that makes sense. A flag, like a didactic image, can act as a specific kind of sign that seeks to efface the possibility of difference.

Exactly. Propaganda flattens. It removes nuance. It replaces contradiction with “truth.” It says, “Here—this is reality.”

That flattening is the danger.