The Golden Age Is Out of Joint: Photography, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Nostalgia in Lebanon

Nour Annan

The Golden Age Is Out of Joint is a hybrid project taking the form of a written article and a lecture performance  that examines the photographic archive of 1960s Lebanon through the processes that produce its historical meaning. Departing from the common misreading of Lebanon’s so-called golden age and the bourgeois nostalgia that continues to resuscitate it, this project presents another reading of the archive: searching for the pasts and presents that are left out of frame. Building on Walter Benjamin’s notion of “the dialectical image,” a revelatory image that is activated by present readers gazing upon the past, the project presents the photograph as a dialectical image in an alternate temporality of permanent catastrophe. Through repositioning the golden age archive against the purported progress of capitalism, The Golden Age Is Out of Joint asks if and how photographs of the past can fuel our radical imaginations of the future.

Photo by Tania El Khoury