À L'instant T. Serge Najjar

La Galerie Lahumière presents the work of a photographer for the first time, and has chosen Serge Najjar, whose geometric images, captured in the real world, compose spaces that nonetheless seem almost unreal.

Born in Beirut in 1973, Serge Najjar looks at the city with a gaze that departs from any expected representation of Lebanon. Looking differently also means refusing to reduce a country to its wounds. Serge Najjar grew up alongside a family collection kept in Beirut, which brought together works by great masters of abstraction such as Otto Freundlich, Auguste Herbin, Victor Vasarely, Gebran Tarazi, Sonia Delaunay or Aurélie Nemours. He also drew on the exhibition catalogues that piled up in stacks at his parents' home.

Speaking of these great masters, he says: "They trained my eye. But my approach is above all intuitive. I react to what I see. The links with the history of art often appear after the fact. They are the result of influences accumulated since childhood rather than a deliberate wish to reproduce a style."

A jurist and lawyer by training, Serge Najjar began a late vocation at the age of thirty-seven and, against the traditional path, made his way from the mobile phone to film photography. From the German school of objectivism in photography, which he is fond of, running from Bernd and Hilla Becher to Andreas Gursky, he retained the idea that photographic practice can operate in an almost programmatic mode: sticking soberly to what has actually been observed, without staging. Serge Najjar's photographs are never retouched.

His rapid rise to fame is closely tied to social media. In 2011 he was nominated for the Pictet Prize for a photograph taken with his mobile phone. The enthusiasm his work generated was such that the director of Instagram contacted him. He then won the Photomed Prize and published his first book with the support of Jean-Luc Monterosso and Ferrante Ferranti. In 2017, Apple chose one of his photographs for the worldwide advertising campaign for the iPad Pro.