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THE PIGEON'S ROCK series are 16 digital black and white diminutive photographs depicting young men and boys jumping off Beirut’s coastal cliffs facing the notorious arch-like "Pigeons’ Rock". The photographs emphasis an exaggerated display of machismo that defines male-to-male relations in patriarchal societies. The only woman taking part in the spectacle is behind the lens. Rock diving remains a leisure sport passed from one generation to the next. It is twinned to the city's contemporary circumstances, reflecting socio-economic conditions such as cleaving class divisions, stark political indifference to the lower rungs of the economic ladder and creeping unemployment, which leaves far too many young men in Lebanon without work, money or adequate means of empowerment. The photographs embody a lurking paradox: the weatherworn timelessness of Beirut in spite of modernity and the postwar policy of reconstruction. |
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