These photographs are part of a larger project in which the artist Akram Zaatari has explored the archive of photographer Hashem El Madani. From 1948 to 2008, Madani operated a photography studio in Saida, Lebanon, where he produced hundreds of thousands of photographs—mostly studio portraits. In Zaatari’s presentations of selections of Madani’s portraits—in this example, photos of men posing with guns—the images become as much about the ever-shifting personal, historical, artistic, and economic value of photographs as they are about the individuals pictured, whose names are unknown to us.
Additional text from Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016