“In every photograph,” French theorist Roland Barthes wrote in his book Camera Lucida (1980), there is “the return of the dead.” If photography always captures a moment in the past, then every time we look at a photograph, that specific moment it captures in time is continued in the present, even if those in the photo are long gone. This makes photography a memorial medium, spurring us to remember those depicted, but equally, as Barthes’ return of the dead suggests, a ghostly one. In his project The Company of Silver Spectres, Lebanese artist Raed Yassin, underwrites this tension. Moreover, he sharpens the ghostly to the extent that haunting itself becomes an act of remembrance.

For many years now Yassin has been collecting old black and white photographs that he finds at flea markets, antique shops, or auctions. Originally, he limited his search to Lebanon and the Arab world but has since widened his geographical scope. What unifies these photos is their focus on the actual people whose lives are recorded, rather than on the events, settings, or landscapes that might have been of importance for them to commemorate. These typical but intimate keepsakes of family life tell stories we, as strangers, will never be privy to. Taken in times before images became digital, ubiquitous and disposable, these photos are cherished signifiers of family narratives, belonging and lives past. And yet, Yassin has found them discarded and no longer precious.

If these photos are an attempt to trick time and have the people in them, perhaps long deceased, accompany us into the present, then Yassin, strangely, suspends time. By spray-painting the photos in monochromatic colours, he blots out their specificity and summons ghosts. The image only faintly shimmers through the layers of paint. What seems like a radical act of erasure becomes, paradoxically, a gesture of preservation: these images are never laid to rest and will forever continue to haunt. Ghosts are elusive and therefore preclude full comprehension. The viewer is faced with a series of framed colourful rectangles that are equally challenging to make sense of. Only close inspection reveals the absent presence of the photographs. If anything, these vibrant colours stand in stark contrast with the sense of loss the “return of the dead” elicits. Yassin came of age during Lebanon’s Civil War (1975-1990) and lost most of his own family photographs. Personal photographic archives extend a sense of belonging, family, and community. They can serve as aspirational expressions of a time before disaster, while at the same time, as is the case in Lebanon and other places where the end of the war has failed to bring political and social reconciliation, invite ghosts to linger.

In The Company of Silver Spectres, the personal is spectrally reconstituted into the universal. It is a poignant reminder that working through trauma, be it individual or as is the case in so many conflict zones, collective, is always a communion with ghosts. To compile an archive, or anti-archive as the artist calls it, of the ghostly, demonstrates a compulsion to compute loss, make absences count and fight forgetfulness.