Antranik Anouchian
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Excerpt from: January 14, 2005 Newsday
Mideast stock shots - minus war and tyranny
Most striking is a wall of some 4,000 ID photos by Antranik Anouchian (1908-1991), a Turkish-born Armenian immigrant whose studio was in Tripoli, Lebanon. Taken for passports, licenses, permits and the like, these portraits offer a kind of random cross section of Tripoli society. Oddly, though, Raad and Zaatari have mounted them into a mammoth mosaic that wipes out the singularity of the separate faces. It's a curious echo of the Western media's take on the Middle East, in which individual dramas are subsumed into larger stories of war, devastation and tyranny.