# MILITARIZED ARCHITECTURES /// Beirut & Cairo: The Dangerousness of the Photograph
While I was recently spending some time in Beirut and Cairo, one of the things that stroke me is the difficulty to represent these cities through photography. Of course, this is always true when one visits a new city; photographs tend to correspond more to the confirmation of the vision one had before visiting it than to a fair representation. In the case of Beirut, that could materialize through a focus on its ruins from the war and thus the repetition of a representative cliché, rather than showing the profusion of unaesthetic luxury towers. But the exercise is even more difficult because of the regular denial of representation enforced by private security forces or the army itself. An important part of the city reaches an important degree of militarization that materialize through the multitude of road obstacles, gates, concrete walls (often painted like the Lebanese flag), defensive kiosks, trained dog houses, road checkpoints, and other militaristic apparatuses, none of which are easy to photograph, since their very function is to survey public space and its bodies’ behaviors.
▻http://thefunambulist.net/2015/03/11/militarized-architectures-beirut-cairo-the-dangerousness-of-the-phot
#architecture #photographie #Caire #Beirut
cc @albertocampiphoto