Jeroen R. Kramer - Une Femme

About the book:

Si Une Femme est avant tout un roman de J.R.Kramer, il a également inspiré Sjors Swierstra la réalisation d'un documentaire, appelé The Life According to Mr Khiar (La vie selon M. Khiar), qui s'appuie sur le personnage principal du livre, M. Khiar. Le roman est écrit de manière expérimentale ; les pages sont faites de transcriptions d'enregistrements, de notes et de photographies. Le style de la prose enregistrée nous donne envie d'observer les photos quand les photographies énigmatiques nous incitent à lire la prose. Le personnage principal est suivi par un photographe obsédé par sa volonté de raconter l'histoire de M. Khiar qui cache une part sombre de son passé et refuse de la révéler. Les deux personnages font de grandes promenades à travers Beyrouth et ils deviennent amis. A la fin, que le passé soit révélé ou non n'a que peu d’importance.

Although Une Femme is first and foremost a novel by J.R. Kramer, it also inspired Sjors Swierstra to make a documentary called The Life According to Mr Khiar, based on the book's main character, Mr Khiar. The novel is written experimentally; the pages are made up of transcriptions of recordings, notes and photographs. The style of the recorded prose makes us want to look at the photographs, while the enigmatic photographs encourage us to read the prose. The main character is followed by a photographer obsessed with telling the story of Mr Khiar, who is hiding a dark part of his past and refuses to reveal it. The two characters take long walks through Beirut and become friends. In the end, whether or not the past is revealed is of little importance

About the artist:

Jeroen Robert Kramer (1967, Amsterdam) lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. After studying French literature in France, in 2000 he started working in the Middle East as a documentary photographer for Getty Images, de Volkskrant, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and others. His photographs were used in articles on the Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan, Burma (now Myanmar), and the Philippines.

After an unremitting study of life and death in the barren, war-torn Middle East, his work began to reflect his inner struggles with human fallibility, aesthetic constraints, and the harsh perceptions of his profession. In 2008 Kramer decided to stop working as a documentary photographer and in war zones, and to embark on a new, more poetic journey. This led to the book Room 103 (2010), in which images of daily life in the Middle East are intermingled with images of terrible violence. This book won the Dutch Doc Award and the New York Photo Book Festival Award. In 2012 Kramer published the book Beyrouth Objets Trouvés, which in retrospect he regards as a preliminary study for Une Femme.