Stereotypes Vol. 005

A volume in the Lebanese-American artist Lucien Samaha's self-published ftA (from the Archive) series, Stereotypes Vol. 005 collects collages that splice the swaggering leading men and starlets of vintage Arabic-language movie magazines into pointed, funny recombinations.

Issued in New York in 2022 as a signed first-edition softcover, the zine draws on Samaha's collage practice rooted in his long engagement with Arab visual culture. He was an early member of the Arab Image Foundation, and his cut-and-paste works recirculate the printed ephemera of mid-century Beirut and Cairo pop cinema, probing the stock characters its title names.

Samaha (b. Beirut) is best known as a pioneer of digital photography (while at Kodak he shot among the first digital photographs ever taken) and as an obsessive archivist of his own life: three decades of images from airline galleys, New York nightclubs, and the Windows on the World DJ booth, sequenced into ongoing self-published series like FLM and ftA.