Discordia

Discordia takes its title from the Roman goddess of discord and strife, and gathers Moises Saman's photographs made between 2011 and 2014 while he worked as a photojournalist across Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria during the Arab Spring.

Rather than the captioned, event-driven images Saman filed for The New York Times, The New Yorker and TIME, the book strips away text and chronology, building long sequences of double-page spreads, isolated images and provocative juxtapositions to convey what he has described as the way the era's overlapping revolutions blurred into a single memory. The volume includes a series of photo collages made by the Dutch-Iranian artist Daria Birang from Saman's negatives, cutting and repeating fragments of gesture and crowd, and closes with short essays by Saman describing individual encounters from his years living in the region. The project was supported by the Incite Project, the Guggenheim Foundation, the W. Eugene Smith Fund and Magnum's Collectors Circle, and was self-published in 2016.

Saman, a Peruvian-Spanish photographer and member of Magnum Photos, has covered conflict and its aftermath across the Middle East, Africa and Asia for two decades. Discordia stands apart from his editorial assignments as a personal, subjective account of the same events, and won the 2016 Anamorphosis Prize for self-published photobooks.