At the Precise Moment. Serge Najjar

Born in Beirut in 1973, Serge Najjar looks at the city in a way that deviates from any expected representation of Lebanon. Looking differently also means refusing to reduce a country to its wounds. Serge Najjar grew up in contact with a family collection kept in Beirut, bringing together the works of great masters of abstraction such as Otto Freundlich, Auguste Herbin, Victor Vasarely, Gebran Tarazi, Sonia Delaunay, or Aurélie Nemours. He was also nourished by the exhibition catalogs that piled up at his parents' home.

Regarding these great masters, he says: "They trained my eye. But my approach is above all intuitive. I react to what I see. The connections with art history often appear after the fact. They are the result of influences accumulated since childhood rather than a deliberate desire to reproduce a style."

A jurist and lawyer by training, Serge Najjar began a late vocation at thirty-seven and accomplished, contrary to the traditional path, a journey that led him from the mobile phone to film photography. From the so-called German Objectivist school of photography, which he is fond of, from Bernd and Hilla Becher to Andreas Gursky, he retains the idea that photographic practice can be carried out in an almost programmatic mode: soberly sticking to what has actually been observed, without staging. Serge Najjar's photographs are never retouched.

His rapid notoriety is intimately linked to social media. In 2011, he was nominated for the Pictet Prize for a photograph taken with his mobile phone. The enthusiasm for his work was such that the director of Instagram contacted him. He then won the Photomed Prize and published his first book with the support of Jean-Luc Monterosso and Ferrante Ferranti. In 2017, Apple chose one of his photographs for the global advertising campaign for the iPad Pro. Today he is followed by more than 130,000 people and his work is the subject of numerous publications, in all languages, even Japanese.

Serge Najjar searches construction site walls for images, shapes, or accidental clues that echo, in retrospect, the artists who shaped his gaze. Not all could naturally be in the family collection: Kupka, Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, or Bridget Riley. He also gladly cites Alexander Rodchenko as a major reference. His gaze is also marked by compositions from the Swiss school of concrete art, represented in particular by Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, and Verena Loewensberg.

Where photography could allow for the forgetting of traditional pictorial norms in favor of a new kind of art, Serge Najjar paradoxically brings us back to the history of painting. It is by scrutinizing the observable reality that he brings out forms that evoke abstract paintings totally freed from the representation of nature.

His predilection for concrete, particularly visible in his photographs, might be surprising. An unloved material, often associated with wild urbanization and an initially limited aesthetic, concrete nevertheless offers an extraordinary diversity of possibilities. It allows for curves as well as the most daring angles. Its composition can be transformed, its surfaces present a great variety of textures and colors: it thus constitutes a true palette.

Concrete is also the material associated with the trio that forms his pantheon of architects: Le Corbusier, Tadao Ando, and Oscar Niemeyer. Admiring architects does not mean wanting to photograph their works. Oscar Niemeyer built, in the 1960s, the Rashid Karami International Fair in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, but Serge Najjar never photographs a finished architecture. When he visits Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille, he does not photograph it either.

If he never photographs a finished architecture, it is because he seeks to capture the possibility of an image contained in an architecture under construction. In a word: create rather than reproduce, even subjectively. His photographs thus bring out, in ordinary constructions, relationships of lines, planes, colors, and proportions that evoke the research of concrete art.

Serge Najjar's work suggests that what is photographed had perhaps never been truly seen or noticed. It produces in the spectator an illusion, a reversal of meaning, a unveiling. Photography gives the subject a value it did not seem to possess before being shot.

"Who sees my photos sees my thoughts," said American photographer Duane Michals. Brassaï, for his part, emphasized to Jean-Claude Gautrand: "The photographer invents nothing. He imagines everything."

Serge Najjar composes and dismantles space in his mind before clicking. It is through framing that he eliminates what is foreign to the meaning he wishes to give to the image.

He sees, in the object he observes, the photograph he is going to take. Facing his lens, the walls, of which he never hides the irregularities, seem to carry living canvases within them.

Serge Najjar, who thinks a lot in black and white, in shadow and light, does not, however, hesitate to fix with his camera frank flat areas of color, in the neo-plasticist manner. The colors are not necessarily primary, but they can remind one of Michel Seuphor's commentary on Piet Mondrian, who wrote that he thus humanized, through color, his painting or construction projects.

Serge Najjar above all makes visible what would have gone unnoticed by the naked eye, what Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he admires, called "the decisive moment." When a worker crosses the site, he becomes an integral part of the composition, without having to pose. His photographs thus underline the human factor of the working condition, inseparable from the life of a construction site. Even more so, the human presence keeps an essential contradiction open: it gives scale and brings abstraction back to reality, reminding the spectator that he is looking at a photograph and not a painting.

The photographs gathered here, mostly taken during the summer of 2026, testify to a simple conviction: abstraction can be found in reality, provided you know how to see it: At the precise moment.