Abu Suwra

Abu Sura is a photographic performance piece staged by Eldad Menuhin and Omar Yair at the Midburn Festival in 2016. As descendants of Babylonian exiles with a strong fondness for the Arab-Jewish-Iraqi accent and vocabulary, the name we gave to the performance is based on garbled Arabic that originated with immigrants to Israel from Arab countries. “Sura” is a picture or photograph in Arabic. The prefix “Abu” describes a professional. When Jewish immigrants from Baghdad arrived in Israel, they stopped using the word describing a hairdresser: “mezayen,” because it did not translate well in Hebrew where the word had a negative sexual meaning. This is how the book became “Abu-Se’ar.” Which led to the name Abu-Sura, which is also bad usage in Arabic: a photographer in Arabic is "musawwir". In the garbled translation, it gains another reading that means “fathers of photography.” The performance included a white tent and a large format camera that was manufactured between 1920 and 1950, which was refurbished especially for the event. Using a large format camera slows down the pace of the photographing and requires concentration. The subject must not move for several minutes once the camera is focused and until the shutter is pressed. The person being photographed and the photographer are together for a relatively long moment, without distractions, breathing the desert air and sharing a gaze. The book brings together reputable acts of photography into a singular event.