London Bridge (2012, Edition 1/3) is a striking work from Ziad Antar’s photographic series featuring renowned touristic sites. Captured in Cairo, New York, and London, the series reflects on how these architectural feats convey implicit narratives of power, wealth, and progress.

Utilising a 1948 Kodak Reflex II camera with expired mid-1970s film, Antar's technique complicates conceptions of these locales, rendering the iconic structures as decaying in the resulting grainy images. The C-print was created using a complex chromogenic process. This approach subverts the immediacy typical of contemporary photography, prompting critical reflections on the medium's constraints. Through this work, Antar explores the porous boundaries of memory, time, and geography in today's interconnected world. The work interrogates our spatio-temporal relationships to monumental structures.

Ziad Antar (b. 1978, Saida, Lebanon) is a contemporary Lebanese video artist and photographer whose work explores the material complexity and conceptual depth of the photographic medium. Trained in Agricultural Engineering at the American University of Beirut, Antar shifted his focus to the arts after participating in a pivotal workshop led by Lebanese filmmakers Mahmoud Hojeij and Akram Zaatari in 2001. He pursued studies at the École Supérieure d’Études Cinématographiques in Paris, where he honed his distinctive approach to image-making. He gained significant recognition through his residencies at the Palais de Tokyo and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which solidified his place in the contemporary art scene.

Antar is renowned for his use of expired film and outdated cameras, which infuse his work with a sense of nostalgia and an intentional questioning of photographic conventions. His practice often juxtaposes the ephemeral with the enduring in his compositions. Antar’s work has been exhibited internationally, with solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as the New Museum in New York, MAXXI in Rome, and the Sharjah Art Foundation. His pieces are held in prestigious collections including the Centre Pompidou and the British Museum. Antar currently divides his time between Saida and Paris, where he continues to expand the boundaries of photographic art.