Rasha Kahil Among The Graves

It's always the rawness in Rasha Kahil's photography which gets to me. No matter what she does - and she is insanely prolific, seemingly living with a camera sewn on the end of her arm like Weegee - it always has this ruggedness, raggedness, roughness to it. Sometimes she makes me think of Nan Goldin, sometimes of Weegee, sometimes of Terry Richardson, sometimes Elinor Carucci, sometimes Wolfgang Tillmans - sometimes of filmmaker John Cassavetes. Very much a diarist, following a blog is to follow Rasha wherever she goes/ whatever she does: trips back to her hometown of Beirut, the rest of Lebanon; trips around England; magazine commissions - but mostly it's the story of her life in London - faces come around time and time again until they become familiar to those following her work. Oh yeah, you think, there's X or Y, she looks more tired/ run down than last time she was photographed - or he/ she looks happier/ healthier. The work tracks the ups and downs. Sometimes people appear and then disappear - transient figures who briefly seem to obsess Rasha and then they're gone. The photographs below feature another Rasha subject, Sarah, set loose in what appears to be Highgate cemetery. The work made me think generally of Georges Bataille's writings. It's another arresting series from Rasha with all her hallmarks: rawness, irreverence, the sense that what is happening in the photographs is out of sync with 'conventional everyday life'. It's a running theme in Rasha's work - her self portraits are nearly always nudes: her successful travelling series (now off to Istanbul from Beirut) In Your Home, is only that: Rasha placing herself naked and secretly in other people's spaces. There are plenty of other self portraits in which she places herself naked in public spaces too - often forests, open spaces. Logistically, you sense she gets a huge kick out of repeating this same story over and over. Anyway, here's a mini-series edit of the series 'Sarah Among The Graves' Rasha took of someone she knows playing muse and acting inside the usual Rasha preoccupation.