Untitled (Oran), from the series Diary: Exile, 2014-2016

Coinciding with “Platform Africa,” Aperture is pleased to present a series of limited-edition prints by artists featured in the issue.

“The photographs in Abdo Shanan’s series Diary: Exile (2014–16) take viewers by the hand and race them through a vertiginous world of gritty, everyday intimacies. Imagine Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus meeting Roger Ballen in the inner cities of twenty-first-century Algeria to produce work that none of them had the background or experience to perceive. He points his camera up to catch a shredded campaign poster or the face of a woman laughing, down to catch a splash of white paint on the sidewalk, a hand on a leopard-print coat, or a pair of lovers rolling on the ground. In Shanan’s series, there are friends, strangers, twins, soiled bedsheets, signs of poverty, hardship, and distress, as well as moments of unguarded pleasure.”

—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, from Aperture Issue #227: “Platform Africa”

Pigment print on fiber paper
Paper size: 24 x 16 inches
Edition of 6
Signed and numbered by the artist

Abdo Shanan (b. 1982, Oran, Algeria) is a member of collective 220. Until 2006, he studied Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Sirte, Libya. In 2012, he completed an internship at Magnum Photos Paris, giving him the opportunity to reflect on his photographic approach and make his first story for the magazine Rukh. His photographs are published in a number of printed and online magazines and newspapers. In 2015, he was nominated for the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, and in 2016 his series ‘Diary:Exile’ was selected for Addis Fotofest.