Richard Saad ريشار سعدريـشـار سـعد

A photograph is proof. Not argument, not interpretation — proof. Someone stood somewhere, light came off the world, and the image answered for it. What the image cannot tell you is which case the proof belongs to.

In December 1948, the United Nations passed Resolution 194. It stated that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date. The resolution has been reaffirmed every year since. It has never been implemented. The number persists. The date remains earliest practicable.

I left Lebanon, my country during the July war 2006...

These ten photographs were made in Seville and from Seville when taking off to Beirut, between 2012 and 2016. Someone who left Beirut years back and kept returning to find himself a stranger in his mother land. They were taken on a phone, in passing. They do not illustrate anything. They are traces; each one proof that something was there, at that moment, under that light. What they are evidence of is not given. That is left to whomever stands in front of them.

A street dissolving into fog, two figures walking toward what the light has already swallowed. A bird that came from somewhere else and made a life in this city, at the base of the tree it will never leave now. The same ground, the next day, without the bird. A wall in two registers, painted above, raw below and a ledge between them that the eye reads as a horizon. A face present behind a veil, lit from a single source, unreadable. A child beside a stone man who has been looking at the same thing for two hundred years — the child is my son, and he is also me, and he is looking somewhere else. A line thinning in blue where a plane has already been. A face on a magazine page, seen through a gap in airplane seats, looking back.

Ten clues. They do not belong to the same case. The map is yours to draw.

Richard Saad, Seville. Septemeber 2026

The series is closed. Edition of five.

A root doesn't choose where it grows. It takes the ground it's given and holds on.

It pulls in whatever the earth has, whether that's water or rot, nourishment or poison, peace or what's left after the bullets. Most of it stays out of sight, and everything above ground depends on it.

These ten photographs were made over many years, in places I didn't so much visit as return to. Some I returned to in body and some only in memory. They weren't taken as a series. They became one slowly, the way a family resemblance only shows once enough faces sit side by side.

Every place keeps a record of itself. It keeps what people did and wanted, and the damage done in between, long after the people have moved on. Under each surface there is an older one, and under that, older ground.

A society goes on living with its own contradictions. It trades, imitates, rebuilds, forgets, and starts again. It borrows its names from elsewhere and makes them its own. Its confidence and its fragility often turn out to be the same thing.

Love runs through these images, and so does the rougher kind of wanting that sits close to love. Desire is also a root. It works underground and doesn't ask permission.

And there are the children. They are what a root finally produces. They inherit the ground whether they want it or not: its beauty, its wounds, and the question of what to do with both. One of these photographs is of my own children. It stays with me.

I don't read these images as documents of a place. I read them as testimony from a single condition. Belonging is never clean, and what feeds us is often what has hurt us. Leaving a place doesn't mean you stop drawing from it.

Root consists of ten photographs. Nine are released in limited editions of eight. The tenth exists only as an artist's proof and is not for sale. When the editions are complete they close and won't be reprinted. What stays is what a root leaves behind: a hold on the ground, and whatever grows from it.

Richard Saad

Null isn't nothing. Nothing is an absence. Null is a field where a value should sit and doesn't, while the structure around it goes on holding the space open for an entry that never comes.

These ten photographs were made over years and across two countries, some deliberately and some because I happened to be carrying a camera. They share no subject. What they share is that condition.

A place built to hold a life, once emptied, doesn't become neutral. It keeps the shape of the intention, and you can still read what was meant to happen there. That's what makes it hard to stand in, and what makes it beautiful. A functioning city spends all its energy convincing you it's permanent. A place that has stopped functioning has given up the argument, and what remains is the effort itself: slab, frame, stair. Architecture with the persuasion removed.

I grew up in a country that has been suspended for most of my life. It doesn't collapse and it doesn't recover. It holds the position. So I recognise these places before I understand them: the plan drawn, the money spent, the opening postponed, and then a long grammar of waiting that becomes the permanent condition rather than the interruption. Fog does the same work, only faster. It removes the middle distance and leaves you with what's in front of you and nothing beyond it. A country can live like that for decades.

What comes back is never what left. Green returns to concrete, but not as a garden, and the return is not a repair. Growth without plan or permission is its own verdict on the plan that failed.

The bodies are the exception. Everywhere else the emptiness is plain to see. With a body present, the absence moves inward, which is harder to look at. A person can be entirely there and still not occupy their own life: awake inside a stalled country, working with no reason to, spending years that were meant for something. The field is filled and the value is still missing. That is the harder null, and it's the one most of us have lived in.

I don't photograph these as ruins. A ruin is finished. These aren't.

Null consists of ten photographs, released in limited editions of eight. When the editions are complete they close and won't be reprinted.

Richard Saad