It is not unusual for one artist to display admiration towards another, but it is more so perhaps when the two are almost contemporaries (give or take a decade) and the appreciation takes the form of a dedication at the beginning of a book. In giving ‘tribute to the work of Jean-Luc Moulène’ on the credit page of Akram Zaatari: Earth of Endless Secrets (2009),¹ Akram Zaatari acknowledges the undeniable formal proximity that exists between his photographs showing material evidence related to the stories he presents in his films and installations projects and Moulène’s photographs of objects set against neutral grounds.¹ More than that, however, and despite tackling different subject matter, Zaatari’s images consider the ambiguousness of the photograph as evidence — a reflection that can be traced back to Moulène’s own experimentations. Rather than the industrially manufactured objects of daily life that commonly turn up in Moulène’s images, Zaatari’s photographs most frequently present objects that bear the marks of the conflicted history of Lebanon, from postcolonialism to intermittent war. A handbag stuffed with letters from a war prisoner, vintage audio and videocassettes, an archive of old photographs and pages from a diary are shown as material traces of the narratives that unfold in such films of Zaatari’s as Al-Sharit Bikhayr (All Is Well on the Border, 1997) and Fi Haza al-Bayt (In This House, 2005). But, once they are captured in the form of a photograph, the folded letters become illegible and the tapes inaudible. For all their clarity of composition, these images show the limits of photographic evidence. As with the work of Jean-Luc