Discordia Book — Daria Birang

Winner of the 2016, Second Edition of The Anamorphosis Prize

A Golden Apple of Discord tossed into the midst of the feast of the gods is torn apart by those immortals who lust over its prize beauty, its seeds spilled upon the ground sowing a terrible fate for mortal man.

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Discordia is the Latin name of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, tosser of Golden Apples. Of one body but two faces, her influence on the lives of men has both ill and good effects. For just as her gaze instigates war and terror with one face, with the other she inspires men to envy the efforts of their neighbor or colleague and thus improve themselves by trying to do better.

With his book DISCORDIA, Moises Saman has built her a magnificent temple. Omnipresent, she; the photographs bear screaming witness to the tumult of her touch. Discordia dances over the wreckage of rubble strewn streets, delights in the wails of widows, drinks up the blood of the tortured and wounded, all the while demanding more and more. Never satisfied.

It is ironic then that the book could only come alive under her eye. Because with her other face, Discordia makes men strive. And this Saman has done, creating a spectacular photobook, a monument to the maelstrom of the Arab Spring and the winner of the 2016, Second Edition of The Anamorphosis Prize.

A distinctive work of unflinchingly terrible beauty, DISCORDIA elevates the act of photojournalism to art. Satisfyingly solid and well crafted in content, design and physical construction, this tome serves as a landmark in demonstrating the freedoms and possibilities of self-publishing resulting through an uncompromising commitment to quality and endurance.

Alive with an organic discord like a cell or an atom, the book not only depicts the actions and uprising of the protestors as its recurrent theme but mirrors them by becoming a daring act of protest itself against traditional narrative and presentation through its inventive use of the haunting, gestural collages of Daria Birang, his collaborator, lack of page numbers and the overall fine edit, a novel exploitation of the subtlety, ambiguity and repetition of Saman’s photography. Therefore, we not only view the chaos in the photographs, we experience it ourselves. Historical in subject but timeless in theme, DISCORDIA demonstrates the contemporary reality of ancient myth in an original way. No matter how hard man attempts to order or reorder the world around him, Eris smirks and chaos reigns supreme.