Goodbye, Lebanon

Beirut blues: the end of opportunity and the last man 

We were five friends. We were, and are, a microcosm of a generation of Lebanese-Somethings that returned to their “roots” at some point in the 1990s or 2000s. Our families, see, loved and appreciated all that the world—the United States, Europe, Australia, Latin America, West Africa, the Arab Gulf—had given them and allowed them to earn. But if we’d been born and raised in America or Australia, our parents had been born and raised—and then violently driven from, or slowly starved out of—Lebanon.

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The Armenian family photo album 

The photographs I’ve gathered range from professional studio portraits to intimate family photographs, and I found the majority of them on eBay, from a seller based in Cairo. Although little providential information accompanied the photographs, many of them have been made into postcards inscribed with handwritten messages, dates and locations, suggesting that they had been shared and exchanged among distant family members or friends. The majority of them were dated from the 1930s.

For me, the value of these photographs lies in their ability to offer insight into how individual families grapple, cope with and exchange shared experiences of extreme trauma and mourning in their new surroundings. In this sense, the austere disposition of the families in the photographs represents a record of collective acknowledgement that these families survived and that they did not want to be forgotten.