Following last year’s theme of the young generation of Lebanese photographers, this year the organizers of Photomed Liban are highlighting the country’s photographic heritage through three exhibitions.
Photography as heritage emerged in the 19th century in parallel with the development of a policy of patrimonial preservation. It became a tool for documentation and memory, says the photographer and academic Raphaëlle Bertho, who speaks about a “passion of the inventory.” Archives began to form, bearing witness to the evolution of architecture, and those archives would be elevated to the status of national heritage nearly a century later.
The phenomenon is striking in the context of Photomed Liban with respect to two exhibitions on display at the Oriental Library at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut. Voyage en Orient shows viewers how people once dressed. It was the crazy idea of three partners in the early 1860s: the photographer Ludovico Wolfgang Hart, the journalist Charles Lallemand and the distributor Varroquier announced a series of publications of a new genre of albums. They came up with the idea to shoot a universal gallery of people to reproduce, through photography, the national costumes that were, “threatened by the progress of civilization.” Only a small part of their world tour was completed, but the three did manage to pass through Syria (including modern Lebanon), capturing an era in the mid-1860s on 36 plates preserved at the university library. These prints are on albumen paper, colored by hand and pasted on cardboard, showing the people of three different regions displaying their clothing: a Maronite bourgeois, a Damascan Jewess, and a Druzean woman. They represent a multifaith East that is sometimes forgotten in the geopolitics of today.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
EXHIBITIONS
Collection de la Bibliothèque orientale
Portraits d’Orient – Voyage en Orient
Until February 11th, 2015
Galerie 169
rue Mkhalassiye
Beyrouth
Lebanon
Beirut in Motion, archives du ministère du Tourisme du Liban
Jusqu’au 11 février
Hôtel le Gray
Beyrouth
Lebanon
