Rene — Beirut: Seeing war and its aftermath through the cameras eye
Topic(s): Lebanon | Comments Off on Rene — Beirut: Seeing war and its aftermath through the cameras eyeBeirut: Seeing war and its aftermath through the cameras eye
The Daily Star, Lebanon
Jan 8 2004
Seeing war and its aftermath through the camera’s eye
Journalist Zaven Kouyoumdjian’s collection of photos compares Lebanon
in its darkest hours and now
Peter Speetjens
Special to The Daily Star
A good photo doesn’t just freeze the moment, but in a fraction of a
second captures history itself. As such, a photo can tell more than a
thousand words. Just recall the image of the crying Kim Phuc, running
naked over a war-torn road while her village in the background burns
after being hit by napalm. Perhaps this 1972 World Press Photo of the
Year is a more significant document to the Vietnam War than the
entire Hollywood production on young American GIs fighting the red
danger of the Vietcong.
Likewise the image of the Chinese man who stopped a column of tanks
before Beijing’s Tiananmen Square summed up an entire chapter of
recent Chinese history in a single shot. Closer to home there is the
image of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura being shot by an Israeli
sniper, which probably told the world more about the second intifada
than any newspaper essay will ever do.
Moving photos tell moving stories. However, did you ever ask yourself
what happened to those silent heroes of history? What became of sad
Kim Phuc? Did she recover and have children of her own? Did the brave
unknown Chinese man get arrested? What about the father of Mohammed
al-Dura, who in vain tried to protect his son? Did he learn to live
with the death of his son?
“What happens when the cameras stop rolling, the lights go off and
the crew goes home?” That’s the basic notion of Zaven Kouyoumdjian’s
book Lebanon Shot Twice, a splendid collection of photos showing
people and places during the Lebanese civil war and today.
Generally known as Zaven, the journalist and host of such popular TV
talk show as 5/7 and Sire Wen Fatahit, writes in the foreword to the
book that the idea was born in a forgotten drawer full of photos
which he had cut out of newspapers and magazines during the war.
“They were pictures of faces and people,” he explains, asking
himself: “Had their life been frozen in time or had our recollection
of them been confined to a photo, a mere moment from which they have
moved on? Had the war, their war, ended?”
Thus Zaven went on a quest for answers, which proved to be more
difficult than he had expected, as names and addresses were often
wiped out by the war. What eventually turned out to be a
two-year-search took him from “street to street and village to
village to find those sad, smiling, victorious or defeated faces.”
Along with him came photographer Hayat Karanouh, author of the book
And The Smile Survives, who beautifully captured today’s Lebanon. On
their journey together, they discovered more faces and places, each
with their own story, which were added to Zaven’s initial collection.
Thus Lebanon Shot Twice came to life.
The book opens with a photo of the bus that on April 13, 1975, was
attacked by Christian militiamen in Ain al-Roummaneh. It’s in itself
not a brilliant photo, yet it is significant; the bus attack, which
killed 26, is by many people regarded as the starting point of the
1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. From the accompanying text we learn the
context of the attack, and that the bus was repaired and put back to
work as a school bus in South Lebanon. Today, it stands abandoned in
a field near
the village of Marj Harrouf.
The bus drives us into Zaven’s book on Lebanon’s past war and
peaceful present, taking us among other dates to Oct. 10, 1975, when
we see 8-year-old Zakaria Amcheh and his family running for their
lives, while in the background Karantina is burning. Some 270 were
killed, but not Zakaria, who today lives in Khaldeh. At the place of
his home stands today the coffin-shaped nightclub BO18. “I never
thought of going in,” he told Zaven, “I heard it’s very expensive.”
Another photo from Karantina shows people put up against the wall and
killed for having the wrong identity card. The wall is still there,
its past covered by a commercial for Mango.
And so the unique journey continues, taking us past destroyed and
rebuilt mosques, churches and hotel lobbies, past snipers, victims,
barricades, the 1982 Israeli invasion, Sabra and Shatila, car bomb
attacks in Jounieh and airplane hijackings, all the time showing us
what was then, and what is now.
The photos are regularly accompanied by moving or eye-opening
stories. Take the photo of Murr Tower then and now. In a 1977
An-Nahar interview, owner Michel Murr is quoted as saying: “The
damage to the building was some LL100,000.” Then a small fortune,
today $75. Murr also said: “If the situation continues to improve,
the construction of the building will be over in a year’s time. This
includes 400 offices, a cinema, a luxurious restaurant and a landing
pad for helicopters.”
Apart from Michel Murr, former president Amin Gemayel, former
Hizbullah spiritual leader Sayyed Mohammed Fadlallah and Druze leader
and MP Walid Jumblatt, who in 1982 narrowly escaped the fate of his
father and grandfather, feature in the book.
However, Lebanon Shot Twice is not a book about Lebanon’s leaders,
but about people like you and me. They once made headlines not
because of who they were, but simply because of being at a certain
place at a certain moment in time, a moment the photographer decided
to capture and turn into history.
It’s interesting to note however, that some people featuring in
world-famous images, made history for the wrong reasons. So, in 1984
a photo of Nawal Barakat, dressed in an abaya while holding a gun,
became a worldwide symbol of the Islamic revolution in Lebanon.
In an interview with Zaven, however, she can’t recall when the image
was taken or what she was doing. “I was trained to hold a gun like
everyone from my generation,” she said. “But I only participated in
support of the resistance.”
Likewise a photo of Druze fighter Kamal Ghannam waving a knife became
in the international press a symbol for the thirst for blood during
the mountain war, while in reality it was taken as an Israeli convoy
passed his village.
“I would not like my son to see this picture,” Ghannam told Zaven.
“We did not choose this filthy war. It chose us.”
Lebanon Shot Twice ends with an image of the severely injured victims
of an Israeli air raids in 1993, which, according to Zaven, is the
true end of the civil war, as for the first time the Lebanese people
stood united against a common enemy.
It’s good to see that the bleeding young girl in the photo is today a
beautiful, healthy young woman.