Aug 1973 / Baalbek Blues (2009)
The project is a collection of fabricated and “found” photographs, some belonging to one of the anonymous men in the photos from August 1973 and others are a series of photographs that I created, shot and staged, in order to recreate a “lost film roll” of their day.
Aug 73 / Baalbek Blues represents my desire to belong to a space-time that was described by everyone I know as pure bliss. However, I think that the insouciance and the happiness that my parents so proudly recount was intense only by relativity; the war that started in 1975 made everything that preceded it look majestic. The choice of integrating myself in these photos, through a staging process that included dressing up and posing with three of my friends, thus manifests an attempt to relive that epoch. Even though the ruins of Baalbek (like all other ruins) are outside the realm of modern space and time, the attempt to relive (perhaps literally) that experience failed.
During one of my regular visits to the Sunday market, I found four photographs from August 1973. These photographs show two Lebanese men accompanied by two foreign women, during a road trip to Baalbek. The men kiss both the women, like swingers, in various places. The intimacy amidst the ruins and the landscape, framed, printed, found, is like a suspended moment in a very specific timeframe and space. The tourist destination popularized in the late 1960s, Baalbek was not only iconic but was representative of a complex identity. Similar to Beirut, the materialization of a promise had been under construction for several years. The threshold felt peculiar. In 2009, I held a remnant of 1973, one that was as collective as it was private, as palpable as it was distant. I felt the desire to cross that threshold, even if it was in the most unnatural of manners.