photo américain

A building comes alive

The other day I got an interesting comment on a photo I posted on December 25th. I responded and he wrote again, with an amazing story. I thought I'd make it into a post, because not everyone sees the comments and it's worth reading. It's just a reminder of how many stories are buried in our environments that photographs can only vaguely hint at. One reason I took the photo, besides the tree, is the line of jars on the shelf on the ground floor apartment's balcony. The personalized decoration gave me a sense of the particular people who dwell there, but I never expected to hear a real story of this building.

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From Nadim:

Oh my God! The top picture is the building where my grandmother's house was. I grew up there! The balcony at the top of the picture is where I spent a large part of my childhood. Amazing. I was just discussing the building with a friend here in the US the other day and wondering whether it still exists. Just to make sure I'm not crazy, the building is on Bliss Street, just past IC and just before Mike's barbershop, right?

Michelle:

Hi Nadim, thanks for the comment. You're exactly right about the location. I'm thrilled to have delivered a photo with so much meaning to someone else. The side of the building (to the right) has a lot of scars, bullet holes from the civil wars I imagine. If I take another photo of it, I'll let you know!

Nadim:

Michelle, the scars are from a shell that fell in front and to the right of the building during the war (~1975). I remember the day clearly. I was playing with my cousins and three siblings (on the balcony at the top of the picture) when we heard the doorbell ring. For some reason, we all decided to go answer the door. It was a family friend coming to warn us not to go outside because of expected shelling of Beirut. Right at the moment he finished telling us, the shell landed, exploded and sprayed the building and balcony with shrapnel. We all avoided death by a few seconds. Answering the door saved us.

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Here's the photo again.

untitled pictures from around town

[Update: January 11 I walked by these two trees and they were completely gone!]

 

Trees on streets and in the cemetery

Beirut is really quite festive these days. Starting with Eid al-Adha and now Christmas, then New Year and Armenian Christmas coming up, the holidays are creating a long line of peaceful quiet days. Christmas trees abound in shop windows, but I'm still looking at the permanent street dwellers. Below are a few more trees in Ras Beirut. I also recently explored an old Greek Orthodox cemetery in Ashrafiye. A line of very tall cyprus trees eluded my limited lens, but I caught an orange tree full of fruit, a weathered trunk in a messy collage of barbed wire, rusted fence, angels and the neighboring supermarket, and a slender trunk tucked among blocks of stone and slabs of concrete. Lastly, in honor of the holidays, I include a shot of our very own Christmas tree getting some sun on our balcony.

Happy holidays!

walls and trees

different images of Beirut

In my last post I mentioned looking at a map of Beirut that shows the gardens, orchards and hedges (as well as buildings and streets) as they were in 1947. Here's the section that shows Hamra.

The green blocks are buildings, the open spaces with a dot in the center are orchards, and the spaces with a little circle in the middle are gardens. Curved lines like this ( denote a hedge with cactus. There seem to be more of these as you go further west.

On a random note, here's a shot of the spectacularly brilliant rainbow that appeared this afternoon.

Trees in an urban environment

I've started a new project, on trees in Beirut. Haven't got farther than Hamra yet, but there are a lot here I want to take portraits of, they are very resilient. Today I was looking at old maps of the city in the AUB archives. They show orchards, gardens and hedges of cactus and coniferous trees all around Hamra as late as 1957. In the 70s there seem also to be open spaces, though not as much. Some things I discovered were no surprise, like that the plant nursery across the street from us was a garden in the 1950s. Unknown to me was the existence of a big swath of sand dunes in west Beirut, south of Ras Beirut.

Here's a start on my project, from the first roll.

[Abdul Aziz street at the end of Makhoul street, near AUB hospital.]

[Makhoul street.]

[Tree trunk next to a parking lot behind buildings along Sidani street.]

[Orange tree, with oranges, outside the Evergreen pub.]

[Corner on Makdisi street, near Graffiti cafe.]

[Two photos put together of an old pine tree behind some buildings near the Evergreen pub, between Sidani and Makdisi streets.]

graffiti on graffiti

Some graffiti here has been up long enough to acquire comments in the form of additional markings. For example,

this pink love bomb outside the American Dream bar has been amended to read "Homophobia: A Social Disease" below it. It's fading now, so it's a bit hard to see. On the left is the Fadi Mounira graffiti I've seen around Hamra, I guess Fadi is indicating Mounira is his love.

This stencil by 3dom, representing the three members of the group, has the phrase "We're Gay!!" added to it. This is also in Hamra, near the Coop grocery store. I get the feeling this is a friendly addition, not antagonistic.

Both of those stencils were on the wall for a long time before attracting written comments.

On another note, I've also been seeing this ant around.

Baalbek and the Shouf

We've taken a few trips recently. A month or so ago we went to Baalbek (Roman ruins in the Beqaa valley) and last weekend to the Shouf mountains, including Beit ed-Dine (a 19th century prince's palace) and the Shouf Cedar Reserve. Below are a few photos, just snapshots.

I'll be back to more considered photography soon. My medium format film order has arrived in the bag of a friend who has come to Beirut for research. I'm definitely ready to return to the Hasselblad. I'm not sure why I feel so disappointed with 35mm, though to be fair, I'm hard to please with the medium format too. Still, the incredibly rich texture of so much fine detail, the quasi-scientific feel of the straight-forward square shape and basic mechanical process of the camera are all so enticing. I also think that having only 12 frames on a roll, one lens, using a hand-held light meter and the camera's heavy body all slow me down and make me consider each shot in a way that in itself is satisfying.

For now, enjoy the tour of Lebanon...

[Baalbek, along the side of the Temple of Bacchus someone planted roses.]

[Baalbek. Detail of half man, half sea serpent creatures.]

[Baalbek. Massive blocks of carved details litter the whole site.]

[Baalbek. Lion head, part of a fountain at one time?]

[Baalbek. There is a lot of old graffiti from the 19th century in both Arabic and English. It's high up on the walls and columns, presumably indicating that the site was partially buried in the earth.]

[Baalbek. Outside of the Temple of Bacchus.]

[Baalbek. Dancing woman relief sculpture inside the Temple of Bacchus.]

The Shouf:

[Old stone buildings on the terraced hillsides on the way up to Beit ed-Din.]

[Beit ed-Dine. Many Roman-era mosaics, rescued by the Jumblatts in the 1980s they say, are displayed in the former stables, which lead out to a garden with a view down the valley. You can get a glimpse of mosaics in the left window and on the wall to the far right.]

[Shouf Cedar Reserve at Barkouk. An ancient Lebanese cedar tree.]

[The trunk of a cedar in the reserve.]

[Cedars in the small grove of old trees.]

[Maasser es-Shouf, a village in a valley next to the cedar reserve area.]

a few things that caught my eye

 

US in the Middle East

The longer I live in Beirut the harder it is to see the place as a visitor from the US would see it. But the other day, while attending some panels at the Beirut Media Forum, I heard a talk by the smart and informed journalist and press critic, Michael Massing who was visiting for just a few days. [He often writes for the New York Review of Books, which is where I have read his critiques of US press coverage of the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and later of coverage of the war itself.] He has spent time in Iraq but had not been to Beirut before. His talk explained the various impediments to reporting from Iraq –- non-Arabic speaking journalists, violence restricting their movements and interactions with Iraqis, the embed system of tagging along with American military units leading to isolation from other points of view, and lack of trust in Iraqi sources. I appreciated the talk, even though most was nothing particularly new especially if you've read his work, because I like straightforward analysis of how journalism works and what that means for readers’ understanding of the world.

Massing’s concluding point was also interesting. He explained that in order for a story to be told it has to be recognized as a story by the journalist, then the editor, and lastly it must fit within the bounds of what the public is willing to hear and tolerate. The location of these boundaries is something he has been noticing more lately. All societies have boundaries of what’s acceptable or not, but this part is distressing to me as he described the US public as still largely affected by an atmosphere of “fear, distrust, and xenophobia” since September 11, 2001.

Massing mentioned that the US is still very isolated from Arab views. For example, US cable companies don’t carry the new Al Jazeera International, which is in English. At the beginning of the talk he had admitted that seeing Beirut made him realize how misinformed he was on the situation and the city itself. I later asked him what surprised him. He had a couple of examples. He explained how he had taken a walk around the neighborhood of Hamra and from its appearance had assumed it was the Christian part of town, which he had been led to believe was more Western than the Muslim areas of Beirut. He was surprised to learn later that Hamra is not the Christian area but a mostly Muslim neighborhood. And when he was given a tour of the southern suburbs (Dahiyya) where Hizballah is the most popular party and has its various offices, he noticed that not all the women are swathed in black and there aren’t mullahs on every corner (he was poking fun at the stereotype too, I doubt he really expected that...did he?).

Also surprising to him was the effect of US support for the current majority (called the March 14th forces) in the Lebanese government. He seemed surprised to learn from people here how the US does not support compromise with the opposition (which is led by Hizballah). He said that the US stance of no compromise seems to stem from its “with us or against us” mindset and black and white definition of allies and enemies in the Middle East.

I too find this very frustrating. The more the US marginalizes, undermines and refuses to deal in any way with forces such as Hizballah and Hamas or countries like Iran and Syria the more their supporters and others will resist anything to do with the US. Any US support of democracy, human rights, NGOs, arts and education in the region, for example, then becomes tainted by this one-sided position and renders everything the US does here suspect and partisan in many people’s eyes.

One way for the US to do things differently is to interfere less directly (especially in the use of military force) and reduce the sense of threat that those not supported by the US in the region feel. By allowing the broadest range of voices and giving the region as a whole a sense of security and autonomy, internal forces can more freely work out new social and political relations on their own terms.

Now for something entirely different -- a new graffiti image on Jeanne D'Arc street of the French character from the book The Little Prince.

The words say "come to my heart."

[Here's the original Petit Prince, drawn by the author of the book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in 1943.]