photo américain

missing Beirut

We've been back in Baltimore for 3 weeks now and I still miss Beirut. I finally got around to scanning some of my last photos from wanderings around the city. Here in B'more I'm thinking about photographing, but have only taken one roll (as yet undeveloped) with my old folder camera (a Zeiss Ikon) of the alley behind our house. The Hasselblad is in the shop for a broken mirror, so when you notice a few of the photos below are out of focus, that's why. I find I am still contemplating trees. Here they are skeletons, creating filigree patterns against the winter sky. Very beautiful in an austere way. For now, though, here are some shots of temperate, Mediterranean Beirut.

(Banyan trees on the AUB campus with their roots like ropes stretching down from the branches.)

(Cactus plants in pots in the woodsy part of AUB's campus. Below is an olive tree in the same area.)

As much as I love the AUB campus, it's really my old neighborhood of Hamra that I miss the most. Below are spots I frequented or walked by often. The first is a fig tree, though I seem to have completely missed the proper focus. Nevertheless, I like the feel of it, an improbable spot for a tree to sprout up. Unfortunately I never seemed to pass it when there were actual figs to be picked. (You might recognize the graffiti on the lower right.)

(Cafe Younes is where I bought coffee, someone behind the counter was always roasting the beans in small rotating cylinders over gas flames. And you can get all sorts of espresso drinks here to accompany your people-watching or newspaper reading outside.)

(Cigale is where I bought croissants and ogled various pastries and elaborate buche de noel cakes at Christmas.)

(This stand is on the bottom floor of the building we lived in and is owned by one of the landlord's sons. He makes delicious manouche. In other parts of the Middle East it's called mana'eesh. It's flat bread made like little pizzas with various toppings. My favorite is with zaatar, the mix of spices, including thyme and sesame seeds, spread on top with olive oil.)

(Sam's is where we bought beer, wine and arak. I had lots of nice chats with Sam too. It's the first place we went after we experienced the car bomb assassination of Walid Eido a bit too closely. A drink while watching the news on TV back at home with friends was necessary for pulling ourselves together. And talking to Sam, who had heard and felt the blast, was a comfort too.)

It's these places, among many others, that really anchored my experience of the year in a very particular locale. Even if I didn't know people's names (and I have to admit, I am just assuming his name or nickname is Sam) it did feel like we knew each other. I saw the same young women every time I went to the supermarket, the same man where I bought my contact lens fluid, the same dignified older man in a lab coat at the pharmacy across the street, the same few techs at the photo shops who always remembered my name, the same men at the Takkoush flower shop who seem to have been there since the '50s, the same waiters at Walimah or Kebabji, and on and on. I recognized people on the street, and said hello to my neighbors. I do that here too, but I see so many fewer people. This is a residential area of small houses and during the day during the week it seems I am the only one around. After Beirut's bustling street life, it's eerie. And a bit lonely. I'll get used to it, but for now it makes me feel I'm in a much vaster, more anonymous place. I miss the cozy intimacy of Beirut. 

Beirut graffiti

Well, my year here is over in a week. When we get home I may try to convert this blog into "photo baltimore."  But until then I have more photos from Beirut and the South to post and several rolls of film left to shoot. So, don't give up on me yet.

I've really enjoyed this sketchbook of a blog and hope you have too.

Here is some relatively recent graffiti.

[Ain Mreisse, bottom of the steps. I have been told that the person who did the pink "love bomb" is behind these -- serve, tolerate, love, respect.]

[Ashrafiye.]

[Hamra street, near the intersection with Sadat street.]

trees along walls

Many of the large trees in Hamra are on the edges of parking lots. I assume this is because they used to demarcate the edges of agricultural or garden plots. When these individual plots of land were converted one by one for buildings (or parking lots) some of the trees were left on the borders.

Trees in the Gefinor plaza

The Gefinor plaza is home to one of our favorite restaurants, Gruen. The lines of stylized trees seem to compliment the modernist design of the building. The Gruen Eatery is named for the architect of the office complex, (first name: Victor), know as the designer of " the world's first true shopping mall."

"Victor Gruen was a Jewish bohemian who began to design shops for fellow immigrants in New York after failing in cabaret theatre. His work was admired partly for its uncluttered, modernist look, which seemed revolutionary in 1930s America. But Gruen's secret was the way he used arcades and eye-level display cases to lure customers into stores almost against their will. As a critic complained, his shops were like mousetraps. A few years later the same would be said of his shopping malls."

    From "The Rise and fall of the shopping mall," The Economist Dec 19th 2007

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.

---

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.

---

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.]