احتفاء how to preserve photographs. It is also how to distinguish, document, and authenticate images in a world where the boundaries between the captured and the constructed are increasingly difficult to discern.
”
We have never produced so many images, yet much of our photographic heritage remains at risk of loss.
A Personal Commitment to Memory
This is a question I have lived with long before museums and scholars. For decades, I have been committed to collecting and preserving our photographic heritage, beginning in North Lebanon and eventually extending this work more widely. My aim has always been to preserve not only the image itself but also, wherever possible, the identity of the photographer who created it. The recurring wars that have ravaged Lebanon have been a principal force behind this commitment. They have repeatedly shown how quickly places vanish, how easily archives can be scattered, and how profoundly the loss of images can affect collective identity and memory.
At the 2017 exhibition An Uncanny Impulse, held at Casa Árabe in Madrid and curated by Clémence Cottard and Marc Mouarkech in collaboration with the Arab Image Foundation, where I deposited part of my collection some half-century ago, this commitment was described as“ strange.” Yet to me, it has always seemed entirely logical. My interest in photography also brought me into contact with prominent collectors, foremost among them the late Fouad Debbas. At the same time, I wrote extensively about photography in An-Nahar, Al-Mustaqbal, Al-Anwar, and Al-Hayat, when print journalism was still flourishing, and cultural pages offered ample space for writing about images and visual culture.
On Friday, November 17, 2000, through the“ Rawafid” page of Al-Mustaqbal, I called for a museum dedicated to our photographs— a place to preserve this visual history before it disappeared. I was fully aware of the cost such an undertaking would entail. But nothing precious is too costly when what is at stake is knowledge or a memory in danger of being lost.
Two hundred years after photography first captured an image before the human eye, that principle remains unchanged. Technology may continue to evolve, and the number of images may become almost impossible to comprehend, but the fundamental responsibility remains the same: to ensure that the images through which we remember ourselves do not disappear.
Mohsen Yammine is a law graduate and the author of a photography and culture column that appears in several Lebanese daily newspapers, including An-Nahar, Al-Hayat, Al-Mustaqbal, and Al-Anwar. His collection of photographs, gleaned from Lebanese photography studios, comprises more than 10,000 prints, negatives, and postcards. He is a passionate advocate for preserving Lebanon’ s visual heritage and also gives talks on the subject.
General Gouraud’ s visit to Tripoli following the proclamation of Greater Lebanon in 1920. © Mohsen Yammine Collection
MATAHEF. COM 71