Two visitors observe the photographic archives of the exhibition "Photographing Lebanon's Heritage 1864–1970" during the opening at the Alcazar Library in Marseille. (Credit: Emmanuel Khoury)
Through the exhibition “Photographing Lebanon’s Heritage 1864-1970,” inaugurated on May 22 at the Alcazar Library in Marseille as part of Mediterranée Season 2026, we see Lebanon through a fragmented lens of places, trades, and landscapes that many people have never seen before.In one photograph, a train enters the port of Beirut in 1906. In another, a boy from Sour dives into the sea in search of sunken archaeological remains. Further along, bell founders are still at work in a Beit Chabeb workshop that is barely surviving today. Elsewhere, the Antelias cave appears — a site now vanished, once an integral part of Lebanon’s subterranean landscape before it was destroyed and erased from the present.Urgency gives birth to an archiveThe exhibition brings together nearly 80 rare photographs from the Oriental Library of Saint Joseph...
Through the exhibition “Photographing Lebanon’s Heritage 1864-1970,” inaugurated on May 22 at the Alcazar Library in Marseille as part of Mediterranée Season 2026, we see Lebanon through a fragmented lens of places, trades, and landscapes that many people have never seen before.In one photograph, a train enters the port of Beirut in 1906. In another, a boy from Sour dives into the sea in search of sunken archaeological remains. Further along, bell founders are still at work in a Beit Chabeb workshop that is barely surviving today. Elsewhere, the Antelias cave appears — a site now vanished, once an integral part of Lebanon’s subterranean landscape before it was destroyed and erased from the present.Urgency gives birth to an archiveThe exhibition brings together nearly 80 rare photographs from the Oriental Library of Saint...
