Passing Time - Kaph Books

Overview

"Passing Time" looks back at 60 years (from 1960 – 2017) of photographs taken in Lebanon by artist Fouad Elkoury. It took eight-month of research for the curators, Manal Khader and Gregory Buchakjian, to excavate the 160 photographs of this book - most of which have never been published before -, from the 50 000 images, meticulously numbered and labeled, of the artist’s archive. The publication is suffused with emotion, and was realized in close collaboration with the artist.

About the Artist

Fouad Elkoury

After qualifying as an architect in London, in 1979, Elkoury turned to photography, producing a report on daily life in Lebanon. His images appeared in Libération and other publications. In 1984, he published Beyrouth Aller–Retour, documenting the life of a war-torn city. In 1991 he and other photographers were commissioned to take part in a project in downtown Beirut, to document the aftermath of war. This was later published in an album entitled Beirut City Centre, by Editions du Cyprès, Paris, and was the subject of an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 1993. The book has since become a milestone in the history of photography. In 1997, Elkoury co-founded the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation, an organization that seeks to archive and preserve photography from the region. The following year he moved to Turkey and produced an extensive photographic travelogue, the last of his exclusively photographic series. In 2002, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris commissioned him to create an exhibition for which he presented a new collection of photographic compositions, incorporating sequential images to emphasize meaning. As part of the exhibition he premiered his first video Lettres à Francine, based on his photographs of Turkey. The exhibition catalog, Sombres, is published by Marval. Since then, he has alternated between photography and video, as well as writing, with his first text, La Sagesse du Photographe, published in Paris in 2004.

About the Authors

Manal Khader

Manal Khader is a writer, editor and actress based in Beirut. She is one of the founders of Kalamon – a Beirut based cultural quarterly review – and co-editor of the publication from 2010 to 2015. Manal plays leading and supporting roles in Arab and international films and in 2015, she co-wrote and performed with Rabih Mroué a theatrical play entitled "Ode to Joy”.

Gregory Buchakjian

Gregory BUCHAKJIAN (b.1971, Lebanon) is an art historian and interdisciplinary artist, as well as the director of the School of Visual Arts at Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). His research is largely based on archive, archaeology and narration, including his Ph.D. dissertation at the Sorbonne (2016), the book Abandoned Dwellings, A History of Beirut (Beirut, Kaph Books: 2018, Valerie Cachard, ed.) and the exhibitions Abandoned Dwellings, Display of Systems (Beirut, Sursock Museum, 2018 curated by Karina El Helou) and Abandoned Dwellings of Beirut (Brussels, Villa Empain, 2019). In 2018, he contributed to the first Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Works on Paper accompanying Karina El Helou's Cycles of Collapsing Progress in Oscar Niemeyer's Tripoli International Fair. In 2019, he co-organized the 2nd Alba Cinema Encounters “Filming in Times of War, 1975-1990” for which he produced the installation Where do Filmmakers go? In 2021, he created with Valérie Cachard and Sary Moussa the video Agenda 1979 for Opera National du Rhin and the installation Hercules and Omphale for the exhibition How will it end? (Curated by Alicia Knock and Louma Salamé) based on a painting he attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi.