ANIA BAROWSKA, DIAB ALKARSSIFI, ‘A Lebanese Archive’

A Lebanese Archive

ANIA DABROWSKA, DIAB ALKARSSIFI

Published by Book Works and Arab Image Foundation, 2018

A Lebanese Archive is based on a collection of archival photographs from Lebanon and the Middle East, which came into the hands of Ania Dabrowska in 2010 when she was a SPACE artist-in-residence at Arlington hostel Camden, London. It belongs to Diab Alkarssifi, a Lebanese émigré, who was living there at the time. The images were taken and collected by Alkarssifi over a lifetime: thousands of photographic prints, and negatives, including his numerous photographic assignments, images of everyday life in his home city of Baalbeck on the Syrian border and in Beirut, his student years in the early 1970s in Moscow and Budapest and, most extraordinarily his collection of found images from studios in Baalbeck, Beirut, Damascus and Cairo – photographs of society, family and friends, and Arab life in Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, that he passionately accumulated and saved. These images, all that survives of a much larger collection still hidden or lost in Lebanon, gives an intimate insight into the cultural, everyday and political history of this region, from 1993 to as far back as 1889.