is flipping through a picture book that I thought of my childhood, particular images, characters that have not known, places I've been able to determine neither the time nor the space, situations that I can not understand this fascinating violence that both arouses disgust and voyeurism, disapproval and interest, so many conflicting feelings that eventually landed the key issue, how to react against the swirl of barbarity Lebanon has caught this boat drunk who until then moved quietly to the likings of the winds.
Caught this album, I could not get rid of after having traveled from end to end, I tried to scan each photo, trying to imagine the strange life before the violence, more intrigued by publicity at the time, any poster, the name of a street, cars of the day, by the desolation and death, cold and impersonal, trivial as this photo of "Blow Up" which when enlarged, reveals a murder that the anonymous photographer himself did not suspect.
Children born with the war, the military imagery was almost natural for me, it was part of my life with friends at school or elsewhere, the sound more or less distant explosions was the background music that accompanied our first years. We felt no particular fear that if we guessed on the tired face of our mothers, we hastened to bring home the days of great battles. We were attracted by the aura of these young people under the pretext of defending an area against each other, having fun to tickle the trigger of the Kalashnikov as a transgression almost Sexual prohibited. We defend against what? Am I just asking? There was an enemy, we could not see because camped on the other side of the fence in the street next to ours, in our imagination akin to a monster, which strangely echo the villains of these tales rocked our nights before sleep. It was only much later that I realized that this monster looked like me strangely, the only difference being that he lived in this place that was forbidden because it is too dangerous. Each photo
gathered a lot of individual misfortunes, anonymous, picked up instantly, only remnant of a life, a love gone forever, a fate ruined because of the bloody romance of a small band of puritan idealist. Some of them are young soldiers posing proudly in front of the camera lens, marking one hand the V for victory, the other holding a submachine gun, which gave rhythm to the days of Beirut. Unshaven, poorly dressed, some with a bandage over his forehead, the other brazenly wearing a cross, the fighters seemed to please the lazy game design, as if the camera gave a consistency to their tragic lives meaningless.
At the bottom of each photo, a little legend, the name of a politician, a battle, the scene of an attack but also a date. This last information that hailed me more than any other. I tried without much success to add a moment of my own childhood. September 1982, I was 7, I was asleep when the first militia probably sneak into the camp of Sabra and Chatillah attacked with impunity and women, children and helpless old men, probably when I woke up the smell of warm blood emerged already miserable alleys that housed the refugees we demonized and harmless now that I think if I played at last when the first news of the massacre reached us by the foreign media. The years pass, it remains only to show these pictures of horror, the torturers as well as the victims were scattered in our collective unconscious, to reappear at times at the turn of a conversation. They are neither Palestinian nor Lebanese, they are no longer, because what defines a human being is only his life, death being the final destruction which returns all to the condition of being perishable, eternal character a Photo by definition immutable. A photo of Antonioni captures a murder, the photos are perhaps another form of death, what she leaves behind the memory of a happy or tragic moment, not even time to breathe.
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