Lebanon: Lost & Found…

A random encounter between artist Ania Dabrowska and Diab Alkarssifi, a homeless Lebanese man in London, led to the discovery of a rare archive of thousands of photographs documenting life in Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt. Dabrowska learned of Alkarssifi’s collection when the two met at Arlington House, a hostel for homeless men, where Dabrowska was an artist-in-residence and Alkarssifi was temporarily living.

Having contracted polio at a young age and unable to play the regular children’s games, Alkarssifi turned to photography to participate in daily life from a distance. He became an obsessive chronicler of the everyday–from Baalbek to Moscow–and worked as a photojournalist for a Lebanese Communist newspaper. His recovered collection is an artistic trove of social, cultural, and political history…

To learn more about how this rare collection was discovered, please click here. To make a donation in support of a book project featuring the work and archive of Diab Alkarssifi, please visit kickstarter.