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Patriotic Memories I : Somewhere into the valleys of Lebanon - For absent friends

“Somewhere into the valleys of Lebanon - For absent friends” is a celebration of youth moments that seem to be lost as time goes by. Those moments when life used to be simple, without asking too many questions nor seeking too much answers, but enjoying freely our presence as friends bonded together. A presence that has become now an absence haunted by a nostalgic cry and yet, a cut.

This friendship reflects purity and ties us together. It ties us also to nature in a parallel and metaphorical way. The place of our gathering becomes us as we become part of it, as much as the trees and the rocks that form its surface.

The four elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire are significantly presented through these pictures. As for the fifth element called Aether, which represents what is beyond the material world, it is replaced by friendship. According to Buddhism, the four elements are assimilated to real sensations: solidity (Earth), cohesion (Water), expension (Air) and heat or energy (Fire). Our friendship can perfectly match with all these sensations.

This series was done by photographing some old photos in the purpose to create images within images. It is a way to inject a sense of fantasy that serves well the concept of this friendship related to nature (as shown by the comparison with the four elements cited before). To take pictures of these photos means also a distance but a recycling action to revive what seems to be lost now; by giving it another representation based around a feeling rather than a fact. When this feeling could be more accurate than any fact.

The fragment of text shown in this series comes from the book “Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement” by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and it reads as follows: “Others finally know, as if by instinct, that the tree is the father of fire; they dream endlessly of those warm trees where the happiness of burning is prepared: to the laurels and boxwood which crackle, to the branch which twists in the flames, to the resins, matter of fire and light, whose aroma is already burning in a hot summer.”

For Antoine, Elias, Elie, Marc, Roy and Ramy.