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| © The Fouad Debbas Collection |
| Designed by Plan A
Developed by Coperon |
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In 1975, Fouad Debbas was strolling
along the banks of the Seine River in Paris
when he stumbled upon an old album of
50 postcards depicting landscapes
of Lebanon in the late 1800s.
Surprised by the actual existence of such photographs, he wondered why his high school history books were not filled with these visual accounts of the olden days. The discovery ignited his passion for collecting and he set out gradually on
a lifelong hunt to uncover and acquire photographs of Lebanon and the region.
Fouad Debbas travelled extensively
and met with a host of experts, witnesses and especially elders to assemble and structure, by the time of his death in 2001, a collection of 45000 images which includes approximately 22000 postcards, 20000 original printed photos (individual paper or in albums),
2000 slides and negatives and 1000 stereos. Yet the real value of the collection isn’t simply a question of quantity, it is the fervor that Fouad poured into the search for
the images, the investigation of their origin
and the structure he designed to host the entire compilation of images.
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