From Beirut 40 Years Later

Recently, I have been going through my mother’s boxes.  It took me a few years to be ready for this inquiry.

I already wrote about the Ottoman era pocket watch made by Armenian watchmakers I found in one of her boxes (http://vahezen.blogspot.com/2014/07/ottoman-times-armenian-timemakers.html). Today I will share a photo, with a history.

… To my surprise, in a shoebox (Hachim Shoes, a well known Lebanese shoe maker) I found rolled 35mm negatives, 127 film strips, and even large format cut-negatives from the 1940s. Large format? Who in the family used such expensive cameras in those days of war, immigration and struggle in Lebanon? I took the box to my darkroom equipped with 1950s enlargers, loops, trays and memorabilia from my previous darkrooms. I spent days looking at these negatives under the loop and wondering who all these people were.

Then I rolled open the 35mm negatives. These were my photos taken in the 1960s and 1970s with my 1954 Russian Kiev camera. Even then I was curious about mechanical things, so I had opened the camera to see what was inside and realized that it was in fact a true German Contax rebadged as Kiev. I have since owned and used hundreds of classic cameras but I believe that Kiev was a watchmaker’s work—it was pure joy to wind and click, and the Sonnar lens had the creamiest bokeh wide-open.

Most of the negatives were creased, cracked, scratched and affected by time and friction. After all they have travelled to four countries in the past 70 years like their immigrant owners. And in the 1970’s they have seen war. 

So, I decided to print a few pictures from the 35mm negatives, all taken during the 1970s Lebanese Civil War. The one that shocked me when I watched it slowly come to life in the developer tray, under the red darkroom light, was that of a young man, with what seems a hookah tube in his hand.  The tortured negative had not affected his eyes—after a minute in the developer solution they were looking at me with an intensity that froze me and made me forget to take the paper out of the solution to the “Stop Bath” tray making the print darker and the eyes surprisingly brighter.

… I hung the print to dry after washing it under running water and continued to look at it under the red light. These were the eyes of a young man wondering what the future reserves when stuck inside an apartment during a civil war. It was a vivid moment from 40 years ago, kept in a shoebox to come back to life in my darkroom.

What sent a chill down my spine was the fact that this was an auto-portrait, taken with my 1954 Kiev camera probably placed on our coffee table, in Beirut, sometime between 1974 and 1975…

September 7, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014