Fadia Ahmad. Beyrouth | Beirut

Spanish-born photographer Fadia Ahma (b.1975) lives and works in Lebanon. Her poetic series of photographs of Beirut eloquently captures the street life of that resilient city; merchants on street corners, grocers, fishermen, bathers, street artists, collapsed buildings, new construction. She presents fragments of life through fragments of the city itself. This is the first monograph of her vibrant and intuitive work on the people and places of Beirut. She has been crisscrossing her city with a camera since 2003. District after district, house after house, she explores the complexity and humanity of Beirut and the Lebanese people. I decided, she explains, to follow an itinerary, which is always the same, so that I wouldn’t disperse myself. It is my constancy that allows me to discover, to meld with this city. Fadia Ahmad’s imagines her photographs as paintings, which mirror Beirut and capture the poetry of place and people which are nestled in the slightest details. AUTHOR: Pascale Le Thorel is an art critic, exhibition curator and editor. She was recently curator of the exhibition ‘Figurations Libres annees 80’ at the Fonds Leclerc. She is notably the author of a monograph dedicated to the Lebanese painter Shafic Abboud (Skira) and Le Dictionnaire Larousse des artistes contemporains. 180 colour images