Preserving the Photo Jack Collection at the Arab Image Foundation

Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city was once regarded as a trading hub between northern Lebanon and Syria. After independence from the French Mandate in 1943, it was rendered a peripheral city. Only a decade later the citizens reclaimed the Tal Square and made it their own. The rectilinear boulevards, the Palace Hotel, the clock tower, the cinemas and cafés made it a pivotal hub. After the June 1967 war and the influence of Arab nationalism on Tripoli, the westernized Tal Square lost its splendour. Attention then turned to Abd El Hamid Karame Square which became a symbol of modernity and political power.

Between 1945 and 1997, Studio Photo Jack, located in Tripoli and owned by Agop Kouyoumjian (1921-2002), documented the Tal Square’s belle epoque. The Photo Jack collection, acquired in 2003 by the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) is made up of 1225 uncut 35mm negative film rolls in 5 wooden drawers and 98 negative sheet film albums. The rolls of 35 mm negative film were preserved uncut by the Studio, each carefully placed in a cardboard package made for a 120 mm roll that was halved to accommodate the 35mm film.

Lebanese artist and AIF co-founder, Akram Zaatari, came across this collection at Studio Mohamad Arabi in Tripoli. Mohamad Arabi’s son had inherited the collection from Studio Photo Jack after the studio went out of business in 1997. The negative film rolls were added to other material from Kouyoumjian’s archives, previously brought to the foundation by a collector, Mohsen Yammine.

Out of the 1225 uncut film rolls, 1205 containing 40,909 photographs have been processed by the Arab Image Foundation. They have been cleaned, catalogued, digitised, documented and rehoused in acid free boxes. The remaining 23 rolls were isolated as they contain mold. The 98 handmade albums, each containing negative sheet films, amounting to over 30,000 portrait photographs, are yet to be processed.

Born in Sudan, Agop Kouyoumjian moved to Beirut with his mother where he worked from an early age as an itinerant photographer in Sahat al Burj, later opening a small studio in Ashrafieh. He then moved to Tripoli and set up Studio Photo Jack in 1945, hiring photographers Sarkis Restikian and Setrak Albarian, among others, to work on what was then referred to as reportage, meaning commercial photography practiced outside the studio. They covered various social, cultural and religious occasions but were mostly deployed in Tal Square to do “Photo Surprise”, a practice that was common in the Middle East between the 1940s and 1960s. They walked around the public square photographing pedestrians, some posing and others caught candidly in their stride. They then invite their subjects to return to the studio to purchase and collect their photographs.

Working mostly on weekends and public holidays, the “photo surpriseurs” made their mark on the neighbourhood’s public spaces and on the photographs. One could see their shadows capturing subjects and the city. A film roll with intimate snapshots of a family seen in sequence gives the impression of constant movement around the Tal. Images of officials, such as the late President Chamoun’s visit to Tripoli are interspersed with images of baptisms, funerals, birthdays, and parties; they add a strange familiarity to the Tal and to the faces of the people walking around.

Gradually becoming part of the Square, the passers-by developed a more image-conscious attitude towards the cameras as the first film rolls taken between 1953 and 1955 show. A generational divide is visible and one notices the influence of “Cilema”* on Tripoli at that time, in the way the youth pose and dress. The influence of American fashion is evident in the shirtwaists, sundresses, ensembles, coatdresses, and formal attire of the young people posing in the public garden or the famous hairstyles like the “Soft Bob” or “Pompadour”. Towards the end of the collection, the “photo surpriseurs” mainly photographed young people posing in groups and people dancing at parties; perhaps giving in to the consumerist era and foretelling the turn of events that would change the city.

Conveying the fragility of urban memory, as it stretches across the public–private spheres, the Photo Jack collection constitutes crucial documentation of the golden age of the Tal Square and a relic of spaces that disappeared with time, such as the Empire and Roxy cinemas, Inja Theatre, as well as the people who inhabited these spaces. It is a kind of stele on which one can build on to try and reconstruct what has been voluntarily destroyed.

*Cilema is in reference to how people in Tripoli used to pronounce Cinema