Lebanon: The Missing. Photo Exhibition

In 2007 the organisation UMAM D&R began an initiative to collect a range of information about the disappeared in Lebanon. That project, entitled The Missing, was publicly launched with an artistic display of 517 photos of the disappeared at the UNESCO Palace in Beirut in April 2008.

The project will be exhibited throughout Lebanon beginning October 2008 and aims to ensure continued visibility to the efforts of these committees and individuals and raise awareness of the disappeared in Lebanon and abroad.

This national tour of the Missing exhibit will be also a way to gather more information on the disappeared in Lebanon and to develop the missing database that UMAM is setting up.

This exhibition comprises photos of many hundreds of individuals from diverse confessions, origins, and political persuasions who disappeared during the Lebanese civil war(s). Estimates of their total number reach several thousands, therefore this display - though striking in volume - represents only a fraction of those who left families and loved ones behind.

It has been said that the disappeared are neither dead nor alive.[1] In the absence of truth or justice, those who have been left behind are also locked into a purgatory of endless waiting - waiting for good news or bad, waiting for the return of their sons or their bodies, waiting for the reports of commissions, for official responses, waiting for recognition, action and closure.

UMAM D&R believes that it is essential to employ creative approaches in addition to theoretical debate, in order to bring about genuine public awareness of the magnitude and impact of disappearance on Lebanese society. Regarding suffering, Kleinman wrote what is not pictured is not real.[2] And so this exhibition strives to picture the disappeared, to tie them to all that is real, both as individuals and as a part of the population of Lebanon that is missing - a part that, until now, has almost ceased to be visible, but has by no means ceased to exist.

The entire exhibit is available at www.memoryatwork.org.