AL-YOM (TODAY) TORN CURLED FOLDED
photographs (of photographs), research, essays,
and editorial design: paula roush
source archive: arab image foundation, beirut — al-yom collection
text: elie-pierre sabbag (excerpts from L’Ombre d’une ville, paris: buchet chastel, 1994)
research and editorial structure: email correspondence conducted in beirut, 2015
pages: 216
language: english / french
printing: full colour (interior)
paper: 120 gsm recycled uncoated (paperback interior) /
100 gsm uncoated (hardcover interior)
cover: 170 gsm uncoated, grayscale printing (paperback) / adhesive casebound, grayscale printing with matt lamination (hardcover)
binding: perfect bound (paperback) /
adhesive casebound (hardcover)
dimensions: 10.5 × 14.8 cm (A6, portrait)
isbn: 978-1-7396192-0-6
third edition: 2026
published by: msdm publications
edition: 500 copies
available in london at the photographer’s gallery bookshop (@tpgbookshop)
available online via msdm (email: msdm@msdm.org.uk)
Al-Yom (Today) torn curled folded is a photo-textual research publication that emerges from prolonged engagement with a damaged photographic archive linked to the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Yom, active until its violent interruption at the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.
The project does not attempt to restore the archive to narrative coherence. Instead, it works with material instability as method. Torn, curled, and folded photographs — a working classification at the Arab Image Foundation for images whose damage exceeds standard archival thresholds — become the starting point for an editorial investigation into destruction, survival, and the conditions under which images circulate.
The book brings into relation two incomplete bodies: a photographic archive marked by material degradation, and excerpts from L’Ombre d’une ville (1994) by Beirut-based writer and architect Elie-Pierre Sabbag. Every sentence in Sabbag’s novel containing the word “Beirut” (or “Beyrouth”) was extracted and re-edited into dialogue with the damaged images. French and English versions appear side by side, not as equivalents, but as parallel presences shaped by delay and displacement.
A second strand of the publication unfolds through email correspondence conducted in Beirut in 2015. These messages — sent, forwarded, unanswered, contradicted, or lost — are not supplementary documentation. They function as editorial structure. The emails trace how historical knowledge about Al-Yom is produced under conditions shaped by war, institutional delay, and genealogical dispersion. Research progresses through gaps rather than confirmations.
Originally produced as a loose-leaf boxed edition in Beirut (2015), and later expanded in London (2020), this third edition re-assembles the photo-essay and the email-based research into a single bound volume. What changes is not the instability of the archive, but the architecture through which it is held.
The book exists in more than one physical state. None of them resolves the archive.
Published by msdm publications, Al-Yom (Today) torn curled folded operates as archive, editorial device, and meta-narrative of research. Editing here becomes a form of care directed toward what cannot be made whole.
read more:
Al-Yom, Third Edition: Re-Editing an Unstable Correspondence
