Photo-text composed of photographs of a collection of damaged photographs from the Al-Yom newspaper [Al-Yom was founded by Afif el Tibi, the father of Lebanese journalism, in 1937 and closed in 1975 when an armed militia stormed the building] currently stored at the Arab Image Foundation and text sampled from Elie-Pierre Sabbagh L’Ombre d’Une Ville, a book about Beirut in the aftermath of the war.

48 pages
21x29 cm
Laser printing black & white
on coloured paper Favin Le Cirque 80gsm
Loose pages on kraft card stock folder
Photographs (of photographs) and design: paula roush
Source: Arab Image Foundation / EPS collection
Text: Elie-Pierre Sabbag, from the novel L’Ombre d’Une Ville
Hand-bound & manufactured
Edition of 300 copies
Published in Beirut in October 2015 by Plan BEY
Based on research at the Arab Image Foundation and developed with Plan BEY in September 2015 during an artist residency at Makan, Beirut Lebanon

Al-Yom / Today (torn folded curled) is an experiment with the genre of the photo-essay, an attempt to work side by side with a collection of damaged photographs from the Al-Yom newspaper photo archives found at the Arab Image Foundation and text sampled from a book by the Beirut-based writer and architect Elie-Pierre Sabbagh.
The Al-Yom collection has been temporarily held in storage boxes at the Arab Image Foundation waiting to be catalogued and re-housed in safe archiving material, until it is ultimately digitised and made available online for access.
Al-Yom was founded by Afif el Tibi, the father of Lebanese journalism in 1937 and closed in 1975 when armed militia stormed the building giving the staff half-hour to leave the building. The collection was brought in by AIF former director  Zeina Arida who found it amongst Walid El Tibi’s remains after the newspaper’s editor passed away and the apartment where he lived was cleared out.

Further reading:
Marwan El Tibi
paula roush fait revivre les archives du journal Al-Yom
Al Ayam Magazine, Beirut October 2015

Hala Tawil
paula roush residency with the Arab Image Foundation
Report to the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut 2015

Alejandro Acin & Isaac Blease
Activating the Archive
PH museum July 24- Sept 24 2018