The Arab Image Foundation

The Arab Image Foundation is an association registered in Beirut in 1997, founded by the photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad and the artist Akram Zaatari. It collects, preserves, digitises and researches photographs from South West Asia and North Africa and their diasporas, and it has been entrusted with approximately 500,000 photographic objects dating back to 1860, made by anonymous, amateur and professional photographers alike. It is governed by a general assembly that elects a board every three years, and it sits in the Aresco Center on Justinian Street in Beirut, open Monday to Friday.

For Palestinian research it is a lateral archive rather than a frontal one. The Foundation does not organise itself around Palestine; it organises itself around the region and around the photographic object, and Palestinian material surfaces inside collections assembled on other principles. The Linda Jacobs collection, for instance, holds stereographs of Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and Syria from the end of the nineteenth century. Because the Foundation collects work by anonymous and amateur photographers as well as professionals, and reaches back to 1860, its holdings include the domestic and studio photography that state archives rarely keep. Anyone working on Palestinian visual and social history — dress, interiors, studio conventions, the photographic self-representation of a bourgeoisie that was scattered in 1948 — will find things here that no Palestine-specific archive holds.

The access position needs stating clearly. The Foundation’s photographic collections are consulted through its on-site database in Beirut rather than through an open item-level web catalogue; the website is under active development and its collection interface is partial. This is not obstruction but economics. The Foundation publishes a page titled “Our Economic Reality,” written in June 2024, that begins by describing Lebanon as on the verge of collapse and experiencing its worst economic and political crisis in recent history, with the currency in free fall. An archive of half a million objects is being kept alive under those conditions.

Practical notes: the correct domain is arabimagefoundation.org; the .com address does not resolve. The site carries a library and auditorium, a preservation and digitisation practice, residencies and fellowships, and a bibliography — all of which are worth reading before writing to the Foundation, because a specific request framed in the language of its own cataloguing will get further than a general one.

Sources

• About — the Association, its history and its economic reality, Arab Image Foundation