Discovering, Restoring and Disseminating Visual Records of Disappearing Culture
Current Project Areas
The Levant
“The Levant” is an approximate historical and geographical term that refers to the lands forming an arc from Turkey to Egypt along the eastern Mediterranean. Its linguistic origin is Middle French, from the verb lever, to raise, a reference to the direction of the rising sun from a European perspective. For centuries the area was where Europe met the Middle East and Asia, where Christianity met Islam, where mercantilism met the caravan trade, where colonialism ultimately met Arab nationalism. This Lost Light project is gathering photographs of the Armenian, Jewish, orthodox Christian and Muslim communities during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the period in which the term “Levant” was finally rendered archaic. It was a period of rapid and dislocating transformation that uprooted many of these ancient communities and irrevocably altered the social, political and economic landscape of the region.