Christian Catafago

I regretted the urban planning proposal I had made end of 1996 to resolve the chronic circulation saturation had not been taken into consideration.

Yet I fell in love with the new downtown bypasses of Beirut: I would get dizzy passing from one neighborhood to another in an instant, something that would take a while before. Seeing the city from overpasses and swift interchanges incurred a change of perspective; it all seemed like one of those science fiction movies, a matrix of neighborhoods and recognizable urban landmarks.

I had just acquired the recently released Hasselblad X-pan panoramic camera from a famous store in Paris; I was thrilled by the promised portability of that new camera even before seeing it, it would allow me to take panoramic images “on the go”, contrary to my cumbersome medium format 6x17 panoramic camera of election, we even took a picture at the shop as it seems I was the first customer to be given that new camera.

As I got back to Beirut, after only a week, I devised a new way to use that camera strapping it to a ski rack above my car and triggering the shutter through a very long release cable reached through the window.

I had to make sure that, even with this high mounted contraption, sometimes, having something in plain sight makes it less visible or even suspicious having it hidden, however, I had to make sure I would not attract the attention of the Parliament security forces, nor the government seat, nor the U.N., and when out of sight of these, make sure I would not need to cross a military checkpoint or even make the Neighboring country Military Intelligence aware I was grabbing images of billboards to the glory of their president. I did not scan these images for almost a quarter of a century, yet when I looked at them for the first time, they conveyed exactly what I had seen and memories of times passed started to emerge to my memory: “Remembrance of things past” (Marcel Proust) triggers were vibrant to me even though I was far away and time had passed: the original title of that writing in French was “A la recherche du temps perdu”, that more adequately translates into: “In search of lost time”; lost times, was I there already ?