View from outside

Photojournalist Liam Maloney looks at Lebanese history from a different vantage point

WAR RAVAGED: Abandoned train station Tripoli, Lebanon

by SACHA JACKSON

“I can’t explain why it had so much appeal to me. I’m an Irish kid from Montreal.” Photojournalist Liam Maloney is talking about his relationship with Lebanon, a country that’s captured in his new series of photographs The War of the Others.

Despite his passion and eye for photojournalism, it wasn’t his first career choice. “I went to film school and wanted to be a D.O.P., so I moved to Toronto and it sucked. At the time, I was reading a lot about the conflict—I’ve always been obsessed with war photography—and I realized it was something I could actually do.”

After a few years slugging it out for dailies and weeklies, Maloney transitioned to magazines, and in 2006 was sent to Lebanon after the Summer War on assignment for Macleans.

“They refer to the conflict as the July War or the Summer war,” Maloney explains, “but if you weren’t Shiite or poor or living in the South, it didn’t really effect you. But that war’s been catastrophic for the country, in many ways. They were really just getting back on their feet. After the civil war, the infrastructure was being rebuilt and there were more investors, but when the Summer War happened, a lot of that just stopped.”

CHILDREN OF THE WEST BANK:
Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut

It was his experience shooting a current conflict that prompted him to return last year to get a closer look at country and its history. In this collection, he looks past the recent events into Lebanon’s long background of unrest and the physical remnants of the civil war, which lasted for 15 years from 1975–1990.

“The show is made up of work I did examining the political crisis. They’d been without a president for two years, and there’d been a series of assassination attempts and a lot of unrest. At that time, there was the possibility of a second civil war,” he says.

“Lebanon is sort of weighed down by the weight of its own history, textbooks stop in the year 1975 and everyone that was indicted in the civil war was pardoned in 1991, a year after the war was over. So nothing’s really changed and no one wants to talk about it. They refer to it as ‘the events’ or ‘the war of the others,’ the idea that they just happened to be there when the war took place.”

Thanks to much research and personal experience, he says, “When you understand the context, it’s easier to understand what you’re looking at.” Maloney’s developed an outsider theory of how and why things have developed in this vein, for a country that’s long been at the crossroads of civilizations in the Middle East.

“Talk to any Lebanese and almost all of them say it’s the fault of another sect,” he says. “Part of the problem is that there was never a truth and reconciliation council. Take Africa, for instance—after the wars there, people came forward to talk about rape, destruction etc. and went on the official record. That never happened in Lebanon. Which might be why young people today are expressing themselves in a more militant way. There’s no unified way to move forward.”

Even after coming face to face with both the country’s past and present, he remains optimistic about its future. “It’s a sort of relentless optimism,” he says, “and Beirut’s a party town. Despite the simmering sectarian conflict, people come from all over the Gulf States to party.”

Of course, the surroundings can also help. “In Beirut, I was living in a Christian neighbourhood and stayed in a monastery run by Italian monks,” Maloney says. “It was one of the worst winters here in Montreal and I kept hearing from friends about how bad the weather was and here I am on the Mediterranean coast.”

Ultimately, it’s Maloney’s distance as a foreigner that’s allowed him to get to the depth of a country that might otherwise elude him.

“Outsiders usually have a better understanding of a country. Robert Frank was German and he went to America with these cynical ideas of the country and he sort of nailed it.”

The War of the others
RemeMbering Lebanon 1975-1990
Opens Wednesday, Aug. 13 at 5 p.m.
at Papeterie Nota Bene
(3416 Parc)