'I have been photographing cities for many, many years, I am familiar with the rituality of gestures associated with exploring the urban environment. But a wounded, outraged city needs a sensitivity all its own, it demands special attention, participation but also respect.' Gabriele Basilico
In 1991 Gabriele Basilico, one of the masters of contemporary Italian and European photography, was involved by the Hariri Foundation and Lebanese writer Dominique Eddé in a project aimed at photographically documenting the central city area of Beirut at the end of the devastating civil war that had torn the city apart for 15 years. Involved with him were five other photographers: Raymond Depardon, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank, René Burri and Fouad Elkoury.
Basilico moved through the center of the devastated and still undermined capital with the gaze that has characterized his entire production, attentive to the transformations of the contemporary landscape, to the form and identity of cities and metropolises from an architectural point of view, of course, but above all from a social point of view.
Basilico returned to Beirut three more times. In 2003 on commission from the architecture magazine Domus directed by Stefano Boeri, to record the reconstruction of the city through urban views corresponding to photos taken in 1991. In 2008, when at the opening of one of his exhibitions at the Planet Discovery Center he continued to record the reconstruction of the city. And finally in 2011, when the Hariri Foundation called him again to document the reconstructed Beirut together with Fouad Elkoury, Klavdij Sluban and Robert Polidori.
On the occasion of an exhibition at the Chateau d'Eau in Toulouse, curated by Christian Caujolle, Contrasto is publishing the "definitive" volume on Basilico's work in Beirut, with a wide selection of images, in black and white and in colour, divided into four chapters introduced by previously unpublished texts by Basilico himself, curator Christian Caujolle, Dominique Eddé, Stefano Boeri, Fouad Elkoury, Alessandro Ferrario, Gabriele Basilico's assistant during his last three missions, and French critic Gabriel Bauret.
