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Lebanon: Baalbek Festival Back, Despite Economic Collapse

Visitors arrive for the concert of the French Pianist Simon Ghraichy in the ancient northeastern city of Baalbek, Lebanon, Sunday, July 17, 2022. Lebanon's renowned Baalbek Festival is back, held in front of a live audience for the first time in two years amid an ongoing economic meltdown. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Visitors arrive for the concert of the French Pianist Simon Ghraichy in the ancient northeastern city of Baalbek, Lebanon, Sunday, July 17, 2022. Lebanon's renowned Baalbek Festival is back, held in front of a live audience for the first time in two years amid an ongoing economic meltdown. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
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Lebanon: Baalbek Festival Back, Despite Economic Collapse

Visitors arrive for the concert of the French Pianist Simon Ghraichy in the ancient northeastern city of Baalbek, Lebanon, Sunday, July 17, 2022. Lebanon's renowned Baalbek Festival is back, held in front of a live audience for the first time in two years amid an ongoing economic meltdown. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
Visitors arrive for the concert of the French Pianist Simon Ghraichy in the ancient northeastern city of Baalbek, Lebanon, Sunday, July 17, 2022. Lebanon's renowned Baalbek Festival is back, held in front of a live audience for the first time in two years amid an ongoing economic meltdown. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Lebanon’s renowned Baalbek festival is back, held in front of a live audience for the first time since 2019, despite the country's economic meltdown and the coronavirus pandemic.

French pianist Simon Ghraichy performed in front of a full house on Sunday night in what organizers described as a night of hope for Lebanon's revival. The annual festival in the ancient northeastern city of soaring Roman columns has long attracted celebrities from around the world, The Associated Press reported.

It had taken a major hit as a result of Lebanon’s ongoing, nearly 3-year economic crisis and the pandemic, which had forced organizers to broadcast live from the site without an audience in 2020 and 2021.
Inside the city’s mesmerizing acropolis, French-Iranian oriental dancer Rana Gorgani twirled to Ghraichy’s piano playing.

“I’m so proud to be here in this place full of history and beauty,” Ghraichy, who is of Lebanese and Mexican heritage, told AP.

Since 1956, the Baalbek International Festival has hosted icons from Lebanon and the rest of the world, including world-renowned artists like French singer Charles Aznavour in 1999, English musician Sting in 2001, France’s Johnny Hallyday in 2003 and tenor Placido Domingo a year later. It was also home to concerts by Lebanon’s diva Fayrouz and Egypt’s Umm Kulthum.

The festival suffered a 23-year hiatus during Lebanon’s civil war and resumed in 1997. Both residents and tourists attended in large numbers every summer. This year, the festival comes at a challenging time as Lebanon struggled with an unprecedented economic crisis, described by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern history.

For many among the audience — which also included Lebanese officials and foreign dignitaries — the evening was a welcome escape.

“Baalbek is back, and we want Lebanon to return to the way we used to know it, which is the Lebanon of art, culture, openness, and moderation,” said former lawmaker Henri Helou.

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Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.