Elkoury, Fouad

Photography | Lebanon + France

Fouad Elkoury was born in 1952 in Paris. After earning a degree in architecture in London in 1979, he turned to photography, and covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, with his pictures appearing in Libération among others. He joined the Sygma agency, only to leave it one year later, and from then on divided his time between Paris and Beirut, publishing in 1984 Beyrouth Aller-Retour, a report on life in the war-torn city.

The following year he started working on Egyptian cinema, while simultaneously undertaking a series of portraits of Arab authors. In 1989 he joined the Rapho agency and won the Prix Medicis Hors les Murs. In 1991, he took part in two collective missions, in Jordan and in post-war Beirut. This work was gathered in the album Beirut City Centre, a landmark in the history of photography, and followed by an exhibition in 1993 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Elkoury published Palestine, l'envers du miroir in 1996, a book informed by several stays in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Two other books followed almost simultaneously, Liban Provisoire and Suite Egyptienne, both published in 1998. Upon his return to Paris in 2000, he was asked by the Maison Européenne de la Photo to prepare an exhibition where he showed a new collection of photographic compositions. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Sombres, was published in 2002. Following the war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Tanit Galerie in Munich contributed to the publication of his work On war and Love, a photographic diary in 33 composite images, exhibited in 2007 at the Venice Biennale.