Wires and cables

Lea Najjar found these images at Souk al Ahad, Beirut’s Sunday Market, which despite its name, opens every Saturdays and Sundays: “These pictures were lost under a pile of various postcards and old family pictures, all for sale. Bits and pieces of people’s lives mixed with other people’s lives sold decades later.”

Even though the exact origin of these pictures is not known, they show the building of electricity lines in the Beqaa in Lebanon’s east. The photographs show the epoch’s approach to work, the cranes, wires, the old trucks with the manually held wooden ladders. The workers, farmers and engineers all pose while working on setting these lines up.

We still suffer with power cuts all throughout the country. Some regions are more hardly hit than others, and the Beqaa’ is one of them. Most residents don’t have more than six hours of electricity daily. This is why these pictures are symbolic of a period when modernity hit the region by building electricity lines, when the situation did not evolve much since then.

 The pictures were found in Souk Al Ahad by Lea Najjar.