Roger Moukarzel was 12 years old when he took his first photograph, on a camera borrowed from his older brother. By 15, he was photographing the violence and devastation wrought by Lebanon’s Civil War, selling his photographs to international agencies like Sygma and Reuters, who published them around the world. At 27, one of his photographs was featured on the cover of Paris Match’s 40th anniversary issue. A hellish vision of a Beirut street engulfed in flames, partially obscured by thick clouds of choking black smoke, the 1989 photograph summarized 14 years of conflict in a single horrific instant. These days, Moukarzel’s subject matter is almost diametrically opposed to everything that photography represents. Sickened by 15 years of photographing death and destruction — and the realization that war photography had become a sort of international trend — he left Lebanon for Paris in 1990 and started working in fashion. A
India is a British-Indian freelance writer and journalist. She was based in Beirut for eight years from 2011 to 2019, reporting on Lebanon and the Middle East. In 2019, she spent six months reporting from Latin America and since 2021 she has been based in Istanbul.
