Al-Yom (Today) torn curled folded is a photo-textual publication built from a damaged archive of photographs linked to the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Yom. The book brings together photographs (of photographs), excerpts from Elie-Pierre Sabbag’s novel L’Ombre d’une ville, and a sequence of email correspondence that traces the research process conducted in Beirut in 2015. Published by msdm publications, the work moves between image, essay, and editorial design, treating the archive not as material to be restored, but as a condition to be worked through.
This third edition appears at a moment when archives are increasingly asked to perform coherence — to be searchable, deliverable, legible on demand. Al-Yom moves in the opposite direction. It insists on what cannot be made seamless: damage, delay, contradiction, and the labour of trying to know. The conditions that shaped this archive — war, displacement, institutional delay, and the uneven survival of documents — are not past conditions. They remain active editorial realities.
This post serves as an introduction to a book that does not resolve its archive. It offers a way into the work, and into the method that produced it: a prolonged correspondence shaped by interruption. The third edition matters because it re-assembles the project’s two textual strands — the photo-text essay and the email-based research — into a single bound volume. What changes is not the instability of the material, but the conditions under which it is encountered.
Al-Yom (Today) is a photo-textual research project that emerged from prolonged engagement with a damaged photographic archive linked to the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Yom, active from the mid-twentieth century until its violent interruption at the outbreak of the civil war in 1975. The project does not seek to restore the archive to a stable historical narrative. Instead, it treats damage, delay, and fragmentation as structural conditions through which the work operates.
The first edition was produced as a loose-leaf boxed publication, in which the photo-text block circulated as unbound components. A second edition expanded the project to include the email-based research as a separate pamphlet, still within a boxed format. The present third edition re-assembles these materials into a single bound volume. Fragmentation remains intact, but the mode of circulation changes.
Editing an Unstable Correspondence
On Damaged Photographs, Delayed Messages, and the Impossibility of Repair
The project began at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, where I encountered several storage boxes labelled Al-Yom. The boxes contained no inventory, no catalogue entry, no stabilising description. What was immediately legible was their condition. The photographs were torn, folded, curled — a working classification used at the Foundation for images whose damage exceeds standard archival thresholds.
The surfaces bore the marks of repeated handling, humidity, pressure, and improper storage. Damage did not appear as the trace of a single event, but as accumulation: photographs bent against themselves, emulsion cracked, paper warped. The archive announced itself through material distress.
Understanding what these photographs were, and how they had come to survive in this condition, unfolded not as a linear investigation but as a prolonged correspondence. Phone calls and emails were sent, forwarded, delayed, unanswered, or contradicted by later messages. Research progressed through gaps rather than confirmations. The archive resisted stabilisation.
Al-Yom was an Arabic-language daily newspaper co-founded by brothers Afif El Tibi and Wafic El Tibi. Afif is widely recognised as a central figure in Lebanese journalism and later presided over the Lebanese Press Syndicate. Less frequently acknowledged in institutional summaries, but repeatedly foregrounded in Arabic-language sources and family testimony, is the newspaper’s explicit alignment with anti-colonial and Palestinian political struggles.
From its earliest years, Al-Yom functioned as both newspaper and political platform, supporting revolutionary movements across Lebanon, Palestine, and the wider Arab world.
The newspaper ceased publication in 1975, when armed militia stormed its offices in downtown Beirut, giving staff half an hour to leave before the building was set on fire. Much of the documentary record disappeared in the chaos of war. What survived did so unevenly, displaced from institutional custody and folded into private life.
The photographic material associated with Al-Yom was later found in the apartment of Walid El Tibi, Wafic El Tibi’s son, and eventually brought to the Arab Image Foundation by Zeina Arida after Walid’s death in 2005. Since then, the collection has remained provisionally stored, awaiting cataloguing, conservation, and digitisation. Its status has been suspended from the outset — neither fully private nor fully institutional.
Faced with an archive marked by damage, genealogical dispersion, and archival uncertainty, I began working with book design not as a means of repair, but as a way of thinking alongside instability.
Al-Yom (Today) Torn Curled Folded
Photo-Essay
The central photo-essay in the book brings together photographs from the damaged Al-Yom archive with text fragments sampled from L’Ombre d’Une Ville, written in 1993 by Beirut-based writer and architect Elie-Pierre Sabbag in the aftermath of the civil war.
Rather than reconstructing a history, the work stages an encounter between two incomplete bodies: an archive marked by material degradation and a text shaped by temporal distance, reflection, and aftermath. Every sentence in Sabbag’s book containing the word Beirut (or Beyrouth) was extracted and repurposed within the publication, in dialogue with the author. The city appears repeatedly, insistently, but never identically. French and English versions appear side by side, not as equivalents, but as parallel presences, each carrying its own delay.
Editing here does not resolve meaning. It sustains dissonance. Photographs function as referential blocks, while the text introduces temporal slippage, separating images from their presumed historical moment and placing them in relation to another narrative at a distance. The work holds open the question of whether images document the city of the text, or whether the text fictionalises the reality imprinted in the photographs. The tension is not resolved.
The Emails as an Editorial Structure
A Meta-Narrative of Research
The research unfolds almost entirely through email. Messages are sent, forwarded, unanswered, delayed, or lost in time. What emerges is not a stable exchange but a correspondence shaped by interruption, mediation, and disappearance.
The emails are not supplementary material. They are the method, the archive, and the failure of the archive at the same time. Their ordering does not restore coherence; it exposes how coherence is sought, negotiated, deferred, and undone. Knowledge appears not as certainty, but as process.
The correspondence is structured into five editorial blocks, each marking a shift in epistemic position:
Block I — The Request
Positioning the researcher inside the damage.
Block II — The Hypothesis (Date Obsession)
How facts harden under pressure.
Block III — Archival Collapse
When absence becomes political.
Block IV — Genealogy
From institutions to bodies, names, and memory.
Block V — No Closure
Testimony instead of proof.
These blocks do not function as explanatory captions. They are editorial signals that keep instability visible. They trace how historical knowledge about Al-Yom is produced under conditions shaped by destruction, displacement, and political exposure.
The project does not close the archive. It settles with it. Editing becomes a form of care directed toward what cannot be made whole.
About the Third Edition
By re-assembling the photo-essay and the email-based research into a single bound volume, this third edition alters the book’s circulation without resolving its instability. Fragmentation is preserved, but the reader now encounters it as a continuous field rather than as dispersed components.
What is new in this edition is not additional material, but a shift in editorial architecture. The separate pamphlet and loose components of previous editions are now structurally integrated. The instability that once appeared spatially dispersed across a box now unfolds temporally across the turning of pages.
The archive remains open, provisional, and wounded. This edition insists on that condition — not as failure, but as the political and material reality from which the work emerges.