REAL VISIONS (1999)
The Lebanese photographer Greta Torossian (b. 1969) is fascinated by urban landscapes. She asks herself what changes in them, what remains the same, and how these elements relate to each other. It is in that, according to her, that the soul, the personality of a city can be found. Torossian has a sharp eye for details. She sees how buildings are ordered, how colours and street furniture are used, and how small streets change into larger ones. Beirut, where she lives, produced an wealth of such observations. After the civil war, which had destroyed the whole of the city centre, the Lebanese capital became on of the greatest construction sites in the world. Seldom have the two extremes of human action – destruction and rebuilding – been so strongly united in one city. REAL VISIONS shows how the often classic ruins are swallowed up in modern urban planning and how a city gets a new personality through the merging of past and present.
