La ruine de sa demeure

It all begins in Beirut, in the apartment where his father had lived and which he was able to rent in turn to stay there. Mathieu Pernot, winner of the 2019 HCB Prize, takes it as a sign of fate. He then decided to repeat the journey that his grandfather had made, in 1926, during a contemplative and tourist expedition to the Middle East, and whose traces were preserved in a photographic album reproduced in the first pages of this book.

Nearly one hundred years later, in 2019, Mathieu Pernot followed the path of his grandfather, in the tradition of the “Grand Tour” and the fascination of the Middle Eastern ruin, whether it is millennial or contemporary, marked by decades of war. From Tripoli to Baalbek, from Homs to Mosul, this book allows us to cross these three countries, at the origin of our history, as if frozen in time and endless tragedy.

The book ends with family photographs found in the ruins of Mosul, which constitute the modern album, opposite that of the grandfather, as a memory of the present.

A text by Hala Kodmani, a native of Syria and a leading reporter for Libération, as well as an interview between Mathieu Pernot and art critic Étienne Hatt, complete this new photographic corpus.