Opinion / Mary Fitzgerald
Life through a lens
Few countries have suffered more from the one-dimensional narratives conveyed by news headlines than Libya. Media reporting of the chaos that followed Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow in 2011 has too often obscured how ordinary Libyans have navigated life in the years since. Moreover, Libya was so isolated under Gaddafi that the country’s social fabric and culture remain little known to the outside world. When I joined photographer Rena Effendi to report from Tripoli for Monocle in 2021, it was Rena’s scenes of daily life in the Libyan capital that captivated readers who were eager to learn more.
For these reasons, I was delighted to hear about the Album Libya project, launched this month by the Arete Foundation for Arts and Culture. Its curators, including poet Khaled Mattawa, asked Libyans to share images from their family photo albums and personal stories that tell a larger story of the country’s past and present. Some of the photographs date back to the pre-Gaddafi 1950s and 1960s, while others are more recent. Together, they are a reminder of the quotidian, intimate realities often lost in the footnotes of a nation’s history. The Arete Foundation describes the project as “a collective love poem ignited by the spark of heartbreak and grief”. The hope is that sharing memories in this way can help to heal societal wounds caused by years of civil conflict.
Album Libya, which is supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, is available online and in book form, with an English translation coming soon. Its recent launch in Tripoli included an exhibition of photographs from the project with accompanying testimonies. The Arete Foundation has said that it wants to take the exhibition overseas and I hope that it does. It would help to open Libya up to the world.
Mary Fitzgerald is Monocle’s North Africa correspondent. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.