The Collective Unconscious

A new book of black and white photography by Ayla Hibri is set to detail her complex relationship with Lebanon.

The photographer Ayla Hibri is sitting opposite me considering Lebanon. Anyone who is Lebanese will sympathise.

“I’m planning on going on a seven-day road trip across Lebanon, just to finish the project,” she says, reclining on a burgundy sofa with improvised cushion covers. “I don’t feel like it’s there yet. I’m collecting little elements and metaphors – the archetypes of this place if you want. It could be a car that’s broken down on the side of a highway, or it could be a bunch of things that I feel could represent what this place is.”

The project in question is a book – a book that will not only detail her relationship with this small but troubled country on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, but its effect on her psyche.

“It’s interesting because I’ve never done road trips in Lebanon that are seven days long. I did the whole of Turkey from Istanbul to Georgia on the Black Sea coast. I’ve done trips in many places, but it was always going with the flow, you know. With no language barrier, I guess I can just do whatever I want.”

The book, which is to be published by Beirut-based publishing house Kaph Books, will feature photographs taken during the course of the past three years. Photographs that have been chosen as part of a narrative based on the different elements that “constitute the collective unconscious”.

“They’re not in chronological order and some might be removed, but you can get an idea of what I’m talking about,” she says, handing me a stack of black and white photographs.

I flick through them: a dusty car; a stuffed pelican; a foliage covered building. There’s the sea and a rowing boat, too, and a man riding horseback along a street. One is of a half-finished apartment block.