Fouad Elkhoury

Born in 1952 in Paris, Fouad ElKhoury now lives between Paris and Beirut.

After earning a degree in architecture in London in 1979, Elkoury turned to photography, producing a report on daily life in Lebanon. He covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, and the resulting pictures appeared in Libération among other publications. He joined the Sygma agency in 1983, only to leave it one year later. From then on, he divided his time between Paris and Beirut. In 1984 he published Beyrouth Aller-Retour, a book on the life of a war-torn city. The following year he turned his lens to the Egyptian cinema, while simultaneously undertaking a series of portraits of Arab authors. His work on the urban landscape of Marseille resulted in an exhibition at the Musée de la Vieille Charité in 1986 and developed into a sustained interest in photographing cities: Rome, Amman, Djibouti.

In 1989 Elkoury joined the Rapho agency and won the Prix Medicis Hors les Murs, before spending a year in Egypt retracing the steps of Gustave Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp.

In 1997 Elkoury co-created the Beirut based Arab Image Foundation, an organization that seeks to archive and preserve photography from the region while also making the medium more accessible. The following year he moved to Turkey and produced an extensive photographic travelogue, the last of his purely photographic series.

In 2002 the Paris Maison Européenne de la Photo commissioned Elkoury to create an exhibition for which he presented a new collection of photographic compositions, incorporating sequential images to emphasize meaning. As part of the exhibition he premiered his first video “Lettres à Francine”, based on his photographs of Turkey. A catalog accompanying the exhibition, “Sombres”, was published by Marvel. In 2003 he directed his second video Moving Out. An essay on photography, “La sagesse du photographe” followed and was published in Paris in 2004.

Between 2008-2009, Elkoury developed a new project, “What happened to my dreams”, a photographic series of 32 visuals addressing a range of contemporary socio-political issues as a natural extension of themes that he has been exploring throughout his career. This series evokes a sense of disillusionment, but also of acceptance at what cannot now be undone. It was exhibited simultaneously in Dubai, Paris and Beirut.