Clue: The Lingering Calendar
Even today, in October of 2013, as I look in my own home, I find two wall calendars lingering on months long gone. They were never really intended for keeping track of the day or of any appointments or events. In the photos below, I was initially thrilled to find two calendars which I assumed indicated at least the year, and published the first version of: Catalogue of Destruction with the wrong year, 1992. It was only after I started suspecting some of the dates that I began this investigation and dove deeply into the photographs were the calendars are featured before I realized that I was misled.
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Roll 50
Filename: 920700-12-24-LEB-fs
When I first saw this calendar I immediately assumed that the year of this photograph was 1991. After I spent several days studying all the photographs and relationships and continuity from one roll to another, I realized that this calendar was left over from the previous year. But in a beauty salon with appointments? Yes.
Roll 50
Filename: 920700-12-24-LEB-fs - Detail
Upon enlarging the image on the monitor, I could barely read the faint image of the month as Tishrin Al Thani, Arabic for November. In both 1991 and 1992 I was in Lebanon in the summer around the month of July. Therefore this had to have been summer of 1992 looking at a calendar left over from 1991. I still found the Calendar itself to be confusing. My assumption was that the dark blue squares indicated Sundays. But why are the First and Twenty-Second of November also highlighted in Dark Blue. Upon some research I realized that November 1st is All Saints Day, and November 22nd is Lebanon's Day of Independence, both very important dates.
I made this discovery after I had already designed and published the book Lebanon 1992: Catalogue of Destruction, which in fact should have been 1991.
Roll 43
Filename: 920700-05-35-LEB-fs
Tante Loulou's kitchen calendar in Baabdat was at first sight also misleading, and I assumed the year was 1991, but when the other photos on the roll didn't relate to other photos from that year, I took a closer look.
Roll 43
Filename: 920700-05-35-LEB-fs - Detail
Just like Salon Laurent's Calendar, this one also has the Virgin Mary as its all-year image, but unlike the former, this one is a day-by-day tear-away calendar, culminating with the text shown in the photograph which translates to basically "Happy New Year to all of you", evidence that 1991 had already passed several months ago, and that the time of capture was indeed in the summer of 1992.
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