War in my Neighbourhood - Lebanon

Photographs by Patrick Baz

April 1st - 30 October 2022

War came to my neighbourhood when I was just 12 years old. My friends and I would swagger with the local militia fighters. I was too young to fight, but transfixed by the mechanical "glamour" of war. At 17 I swapped the Kalashnikov for a camera and became a photojournalist.


The Lebanese Civil War was multifaceted and complex, the parties involved included Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druzes, Christians, Palestinians, Syria and Israel. The war lasted from 1975 to 1990.


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November 12, 1985 - Pro-Syrian militiamen and Syrian Army soldiers fire at Muslim Sunni Islamists in the northern city of Tripoli. Syria's campaign to prevent the re-emergence in Lebanon of the pro-Arafat wing of the PLO, killed more than 500 people before a cease-fire was agreed in Damascus in October.

Patrick Baz

Patrick Baz is French-Lebanese, born in Beirut in 1963. He was twelve when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. Living not far from the demarcation line separating the Christian and Muslim zones, Baz was stimulated by what was going on around him to take up photography at an early age. Lebanon became his training ground. Between 1982 and 1988, he worked as a freelance photojournalist. In 1989, Agence France-Presse (AFP) gave him the opportunity of covering the First Intifada in Gaza and the West Bank. He covered the First Gulf War in 1990, and later conflicts in Kurdistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, the “Arab Springs” and Afghanistan. Baz stopped covering war zones in 2014 and is currently the manager of Factstory (a content production company) for the MENA region. He has won two POYi awards, and published Don’t Take My Picture, Iraqis Don’t Cry in 2009 and Christians of Lebanon Rites and Rituals in 2017.