Repairing the Scars of War

Lenka Clayton: A series of five digitally repaired images taken in Lebanon of buildings damaged by the 2006 conflict with Israel.

The images were taken specifically for this project by a journalist working in Lebanon. I deliberately asked for no information about the original buildings and had no idea how they had looked. The repairs were carried out using the ruins of the architecture as the only guide to the structure of the repaired building. All tones and textures are also limited to the information available within the original image. 

Manipulation of media images has a long history from the complete removal of political opponents from photographs by the Soviets to the scandal during the 2006 conflict where a photograph of the aftermath of an attack on Beirut was intensified by the badly photo-shopped exaggeration of a cloud of smoke. In this series I was interested in how digital manipulation could be seen on the one hand to heal physical damage caused by a conflict and on the other to hide that it had taken place at all.

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