In 1975, Fouad Debbas was strolling along the banks of the Seine River in Paris when he stumbled upon an old album of 50 postcards depicting landscapes of Lebanon in the late 1800s.
Surprised by the actual existence of such photographs, he wondered why his high school history books were not filled with these visual accounts of the olden days. The discovery ignited his passion for collecting and he set out gradually on
a lifelong hunt to uncover and acquire photographs of Lebanon and the region.

Fouad Debbas traveled extensively and met with a host of experts, witnesses and especially elders to assemble and structure, by the time of his death in 2001, a collection of 45,000 images which includes approximately 22,000 postcards, 20,000 original printed photos (individual paper or in albums), 2,000 slides and negatives and 1,000 stereos. Yet the real value of the collection isn’t simply a question of quantity, it is the fervor that Fouad poured into the search for the images, the investigation of their origin and the structure he designed to host the entire compilation of images.

Fouad C. Debbas was born in Beirut, on November 15th 1930, into an old and influential Lebanese family. In 1958, he graduated in engineering from Ecole Centrale in Paris and joined the family in running their lighting business.
Until his sudden death in 2001, he built the world’s largest private collection of postcards and old photographs of Lebanon and the Middle East.

What began as a sentimental side- interest gradually developed into a rigorously organized scholarly enterprise. He was methodical and rational, a perfectionist who masterminded an original archival system classifying the collection by sequence, theme and publisher. This classification allowed the constitution of a database and a catalogue which provided both for himself and for other researchers, whether sociologists, ethnologists, urban planners and architects, an essential documentary source allowing them to formulate their analysis of Lebanon and the region’s history.

His passion led him to fully dedicate himself to developing and enhancing the collection.

Fouad Debbas believed in the importance of collecting, preserving and sharing old images to safeguard the collective memory and the history of an entire region. Fouad Debbas published in 1986 "Beyrouth, notre mémoire" followed by a second book in 2001 "Des photographes à Beyrouth 1840-1918".
Yet his thirst for history was not solely related to old photography, it led him to discover on the shelves of an old bookstore in Lyon, a manuscript written by a French aristocrat who witnessed firsthand Lebanon 1860’s sociopolitical turmoil. His work on the manuscript was published posthumously in 2007 as “Carnets d’Orient, le journal de la Comtesse de Perthuis”. He also ran exhibits of the collection at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and was preparing his second exhibition at the Sursock museum in Beirut in 2001, when he suddenly passed away.

The Fouad Debbas Collection remains a unique source for those of us who wish to research old memories.