Title: Secrets in the open sea
Attributed date: 1994
Attributed to: Anonymous
Production date: 2004

Secrets in the open sea consists of twenty-nine photographic prints that were found buried under the rubble during the 1993 demolition of Beirut’s war-ravaged commercial districts. The prints were different shades of blue and each measured 111 x 173 cm. In 1994, the prints were entrusted to The Atlas Group for preservation and analysis. The

Atlas Group sent six of the prints to laboratories in France and the UK for chemical and digital analysis.

Remarkably, the laboratories recovered small black-and-white latent images from the blue prints. The small images represented group portraits of men and women. The Atlas Group was able to identify all the individuals represented in the small black-and-white images, and it turned out that they were all individuals who drowned, died or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.

Title: We decided to let them say "We are convinced" twice.  
Attributed date: 2002
Attributed to: Walid Raad
Production date: 2004

The following photographs are attributed to Walid Raad who donated them to The Atlas Group in 2002. In the statement accompanying the donation, Raad noted:

​In the summer of 1982, I stood along with others in a parking lot across from my mother’s apartment in East Beirut, and watched the Israeli land, air and sea assault on West Beirut. The PLO along with their Lebanese and Syrian allies retaliated, as best they could. East Beirut welcomed the invasion, or so it seemed and that much is certain. West Beirut resisted it, or so it seemed, and that much is certain.

One day, my mother even accompanied me to the hills around Beirut to photograph the invading Israeli army stationed there. Soldiers rested their bodies and their weapons as they waited for their next orders to attack or retreat. I was fifteen in 1982, and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired camera and lens permitted me. Clearly not close enough. This past year, I came upon the carefully preserved negatives from that time. I decided to look again.