Moore Collection In Exhibit

Attending the exhibit from left to right: Ceasar Nammour, Maroun Kisirwani, Marwan El Sabban, Raif Nassif, and John Waterbury

On the occasion of AUB's 140th anniversary, an unusual exhibition of photographs taken by Franklin T. Moore was held at West Hall Common Room on December 4. The exhibition was timed to launch The Moore Collection, a book published in a special limited edition by the American University Press.

The Moore photographs, many of which were included in the show, comprise 120 black and white images of AUB campus, along with some views of Lebanon, all taken during the years of 1892 to 1902. They were produced by an early AUBite, Franklin Moore, when he was teaching at the Syrian Protestant College (later named AUB). He had arrived in Lebanon in 1891, where he became a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and where he also developed a strong interest in the art of photography.

It was purely by chance that the photographic plates produced by Moore survived all those years. Dr. Marwan El-Sabban of the Department of Human Morphology and also head of the Photography Department fondly recounts how the plates were close to being trashed had luck not intervened. He credits Professor Emeritus Dr. Raif Nassif, who was then the director of the School of Medicine, with salvaging them. Apparently, the plates had been packed away in crates and eventually they had been moved to the attic of Van Dyke Hall, where they were left forgotten for years. It wasn't until 1967 that Dr. Nassif came across them, and, realizing their value, ordered that they be restored and carefully protected.

The preparation for the current show of Moore photographs required extensive knowledge of photography in order to restore the original plates and enlarge them to make them suitable for exhibiting. The whole process took more than a year to complete, with the collaborative effort of the Photography Department putting in hours of hard work to achieve the best results and highest quality. Now, over a hundred years after they were produced, fifty years after the glass plates were discovered, and more than thirty years after their value was recognized, the Moore photographs are now digitized and stored on CD-ROM as part of the AUB archives. It was an effort well worthwhile; for everyone who sees them, the photographs will remain a precious permanent visual memory of AUB's early years.