Samer MohdadSamer Mohdad was born in 1964 at Bzebdine, Lebanon, to a father who was an engineer and a mother who was a poet. After almost eight years of childhood, the Lebanese civil war broke out and his adolescence was marked by bombs, exile, fighting, and thedeath of close friends and acquaintances. After finishing studies in photography at St-Luc in Liège, Belgium, In 1988, he began working for Paris-based photojournalism agency Vu, notably producing features on the other side of the Lebanese civil war (1988 - 1990), the Beirut prison (1988), and the children of the civil war (1991). In 1990, he was commissioned by the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne to take a series of photographs of the Swiss army for a book and exhibition entitled 'Voir la Suisse Autrement', on the occasion of Switzerland's 700 years of existence. From 1992 to 1996, he was in charge of the relations with the Arab world at the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne. During this time, his photography concentrated on the Arab world. In 1993, he published War Children, Lebanon 1985 - 1992, a book on the children of the Lebanese civil war. These photographs had been exhibited at Visa pour l'Image in Pérpignan in 1992, and were shown again after the book's publication at the Beirut Exhibition Center in 1993 and and at the Musée de l'Elysée in 1994. In 1992, he photographed 415 Palestinians expelled from Israel to no man's land in the south of Lebanon, and then portrayed the same men a few years later in 1995 after they had returned to Gaza. Those photos were published in a book called Return to Gaza in 1996. For Du, a cultural magazine published in Zurich, he in 1994 completed a special double feature on Islam and another two years later on Iran, a joint project with fellow photographers Thomas Kern and Daniel Schwartz. In 1996, he was a jury member at the World Press Photo in Amsterdam and the same year he started up the Arab Images Foundation in Beirut, Lebanon. From 1997 to 1999, he was curator of exhibitions and head of workshops at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles, France. Read More Read Less