The monuments survived. The faces did not.

We looked for a photograph of all forty. We found thirty.

We went looking for a photograph of every person on Faces of Lebanon. Forty people. We found thirty.

The ten we could not find are not obscure. A shipping magnate who built one of the largest container lines on earth. A banker whose name is on institutions across three continents. Historians who taught at Princeton and Oxford. A man whose construction group reshaped a coastline in West Africa.

Search the open archives for their faces and here is what comes back instead. Container ships named after the man, not the man. A synagogue funded by him. A boulevard carrying his name. A gravestone. Book covers he wrote and a plaque somebody mounted.

That is not a technical problem with archives. It is what happens when a people’s achievements are recorded by the countries that received them rather than by the country that produced them. France remembers the shipping line. Nigeria remembers the buildings. Nobody was keeping the Lebanese ledger, so the Lebanese part of each story is the part that went missing.

On this site those ten sit in empty frames carrying their initials over an engraved plate. We considered filling them with something invented. We are not going to. An empty frame that tells the truth is worth more than a decorated one that does not, and the frames are a more honest picture of the situation than any photograph would be.