paula roush — msdm publications
Al-Yom Today Torn Curled Folded is the third edition (2026) of the artist publication, bringing together photographs (of photographs), research, essays and editorial design by paula roush, working from the Al-Yom collection at the Arab Image Foundation, Beirut.
The publication incorporates excerpts from L’Ombre d’une ville (Elie-Pierre Sabbag, Paris: Buchet Chastel, 1994), and is structured through research and editorial correspondence conducted in Beirut in 2015.
This third edition revisits and re-edits the project as an unstable correspondence unfolding across image, archive and text.
Al-Yom Today Torn Curled Folded is a photo-textual publication developed from a damaged photographic archive associated with the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Yom, active until its violent interruption at the outbreak of the civil war in 1975.
The project began at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, where several storage boxes labelled Al-Yom contained photographs classified as “torn, curled, folded” — a working archival designation for images whose damage exceeds conventional preservation thresholds.
Rather than restoring the archive to a stable historical narrative, the book works from within this instability. Fragmentation, delay and contradiction are treated as structural conditions.
Originally produced as a loose-leaf boxed edition in Beirut (2015), and later expanded in London (2020), this third edition reassembles the photo-essay and email-based research into a single bound volume.