Wadad Halwani’s short documentary film, The Last Picture…While Crossing (2009), is in the main about the late Odette Salem, whose two children were disappeared in September 1985, during the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). This essay discusses how Halwani adapts photographs and previously made video footage to situate Salem as a site of memory. While the film constitutes a memorial practice to tell a story of Salem and her activist milieu, it works to situate memory of her plight as an ethical modality of address and response. In doing so, the film exposes a public audience, both actual and potential, to Salem’s and Halwani’s circumstances and their arduous efforts in engaging their circumstances. The argument foregrounds memory as a circumstantial tension between the significance and resonance of photographs, in respect to circulations of photographic reproductions and exhibitions as modalities of public exposure.

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated re-enactments of conflicted pasts.Dr. Ihab Saloul is assistant professor of cultural studies, and academic coordinator of Heritage and Memory Studies at University of Amsterdam. Saloul's interests include cultural memory and identity politics, narrative theory and visual analysis, conflict and trauma, Diaspora and migration as well as contemporary cultural thought in the Middle East.Professor Rob van der Laarse is research director of the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies (ASHMS) and Westerbork Professor of Heritage of Conflict and War at VU University Amsterdam. Van der Laarse's research focuses on (early) modern European elite and intellectual cultures, cultural landscape, heritage and identity politics, and the cultural roots and postwar memory of the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence.Dr. Britt Baillie is a founding member of the Centre for Urban Conflict Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a research fellow at the University of Pretoria. Baillie's interests include the politicization of cultural heritage, heritage and the city, memory and identity, religion and conflict, theories of destruction, heritage as commons, contested heritage, and urban resistance.

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