While teaching English in Beirut, photographer Nicholas Kourides developed a strong interest in Lebanon's "Gibran Country," the remote and rugged mountain valleys which inspired much of the work Gibran.
As his interest deepened, so did his determination to capture on film the flavor of Becharri, a village perched on a fertile ledge between the deep Kadisha Gorge and the country's famous grove of cedars. To do so he focused first on the rosy, glowing children of the mountain (Aramco World, July-August, 1969), and then on the men of the mountain, men whose faces had been molded and weathered into seamed, strong reflections of the mountains that had nourished Gibran's writing.
Nicholas Kourides has long since returned to the United States where he now practices law in New York, but his photographs of these proud, dignified mountain men are as enduring as the terraces hacked from the mountain sides by men just like them years ago and as rugged as the gorges carved from the mountains by endless torrents of rushing water.
