1982 by Rhea Karam

1982 is a limited edition artist book by Rhea Karam, published in 2025 by Small Editions. It features a custom-cast concrete brick slipcast, typeset in English Egyptian by Abyme.

1982 is the year that artist Rhea Karam was born. In the same year, her family fled Beirut and moved to the United States to escape the war in Lebanon. All that remains of her family’s visual records of that year is a single photo album with 67 photographs, depicting birthday celebrations; meals with family and neighbours; fabric, furniture, and toys adorning a childhood bedroom.

1982 is an artists’ book that contains photographs from that album, juxtaposed beside images of walls from Beirut and New York City, where Karam now lives and works. Family photographs portray details of a house that no longer exists as such; photographs of walls portray textures and colours of two vibrant, complicated cities. Using the double-page spread, or the dual recto-verso relationship, Karam creates a charge between past and present, between life before and after displacement, and invites readers to imagine a third, unseen space between the two. All books in the edition are different, as each contains a unique sequence and selection of images. The album – in its full, original form – can only be reconstructed by combining all 67 books side by side.

1982 is a continuation of Karam’s broader artistic interest in walls, which she has been photographing and studying for the past 20 years. For 1982, she wanted to create a wall of her own: each of the 67 books are housed within a concrete brick slipcase, sturdy enough to be stacked on top of each other but ultimately intended to be dismantled and scattered.

Brick fabrication by Baylor Ward
Variable Edition of 67 + 2AP