Secrets in the Open Sea - A Project by The Atlas Group and Walid Raad

Secrets in the Open Sea consists of 29 photographic prints that were found buried under the rubble during the 1992 demolition of Beirut's war-ravaged commercial districts. The prints were different shades of blue and each measured 110 x 175cm. The prints were entrusted to The Atlas Group in 1994 for preservation and analysis.
In 1996, The Atlas Group sent 6 of the prints to laboratories in France for technical analysis. Remarkably, the laboratories recovered small black and white latent images from the blue prints. The small images represented group portraits of men and women. The Atlas Group was able to identify all the individuals represented in the small black and white images, and it turned out that they were all individuals who drowned, died or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975 and 1991.
The Atlas Group is a project established in Beirut in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. The Atlas Group locates, preserves, studies and produces audio, visual, literary and other documents that shed light on this history. The documents are preserved in The Atlas Group Archive which is located in Beirut and New York. The archive is organized in three file categories: Type A (attributed to an identified individual); Type FO (found documents); Type AGP (attributed to The Atlas Group).