Peristyle, Temple of Bacchus, Baalbek

Gustave Le Gray documented the architectural ruins of two periods and cultures in this photograph taken in Baalbek, Lebanon: the slender columns from a second century Roman temple of Bacchus, and the heavy stonework from an Arab fortification built about one thousand years later. Centuries of decay are evident in the pile of crumbled building material in the foreground.

Le Gray arrived in Lebanon shortly after his temperamental friend, the great writer Alexandre Dumas, on whose luxury yacht he had been traveling, abandoned him on the island of Malta. Le Gray then traveled to Beirut, where he made photographs for a French newspaper interested in the effects of civic unrest there.