Secrets in the open sea consists of twenty-nine photographic prints that were found buried under the rubble during the 1993 demolition of Beirut’s war-ravaged commercial districts. The prints were different shades of blue and each measured 111 x 173 cm. In 1994, the prints were entrusted to The Atlas Group for preservation and analysis. The

Atlas Group sent six of the prints to laboratories in France and the UK for chemical and digital 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.