Au Retour

I left Lebanon in 2011, and since then, every time I go back, the highway, the mountains and the long coast, these places that were such a big part of my childhood, still stand there, unchanged. We are both in a constant motion, moving together towards the unknown, getting away and reuniting again; just like waves; it is never the same one that breaks on the pebbles. My photographs show you a Lebanon you do not necessarily know, through my own perspective. I want to take it out of its context, its history and its politics. These images that are empty of people, or almost - portray the fact that I never felt like I belonged to this society, I was never able to photograph it. And how can you illustrate a society that is going through an identity crisis? I left, I left everything to step back and to find myself. These photos are a trace of my memory, some leftovers, and some residues. I was never really able to photograph my homeland until I moved away and settled in Paris in 2012. The project started around 2014 during one of my visits and became a constant research since then, about finding myself on a land I once knew and also re-discovering it. It became a research about my identity and a way to archive the process of change that Lebanon is undergoing. I grew up in post war era, mainly hearing about the same stories over and over again which made me repulsive against my Lebanese identity. I never felt part of that society, instead constantly felt the need to get away. The only connection I had was related to its landscapes, mountains, some landmarks and mostly the sea. My photographs then concentrate on that rather than on the people. My goal is to photograph these spaces and have a trace of how our land was and became today, by showing the impact that war has created years later on the territory itself. Abandoned buildings, abandoned houses, factories by the sea, and lately the trash crisis. It is all talking about the corruption that happened after the war that let illegal constructions happen without taking care of the pollution it might create and how it will affect the nature; the economic recession that it put its inhabitants into a crisis and pushed them to leave their property; the beauty that still lies in that landscape nonetheless.