About five years ago, Lebanon entered a new chapter, one marked by a chaos that only seemed to worsen with each passing moment. The protests known as thawra, meaning revolution in Arabic, the financial collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, the August 2020 blast at Beirut’s port, the banking system’s collapse—all these events blended together, overlapping and entangling, making it impossible to process one without the others. I reached a point where I could not distinguish what to grieve for anymore, much less identify which trauma was affecting me the most.
So, I turned to what I knew best—taking pictures. As a photographer and journalist, my responsibility was to document. But beyond that, as a citizen, I photographed to process, to reflect and to attempt to make sense of it all. I was unable to comprehend what was unfolding before my eyes unless I froze those moments, preserving them to revisit on my own terms.
