There are countless ways to categorize the self and the other, some adding political or cultural aspects to the essential divide. This photo essay aims to explore the boundaries between that first, most basic binary, while acknowledging that there may be others at play as well, given that this is a Lebanese woman photographer taking pictures of other Lebanese women for a foreign audience.

Most of these women are friends of the photographer’s, and were chosen precisely because they embody different aspects of her own persona, whether real or imagined. This work is a self-portrait with the self directly absent from the frame and yet present in so many different ways. It is also a portrait of the self, more precisely, of that which is intimately known, for after all, both photographer and subjects inhabit the same world and deal with the same crises. Above all, this is a dialogue between the photographer and her subjects: all women, all self-made, all, like the photographer herself, residing in Lebanon and attempting to practice their art and their lives in an often tumultuous political climate.

What often looks from the outside like a country in constant turmoil is very simply home, with all its special meanings.

This photo essay was commissioned by "DU "
magazine . www.dumag.ch