I met Samira in 2005 when she was 5 years old. She lives with her family in the Palestinian Refugee Camp of Bourj El-Barajneh.

Samira is a third-generation Palestinian refugee. Her grandparents flew to Lebanon from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and were never able to go back to their homes. Her parents were born and raised in refugee camps, eventually getting married and settling in Bourj El-Barajneh Camp at the outskirts of Beirut, where Samira was born years later. The camps are not integrated in Lebanese life and depend on UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) for assistance, health, education, and more. As contingent residents of the country, Samira and her family have experienced numerous hardships, and barriers to her and her siblings’ education and well-being. Despite the conditions they live in, they have always welcomed me with open arms, hospitality, warmth, and love, and I have become attached to them, and especially Samira over the years.

I fell in love with the little girl she was at 5 and developed a very special relationship with her over the years. I visit her on every one of my trips to Lebanon. What had started as a documentary project about women and children in the refugee camps turned into an organic collaboration with Samira over the years as she was growing up and turning into a beautiful young woman. We collaborate and make pictures at every one of my visits. While we used to stay in the refugee camp, in recent years we started venturing out and going on adventures outside the camp. Her self-possession, resilience, and kind personality have been an inspiration to me for the past 19 years.

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War. As we reach this symbolic date, Lebanon still suffers from its consequences. In the past few years, conditions have deteriorated fast, especially after a total economic meltdown, COVID-19, the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, and yet another war in 2024.

Through it all, I found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women. I chose to focus on their majestic presence, creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience. I see my younger self in these women. I left Lebanon at age twenty to study in the United States in 1984. It was during the Civil War, in what had been the largest wave of emigration – until recently. Many find themselves at that same juncture, as they face the painful decision of whether to stay or leave. One road leads to separation from family, home, and life as they know it, the other means staying despite the fraught conditions in the country, always holding on to hope for better days.

I saw graffiti on a crumbling wall that said in Arabic: “Where do I go”لوينروح. I was with Perla, a young woman who threw herself on that wall. It became the title of this body of work.

The project kept evolving over the past years, as I invited more women to tell their story through our collaboration. Together we explored their relationship to the different aspects and textures of Lebanon. Each photograph is personal and has a narrative. The women, the land, the architecture are intertwined. I portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive.

The process is collaborative, and the photo session evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. They climb on rocks and trees, jump fully dressed into dirty water and waterfalls, crawl under thorns, trespass into abandoned buildings. They are embracing life, not afraid of getting dirty, taking risks, and having fun. Given the space to express themselves, they are willing to experiment and go places neither of us thought possible just moments earlier. Just like living in Lebanon, we embrace the element of risk-taking and danger. It is part of who we are. It’s in our DNA.

I find myself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence. The collaboration is intense, creative, emotional, and personal. The need to hold on to creativity and self-expression feels urgent.

While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, the (shared) humanity, and the grace that still exists despite all. They are my love letters to the women of Lebanon. This project is for us all: the ones who stayed and the ones who have left but can never leave.

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Lebanese Civil War. As we reach this symbolic date, Lebanon still suffers from its consequences. In the past few years, conditions have deteriorated fast, especially after a total economic meltdown, COVID-19, the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, and yet another war in 2024.

Through it all, I found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women. I chose to focus on their majestic presence, creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience. I see my younger self in these women. I left Lebanon at age twenty to study in the United States in 1984. It was during the Civil War, in what had been the largest wave of emigration – until recently. Many find themselves at that same juncture, as they face the painful decision of whether to stay or leave. One road leads to separation from family, home, and life as they know it, the other means staying despite the fraught conditions in the country, always holding on to hope for better days.

I saw graffiti on a crumbling wall that said in Arabic: “Where do I go”لوينروح. I was with Perla, a young woman who threw herself on that wall. It became the title of this body of work.

The project kept evolving over the past years, as I invited more women to tell their story through our collaboration. Together we explored their relationship to the different aspects and textures of Lebanon. Each photograph is personal and has a narrative. The women, the land, the architecture are intertwined. I portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive.

The process is collaborative, and the photo session evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. They climb on rocks and trees, jump fully dressed into dirty water and waterfalls, crawl under thorns, trespass into abandoned buildings. They are embracing life, not afraid of getting dirty, taking risks, and having fun. Given the space to express themselves, they are willing to experiment and go places neither of us thought possible just moments earlier. Just like living in Lebanon, we embrace the element of risk-taking and danger. It is part of who we are. It’s in our DNA.

I find myself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence. The collaboration is intense, creative, emotional, and personal. The need to hold on to creativity and self-expression feels urgent.

While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, the (shared) humanity, and the grace that still exists despite all. They are my love letters to the women of Lebanon. This project is for us all: the ones who stayed and the ones who have left but can never leave.

In my photography I usually focus on people, and human moments. When I went to Lebanon after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, I went with the intention of photographing the aftermath of war through people dealing with loss and reconstruction, hoping to capture these moments and expressions that will tell the story of what they have been through and how they are dealing with the brutal reality of the aftermath.

However when I got there, I was also moved by the eerie absence of people in certain places, by empty homes left in a rush in the search for safety, living rooms, kitchen shelves, broken portraits and the simple mundane objects that exist in every home and in every life, all now left behind. People lived there, now they are gone, but those remaining spaces and scattered personal objects that were once theirs are now left in the debris unclaimed, a bittersweet reminder of a life that once was.

The spaces were left eerily quiet and frozen in time. A towel still hangs over a counter, ready to be used; a woman’s portrait still smiles on a paint-peeled wall; a fan stubbornly hangs from the ceiling, its wings broken. The rubble everywhere came to life through scattered objects: little bursts of color popping out of the grayness, random things one finds in any home and takes for granted. They stayed on, eerily delicate, quiet, human, and persistent.

As I walked over the debris and in those quiet empty spaces, the reality of loss became very real; and whereas one eventually gets used to seeing destruction everywhere, these precious remains of a life interrupted and lost memories frozen in time kept bringing back the destruction to a human and personal level. They were the remnants of people’s lives, memories gone forever, memories of a previous home and a previous life.

I photographed those spaces and objects exactly how I found them. I did not touch them, did not move the dust around them and did not arrange them in any way.

As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, my cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood –both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from – in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. I am interested in young women as they enter adulthood today, and in portraying not only their individuality, but also how they confront the environment they find themselves in.

I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive, through a lens that both confronts and challenges the objectifying gaze so true to representations of femininity past. I create a narrative with them. The process is collaborative, and the photo session evolves organically as they become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. I find myself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence.

My work addresses the states of ‘Becoming’ – the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up – in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity, but it is also about collaboration, experimentation, performance, empowerment, and about pushing the limits of creativity and self-expression.

By collaborating with women in the United States and the Middle East, I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.

As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, my cross-cultural experiences inform my art. I have dedicated my work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood –both in the United States where I live and the Middle East where I am from – in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences. I am interested in young women as they enter adulthood today, and in portraying not only their individuality, but also how they confront the environment they find themselves in.

I want to portray the raw beauty of their age, their individuality, physicality, texture, and mystery. I photograph them the way I, a woman and a mother, see them: beautiful, alive, through a lens that both confronts and challenges the objectifying gaze so true to representations of femininity past. I create a narrative with them. The process is collaborative, and the photo session evolves organically as they become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. I find myself focusing on their strength and their majestic presence.

My work addresses the states of ‘Becoming’ – the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up – in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity, but it is also about collaboration, experimentation, performance, empowerment, and about pushing the limits of creativity and self-expression.

By collaborating with women in the United States and the Middle East, I focus on our essence, our physicality and the commonalities that make us human, ultimately highlighting how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.

“If the house of the world is dark,
Love will find a way to create windows.”
– Rumi

It seems as if life went on hold this past year – for everyone.  I am always straddling my two cultures and identities, as a Lebanese/Palestinian and as an American.  It feels as if the news is always dividing us as “them v/s us”, and now here we are a “we”: all in this together, in the same boat, with life at a standstill and reduced to the confinement of home.  This virus is such an equalizer, making us all re-evaluate our shared humanity, our fragility, and our priorities.

After a few days in isolation, and a need for human interaction, I put a call on Instagram asking people in the greater Boston area if they would agree to let me make their portrait through the window. It humbled me how many people were willing to be part of this, but also how important the human interaction we often took for granted, was – for both of us on either side of the window and of the camera.

Despite the fact that we only communicated across a physical barrier, we made a connection. The sense of being inside or outside was blurred. I am outside and looking in, but seeing the outside reflected onto the person in front of me.  Depending on where I stood, we could even overlap, connecting us on many levels, metaphorically and personally despite the physical barrier between us.

I aimed to capture the intimacy, beauty, anxiety and rhythm of daily life in quarantine, where the home “acts simultaneously as a sanctuary and a prison.”* As the weeks went by and the “new normal” settled in, the portraits started transforming with the window almost acting like a stage and people on the inside becoming active participants in the photo session, bringing their ideas and their performances to the interaction we were creating.

*  By Harriet Lloyd-Smith for Wallpaper