Remember me, before I go

This ongoing project documents Lebanese matriarchs and the homes they have built and cared for across generations. Beginning in my grandmother’s apartment in Beirut, the series explores domestic spaces as living archives of family, memory, and survival.

She tells me life has never been easy, and when she speaks of the war, her body remembers what her words cannot hold.

She remembers hiding in the basement of the hotel down the street, the rockets overhead, the airstrikes splitting the sky.

At home, by candlelight, she painted flowers onto silk pillowcases while the world outside went dark. She prayed every day, and learned to keep living.

Now, in the quiet of her apartment, I photograph her hands, her home, the life she carried through it all.

I grew up in my grandmother’s apartment in Beirut, watching her move through life with a quiet, unwavering strength. She raised my mother and uncle through the height of the Lebanese Civil War, devoted herself to her husband and family, and later helped my single mother raise me when we moved back to Lebanon in 2005, when I was eight.

Some of my earliest memories are of the lunches she prepared every day and her steady refrain, “Inshallah kheir,” or “God willing, all will be well.”

During the Israeli war on Lebanon that began in 2023, I found myself photographing her obsessively. Day after day, even as air strikes, death and violence once again shaped our lives, she remained committed to cooking for the family and making sure we were cared for. I began to think about the women like her whose strength is so central to Lebanese family life, yet so rarely documented in their own right.

This became the starting point for a project that takes me into the homes of other women of her generation across Lebanon. I was struck by how familiar these apartments felt. Their ornate furnishings, carefully arranged family photographs, old photo albums, and kitchens always ready to welcome someone echoed my grandmother’s home. Many of these women had designed and furnished their apartments in the 1960s and 1970s, building homes alongside their young husbands and raising families within them. Decades later, the interiors remain largely unchanged, holding traces of lives shaped by war, loss, and separation. Yet the women at their center are often missing from the photographs on their own walls.

Through portraits and still lifes, I document these matriarchs and the domestic worlds they have sustained. Many have outlived their husbands and watched their children leave Lebanon, while continuing to care for the homes that hold their families’ histories. These apartments are more than preserved interiors. They are living archives of a generation of women whose labor, devotion, and endurance have helped hold families together through decades of upheaval.

This project is also deeply personal. Photographing these women and their homes is a way of understanding my own heritage and my relationship with Lebanon, while honoring the woman who helped raised me and the generations of women who came before her.

I know these spaces will not remain as they are forever.

As these women grow older and their homes eventually change hands, entire worlds of memory and lived experience risk disappearing with them. I want to document them while they are still here, not as relics of the past, but as witnesses to the lives they have built and the families they continue to hold together.

*For this project, I have been interviewing and photographing 8 matriarchs over the last 3 years in the hopes to eventually create a photo book dedicated to their individual histories.