The Negative of Me, 2026-present

Following the catastrophic Beirut port explosion in 2020, I encountered a series of discarded photographic negatives displayed inside a photography shop in the city. They were undeveloped negatives hanging on the shelf; they felt less like historical artifacts and more like phantom remnants, suspended testimonies of an ongoing collective trauma. Stripped of names, contexts, and ownership by structural displacement, these anonymous portraits mirrored the sudden, violent erasure of family archives and personal memory across the city caused by Lebanon’s ongoing ordeal. 

In this series, I intervene upon these found surfaces through digital superimposition, layering dense, vivid floral arrangements over the non-identifiable subjects. Rather than attempting to reconstruct or expose their missing identities, my digital interventions deliberately obscure their remaining features. This act of concealment serves as both a protective barrier and an organic monument. By burying the facial markers under layers of botanical growth, the photographic surface shifts from a site of voyeuristic loss to a sanctuary of collective remembrance. The flowers do not merely decorate; they function as a living shroud, visualizing how historical grief attaches itself to the body, transforming absolute absence into a tactile, breathing presence.