THE TIME WE HAVE LEFT
Beirut has always lived with the awareness that everything can change overnight.
When I photographed these streets in September 2019, I was drawn less by the city’s scars than by its insistence on ordinary life: crowded bars, music, friends gathering on rooftops, cigarette smoke dissolving into the warm night air. Life unfolding with an almost stubborn intensity.
A few weeks later, protests spread across the country. Then came the economic collapse. On 4 August 2020, the explosion at the port devastated entire neighbourhoods, including many of the places pictured here.
These photographs have since become something else. They are no longer only about Beirut’s nightlife or a generation searching for normality. They speak about the fragile interval between one catastrophe and the next—about the ordinary moments we rarely recognise as precious while we are living them.
Perhaps that is what Beirut has always known better than most cities: that normality is never permanent. It is something to be inhabited fully, while it lasts.
