Home is where Teta was

Here is a snippet of a large body of photographs and videos taken inside the emotionally and psychologically shifting confines of my grandmother’s house in Hadath, Lebanon. Capturing the complexities of family roles and affection when Death approaches

This project is an attempt to stop time during my grandmother’s final years. Following her stroke in 2017, she became bedbound and unable to communicate, profoundly reshaping our household dynamics. During this period, coinciding with a time of quarantine and significant crisis in Lebanon, I sought to reconnect with her through my lens. What started as a means to spend intimate time with her turned into a raw documentation of a family anticipating loss and the complexity of caregiving.

Lebanese grandmothers occupy the space of the home with much agitation and concern for everyone’s well-being. My grandmother’s moving feet, heard around our corridors, were suddenly silenced from one day to another. So I wanted to give her back agency to occupy space again and, therefore, my every photographic frame. Though unable to communicate through words, her left hand still moved, her eyes still spoke, and small humming and singing slipped from her lips, expressions of being and feeling that transcended the silence.

Using flash, I sought to isolate and fixate tender gestures, capturing hands and mouths reaching, eyes appearing at the edges of the frame, while keeping her as the gravitational point of each composition. Though still, she remains the anchor around which the world moves in fragments, shaping a visual field where presence feels both intimate and elusive. She is not passive but alive, full of expression and always the focal point of the frame and our family.

Proximity structures the compositions. Faces and bodies press into the frame, partially obscured, caught in fleeting interactions that suggest connection and movement. Family exists in relation to her, their gestures orbiting her presence. Layers of textured blankets and fabric envelop her, reinforcing a sense of containment while heightening the tactility of the moment. Touch, whether through hands, blankets, or textured surfaces, grounds these fleeting moments, making them solid and lasting. Light carves through these layers accentuating contrasts between skin and fabric, movement and stillness.

Rather than a linear narrative of decline, these images suspend time at its most fragile. The incidental becomes essential, rendering the everyday into something permanent. Through the harsh illumination of flash, these accidental moments emerge as points of fixation, preserving what was always slipping away.

"Home is where Teta was" refuses to reduce my grandmother to a passive role defined by her dependency on others. I wanted to capture the rawness of her presence, how reliance and strength coexisted and how she remained the backbone of the family even in her fragility.