Longing for Belonging

Longing for Belonging is a photographic exploration and narrative about a lifelong search for home, born out of a personal desire to reflect, understand & reclaim fragmented parts of my sense of belonging as a black Egyptian-born woman.

The desire to belong is a fundamental human need, one that connects us all. It seeps into every corner of our lives and shapes the choices we make, how we dress, who we love, the ideas we hold close, and the people we surround ourselves with. At our core, no matter how different we may seem, we all long for the same thing: to belong, to be claimed and loved for who we are, to find a place we can truly call home.

For as long as I can remember, that feeling has been absent from my life. I was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a home that lacked stability and safety. My mother’s illness often made our household a place I needed to escape from rather than settle into, leaving the very idea of “home” as something foreign, something I could never grasp. At the same time, my family lived in constant motion. By the age of fourteen, I had already lived in four different countries, caught between East and West, never feeling fully accepted in either. This fractured sense of belonging has shaped everything in my life. For years it felt like being stranded at sea, swimming endlessly toward a shore I could never reach. It was only when I began working on this project that I understood how much of my existence has been defined by this search for home.

“Longing for Belonging” was born out of desperation: a need to reclaim the fragmented parts of myself and understand what belonging truly means. It is my story of not knowing where I belong, within geography, family and culture, explored through photography. The project began at a breaking point in my life. After thirteen years in Sweden, years spent trying to integrate, adapt, and prove myself, I was met with rejection, exclusion, and racism that left my sense of self at an all-time low. I came to accept that Sweden would never claim me as one of its own. In that moment of surrender, I turned back to Egypt, to the place where my story began, setting out on a journey to reconnect with my roots.

What I thought would be a cultural reconnection revealed itself to be something deeper. Through this trip I returned to my childhood home, journeyed across Egypt, and traced my roots south to Aswan. I met people of all walks of life: farmers, fishermen, people with plenty and people with very little, all mirroring something back to me that I didn’t even know I was searching for, a feeling of being claimed and loved. The external journey became inseparable from an internal one, forcing me to revisit memories, confront the fractures of my past, and piece together a lifelong search for belonging.

I also spent quality time alone with my parents for the first time since becoming an adult, and through that something shifted inside me. Slowly, I began letting go of the past and started seeing them for who they were today. It became incredibly liberating, and as I got further and further into my trip, I realized that belonging was so much more than just geography. It wasn’t about the soil beneath my feet, or the language spoken around me. It wasn’t something I could stumble upon or be handed by others. Belonging was something built between people. Through love, through understanding, through choosing, again and again, to see and be seen. In healing my relationship with my parents, I didn’t just find belonging, I found myself.

These 20 photographs, part of a larger collection that has been both exhibited and turned into a book, were all taken during this transformative journey in 2025. Photos of the people I met who all mirrored pieces of myself within them, the cultural heritage of the places I visited, and intimate moments I got to share with my parents as an adult that ultimately led me to the answer I had been seeking all my life. The material is also combined with archival photography that I found in my childhood home while on my trip to Egypt that anchors the story in memory and history. Together they become a visual dialogue between past and present, personal and collective, absence and presence.