Remains

Everywhere I looked, I saw a piece of a disjointed relationship between past and present, family and self, home and the feeling of never fully being at home.

Remains is a photographic project that emerged from a return visit to Amman, Jordan, in 2025, after sixteen years in the diaspora. It is a work about what survives when belonging is split across distance and time.

I left Jordan at nineteen. Returning as an adult, with the eyes of someone who has lived elsewhere for most of his adult life, I found myself navigating a city that no longer felt fully mine. From ancient relief carvings at the Amman Citadel to spray-painted walls across the city, I kept noticing things that felt both familiar and distant. Everywhere I looked, I saw a piece of a disjointed relationship between past and present, family and self, home and the feeling of never fully being at home.

Working in black and white allowed me to approach these moments with distance, as if revisiting memories rather than documenting the present. A Quran on a car dashboard reminded me of Islam’s visible presence in everyday life in Jordan, something I had grown less accustomed to seeing during my years abroad. The call to prayer was another familiar part of daily life that I heard less often outside Jordan. Encountering these familiar aspects of life again made the distance between these two worlds more tangible. A photograph of my mother's shadow as she moves through the house with a walker reflects a more intimate side of the work, one rooted in family and the quiet realities of growing older together across distance.

The project moves between the personal and the collective. Some images are drawn from private memory: a bouncy ball held in a palm, a place from childhood that carries difficult weight. Others open outward: a man and his pigeon on a rooftop, a free water cooler on a street corner, a gym sign advertising in both Arabic and English. Taken together, they build a portrait of a city that has continued to live and change without me, and of a self that has done the same without it.

Remains is an attempt to understand what it means to return: what we leave behind, and what refuses to leave us. The diaspora is its own kind of archipelago, a life lived across islands that share a history but no longer share a shore.

Website: Hamzehzahran.com