Remains

Returning home after 16 years in the diaspora to confront the disjointed relationship between past and present, family and self, home and the feeling of never fully being at home.

Remains is a photographic project made in Amman, Jordan in 2025, consisting of black and white photographs taken during a return visit after sixteen years of living 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, everywhere I looked I encountered traces of a life I had left behind. Everywhere I look, I see 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 dashboard is a reminder of Islam's constant presence, one I no longer encounter in my daily life in the diaspora. The absence of something so ordinary becomes a marker of how far apart these two worlds have drifted. 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.

Exhibition and Press

Selected images from Remains have been exhibited in group shows in the United States, including at the Vermont Center for Photography, Filter Space in Chicago, and Cornell University, and have been published in L'Oeil de la Photographie and F-Stop Magazine.