Portrait

Having established a contract with World Vision International in 2016, I had the chance to document the Syrian Crisis in Lebanon in its peak.

Although I was established as a food and commercial photographer, when I was assigned these projects it meant looking for ways to value and celebrate people.

Humanitarian photography is a photography for impact, it goes beyond creating images for commercial use. It is telling powerful stories of social crisis and issues and using images as a catalyst for change. Those images were collected during many field visits to the Bekaa, Akkar, northern Lebanon and South Lebanon, I wanted to tell stories of pain, joy, loss, and hope, I wanted to portray Syrian children, elderly and women in the most humanizing way possible, going beyond facts and figures, reports and funds.

Meeting these people and capturing their faces, was a life changing experience for me, as I learned that these people had normal lives before the war, they had dreams, and hopes, children went to school and played soccer on the street and there’s much more to their lives to be just reduced to conflict. Through these people, I grew beyond photography, and I became a storyteller capturing not just a person’s portrait but their true essence and what makes them shine.