Beirut Wonderings, 35mm color film (expired), 2013–2014.

Since 2005, Sirine Fattouh has been documenting her city, Beirut, where she was born and spent her childhood during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s, and her adolescence in the 1990s, during the so-called postwar reconstruction period. Through her photographs, she seeks to reconnect with those formative years, using expired film stock as a way to evoke the faded texture of memory and the fragmented recollections of that time.

Beirut is a city that deeply fascinates her, one with which she maintains a passionate, ambivalent relationship, marked by both love and frustration. She attempts to capture its energy and vibrations through sensuous images that reflect her visceral connection to the place. Architecture, chaos, construction and destruction, all the elements that shape Beirut’s ever-shifting identity, are at the heart of her visual exploration.

With every return to Lebanon, she looks at the city with fresh eyes, yet always through a veil of melancholy, drawn again and again to the place that continues to stir something profound within her.