This selection of black and white photographs is part of an on-going project about the extremes and the complexities of Lebanon, a small country of about 3.5 million people where one would witness a blend of the West and the Arab world, of Christianity and Islam, of wealth and extreme poverty. The photographs were taken for the most part in Beirut over the last few years.

Lebanon survived fifteen years of a brutal civil war which involved opposing religious factions, Palestinian refugees, and the competing interests of Syria and Israel. The war ended with no clear winner and no real solution. Now, under an apparent atmosphere of peace and prosperity, life goes on in a surreal way with a mosaic of religions and conflicting beliefs living side by side.

I grew up in Lebanon during a brutal civil war. I have now been living in the U.S. for more than half of my life and go back to Lebanon regularly. I consider myself both an insider and an outsider in Lebanon: an insider because I understand the language, the country and its people, and an outsider because I see the complexities and the extremes living side by side from the bewildered eyes of an outsider. As a photographer, I started photographing what I saw, originally as an interesting and funny sequence of street scenes that gradually developed into a documentary story about a Middle Eastern country that in some ways provides a microcosm of what is happening in the world today, due to its geographical location, and a deeper religious consciousness amongst its large mix of religions.

In this project I document the current conditions in a society where a woman covered in black would be walking next to a woman in a mini skirt, where mosques and churches stand side by side, where veiled women get photographed under a beautiful Christmas tree, where fancy restaurants stand next to destroyed buildings housing displaced refugees, where Palestinian refugee camps sit in the middle of expensive residential areas, where people dance on tables in fashionable nightclubs while children are begging on street corners, and where people go on with their lives oblivious to these contrasts that are so shocking to the outsider.