A liminal space; life. Not Here Not There. Suspended between immeasurable loss and hope for an unfathomable future. Waiting. For a shift from imminent collapse and perpetual ruin. Reality. Folding on itself; uncanny, upon being captured. Not here, not there.

The contents of Not Here Not There, captured by photographer Charbel AlKhoury and published by Middle East Archive, are composed of moments frozen in fleeting times—between Lebanon’s Byblos, Beirut and Zouk Mosbeh. “Byblos holds family and the sea, Beirut is where I tried to build a life and Zouk Mosbeh carries the memories of student years and friendships. Each city has its own texture. But when placed together, what emerges is the shared reality of instability and political unrest. No matter the city, that fragility is a constant,” the Lebanese photographer tells STIR.

A sense of duality pervades the words and photographs in the book, wherein public places such as ATMs, highways and entire cityscapes are captured amidst tense settings, including the rising tensions of the Beirut protests of October 17, 2019 and the Beirut Port explosion in 2021. These are featured alongside quiet, peaceful views of AlKhoury’s residential neighbourhood and settings known from his daily life. To build on the contrast across scales of subjects, vibrant and (traditionally) aesthetically pleasing images of sunsets, windows, flowers and plants are juxtaposed with dark, unsettling photographs of urban chaos, establishing a rather stark undertone for the readers.

What am I doing here?... I wasn’t meant to stay, and yet I will truly never leave. – Charbel AlKhoury, Not Here Not There

To AlKhoury, the photographs serve to be a window, an alternative perspective that makes it easier to hold the complex, conflicting emotions he experienced between 2019 and 2021 in Lebanon, when an unshakeable compulsion to document ‘a paradise already known for its self-deception’ overcame him during his time in Beirut. The photographs feature familiar settings captured from an uncanny, almost dream-like setting. While some provide a peek into the chaos, others portray beauty in the ordinary, mundane built environments that one comes across in everyday life.

An interesting understanding of AlKhoury’s work may be derived from Russian-American cultural theorist and visual artist Svetlana Boym’s writing in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), “Two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing… reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” The photographer channels this reflective nostalgia in his book, birthing an ‘alternative Lebanon’ where urban collapse is continuously lived, years of tensions experienced all at once, again and again, like being stuck in a time loop. Some of these photographs become unintentional sites of memory, holding layered imprints of the frailty of human life, the passing of time and the unpredictability of change.

The photographs capture instability without seeking a resolution, offering instead a fragile space to hold one’s emotions, to mourn and hope. There is also—for the discerning viewer—a perceived beauty in the documented urban collapse, contrasting with the apparent (and supposed inherent) beauty of everyday built environments. AlKhoury’s photography appreciably resists a fetishisation of these dismantled ‘bodies’ of architecture. He does not exploit collapse as spectacle, but captures urban memory as a witness, inviting personal reflection on these themes. As American writer Susan Sontag cautions in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), “It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.”

“When I first took these images, I wasn’t thinking about an audience; they were a personal way of processing what I was experiencing. Publishing them in a book inevitably shifted their meaning. Once the work became public, it was no longer just about my own relationship to these places and memories; it also became a way for others to reflect on absence, displacement and what it means to leave home. What I hope is that readers don’t only see Lebanon through my lens, but also connect the work to their own experiences of loss, movement or memory. The book isn’t about offering answers, it’s about opening a space for reflection,” AlKhoury tells STIR.

When further asked about capturing collapse or conflict from an aestheticised lens and ethically holding that tension within, the photographer reveals to STIR, “I’m very aware of how easily images of collapse can be aestheticised, and I try not to reduce suffering to visuals. For me, the photographs come from lived experience. I wasn’t documenting from a distance but from within. That makes the images less about spectacle and more about memory. Ethically, I hold that tension by asking what purpose the image serves: does it honour an experience, or does it exploit it? In the book, I think that comes through in the quietness of the work; it doesn’t sensationalise, it lingers.”

Beirut turned on us… the city has always done this—chased its people away, again and again, like a rhythm etched into its bones. – Charbel AlKhoury, Not Here Not There

As the cities he remembered and lived in quietly eroded, AlKhoury’s lament, in his own words, supersedes not only his memory of them, but also the possibilities of the many lives that could have transpired in those urban settings. As one reads excerpts from the book, one finds both anger and anguish echoing in his words from feeling betrayed by the city—a feeling he believes he reciprocated by migrating to Belgium. Enthralled in unrest, his memory of Lebanon mirrors the fragile sense of being the city often finds itself in. His new life in Belgium isn’t without its burdens, but those of knowing that the people he left behind still live in scarcity and fears of incursion in Lebanon, often suffering relentlessly. The feeling of not truly belonging is, ironically, at home in this liminal space of existence. Not Here, Not There.