Can a city inhabit our being more than we inhabit it?

Beirut-based Lebanese-Austrian Photographer Tanya Traboulsi approaches this question through a body of work that moves between what is seen and what is remembered. As war continues to disrupt daily life, images become more than art, they become acts of preservation, urging us to hold onto memory, to document, and to protect the stories that might otherwise be lost.

Q: Can you walk us through the selection of photographs in this body of work? When and where were they made, and what connects them?

T: “The photographs in ‘Beirut, Recurring Dream’ were made over time, within an ongoing relationship to the city I live in. Beirut, for me, is never fixed, but a shifting scenario shaped by memory and lived experience.

I left in 1983 during the civil war, carrying fragments: the sea, the checkpoints, the scent of orange blossom. Returning a decade later, the city felt both familiar and distant, layered with histories I had not witnessed but somehow carried. This tension continues to shape the work.

The images move between interiors, seascapes, and fleeting encounters, sometimes woven with archival material. What connects them is an atmosphere where reality and fiction blur, and where Beirut emerges as both lived space and dreamscape — resisting resolution, and inviting a more open, intimate reading.”

Q: The work is titled “Beirut, Recurring Dream,” what does the title hold for you?

T: “The title comes from a precise, formative image. When I left the country in 1983, my last view of Beirut was from the ferry we departed on — the city receding, held at a distance by the sea I would carry with me for years.

That separation became a persistent mental image, one that continues to inform how I see and photograph the city. Beirut appeared again and again, in memory and in dreams, not as a fixed place but as something continuously re-staged in my mind, until I returned a decade later.”

Q: How do you approach image as a medium?

T: “I don’t approach image as a fixed record of reality, but as a space where meaning can be imagined. In my practice, the image holds traces of experience, but also gaps, absences, and projections. I’m interested in how these elements coexist: how an image can feel both intimate and unresolved, carrying something of the past while remaining open in the present.

In that sense, photography becomes a way of negotiating belonging. Not by defining it clearly, but by allowing it to remain shifting — something that is felt, questioned, and continuously reconfigured through the act of looking.”

Q: In your practice, how do images carry memory and personal or collective histories?

T: “For me, images carry memory less as evidence and more as traces. They don’t fix a moment in place; they hold onto what lingers: fragments, atmospheres, and sometimes what is no longer there. I work with both my own photographs and material from my family archive, where personal and collective histories begin to overlap. An image might belong to a specific time, but it also carries echoes beyond it — narratives that extend across generations.

I’m drawn to the gaps as much as to what is visible. What is missing, obscured, or unresolved often becomes as important as what is shown. In that sense, images don’t simply preserve memory; they activate it, allowing histories to be felt, reimagined, and continuously reshaped.”

Q: What role does nostalgia play in your visual language when engaging with place and Memory?

T: “Nostalgia is present in the work, but I try to approach it with a certain distance. I’m not interested in idealizing the past or returning to it as something complete. Instead, I see nostalgia as a starting point — an entry into memory that is often partial, constructed, and sometimes misleading.

In my visual language, it appears through atmosphere rather than narrative: in light, in stillness, in the way a space or a gesture holds onto something just out of reach. But it’s always accompanied by a sense of unease or interruption, a reminder that memory is never whole. It becomes a way of questioning how we remember a place, and how those memories shape, and sometimes distort, our sense of belonging.”

Q: What do you hope viewers sit with after encountering “Beirut, Recurring Dream?”

T: “I don’t hope for a fixed reading, but for a certain state of attention. That viewers remain with the images a little longer — long enough for something subtle to surface.

If anything, I hope they sit with a sense of ambiguity: the feeling of being both close to and slightly removed from what they are seeing. Beirut is very specific in the work, but it also opens onto something more universal: the experience of holding a place through memory, and of trying to locate oneself within it.

I also hope the viewer begins to construct their own narratives, drawing from their own memories, associations, and emotional landscapes. That the images become a point of departure rather than a closed statement. What stays, ideally, is not a conclusion but a trace. A mood, a question, or a quiet recognition that the image continues beyond what it shows.”

Q: How has it been going for you lately, and what are you currently focused on?

T: “Lately, it’s been a challenging time. The ongoing war inevitably affects how one moves through the city and how one concentrates. At the same time, I’ve been trying to stay anchored in routine. I continue to photograph, to spend time in the darkroom, to maintain a certain discipline in the work even when the conditions around me feel unstable. Alongside that, I’ve been taking on assignments that I find engaging.

It’s about continuity; finding ways to keep working, even quietly, within a shifting and uncertain context.”