Since October 2019, Lebanon has been entrenched in an economic crisis—one the World Bank ranks among the “most severe globally since the mid-nineteenth century.” According to Human Rights Watch, Lebanon’s crisis was engineered by its own government, who for 30 years instituted a deliberately reckless fiscal policy, to devasting effects. 80% of the population now lives in poverty.
Produced in the three years preceding Lebanon’s economic collapse, A Fragile State (2016-August 2019) investigates the country’s deteriorating economic and political conditions through photographs of the physical structures and systems in the Lebanese landscape. The project—produced while I lived and worked there—was developed out of conversations with Lebanese colleagues, who described how they built lives despite endemic corruption, economic stagnation, and limited governmental services.
To understand the conditions that shaped the contours of their lives, I photographed the built environment. In the places where Lebanese live and work are traces of the country’s economic and political structures and models of the citizens’ deep resourcefulness.
Some images dwell on half-built structures: literal places where Lebanon is attempting to prop up itself. Others depict informal infrastructure—interventions necessary for citizens to meet their needs due to governmental neglect. Attuned to escalating structural insecurities, these representations wonder about the durability of a precarious system.