Fadia Ahmad

Fadia Ahmad is a Lebanese award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Ahmad’s family was exiled from Lebanon due to the civil war and settled in Alicante, Spain where she was born. She returned to Lebanon in 1991. Her most recent project, Beyrouth/Beirut (2019), is a homage to the urban environment, complex demographics, and nostalgic architecture of Lebanon’s capital. To complete this photo series, Ahmad walked a daily itinerary of 10,452 steps across the capital city. The project is a quest for identity and belonging through the streets of Beirut, in which Ahmad seeks the roots of the Self. Ahmad’s photographs are conceived as paintings. The photographs transmit a particular expression of the Lebanese art photographer, one that is sensitive and precise, poetic and humanist. The photos are in color or black and white, in large scale, some carefully framed, while others are snapped in an instant and sometimes, just like chromos of a dreamed-up country that reveals itself quite differently, presenting fragments of life. More than a style, they affirm a present-day vision and portray an artist who often refers to the universal history of art and photography. Ahmad’s photographs are a quest for light and beauty. They witness a search for the essence of emotion and show poetic instants nestled in the slightest details.