Uprooted

Concept

Uprooted is a body of large-format, forensic-style photography documenting uprooted Lebanese flora. The work sets up a deliberate asymmetry: the instinct to protect and preserve the natural world against the growing numbness toward displaced human lives. By photographing plants pulled from the ground with the same clinical, evidentiary precision usually reserved for forensic documentation, the series asks what changes when a living thing is displaced, and why that displacement registers so differently depending on whether the subject is a plant or a person.

Execution

The photographs are shot moments after being uprooted, isolating each uprooted plant against a white background so the root system and disturbed earth remain visible rather than cropped out; the evidence of removal is part of the image, not incidental to it. The project was shown at OUTPOST (Norwich, UK) as a series of 14 prints hung in the center of the room, with the names of the plant species in Latin and Arabic on the floor below each print. Some of the plant species are endemic to Lebanon, while others are part of vaster distribution regions.