Dalia Khamissy, interviewed on Conscientious Extended

Joerg has a great eye for photographers who tell stories often associated with ‘photojournalism’, but whom engage in these stories at a deeper, more thoughtful and often poetic level. Photography that is asking you to think, not telling you what to think.

His conversation with Dalia Khamissy is no exception. I wish my students would pay more attention to this kind of work. Don’t be put off by the tag ‘fine art’. Educate yourself.

‘I went to the bombed out regions in the south of Lebanon almost a year after the war, as I could not be there during the war, so those houses were abandoned for a long time… But this is exactly what made me create those images. In this series I was struck by the peaceful and sad spaces I found when I entered the houses and mosques; the furniture left behind witnessed of the stories of people who once lived there… I felt I knew those people; I knew their taste in furniture, colours, fabric, clothes that covered the ground etc. You imagine stories of how they lived, how they used to gather at night all together, how they laughed, argued etc… How they hid from the bombs and how they fled the war, if they ever managed to flee the war… Their spaces and lives were completely violated and I related to that, I wanted to document that.’