This image feels both generous and intimate, a table full of fruits, breads, sweets, and coffee, the after-lunch intimate chats. What memory or emotion were you hoping to evoke when you created this photograph?
To me, this is what tenderness looks like. The most meaningful kind of bonding happens around a table with carob molasses, coffee, and fruits from one’s own garden.
In the South, my friends and I are always home by six, just in time for our usual afternoon under the willow tree. Setting the table without speaking — already knowing what an asrouniyeh should look like — speaks to the closeness we’ve inherited. We move easily through the kitchen because this love language was passed down to us through land and family.
In this photo, the platings and cups date back to the 1950s. They belonged to my grandmother, Teta Nemriyeh. The table holds the remains of many hands: sweets brought by past visitors, fruits from our garden and nearby villages, figs dried by my mother. There’s the carob molasses my father gulps down every morning, Ahwet Najjar whose foam will be shared equally, all bathed in the afternoon light — ready to sit around, ready to unwind in this space we call home.
I wanted to invite others into this feeling. To me, this image illustrates a language of love that goes back to our ancestry. To have kept this language alive, to still speak it among friends and lovers, to choose it over anything else — is deeply endearing.
Like manners passed down by our parents, this language too is inherited. Including heritage in the way we say I love you adds weight: it means this love has memory. It means I love you here and now, and also the way my people have always loved. It means borrowing from the goodness of one’s own land to create an alphabet of care.
Your work often captures traces of everyday life, the overlooked, the deeply personal. How does food, as a visual and emotional subject, fit into your broader artistic practice?
When the war started, I left Beirut and returned to the South. I was just beginning to grasp how quickly joy can disappear under occupation, how easily we could be stripped of our land.
A few months into the war, I noticed, film roll after film roll, that most of my photos were of food: the dyaffah of rose syrup and ekke-deni at my grandmother’s, watermelon from Marjeyoun on our way to Sojod, Khalto Noura pounding zaatar on her front porch, a basket of baladi eggs from my Amto Saffiah. I realized I was trying to capture food as a love offering — a tenderness between us that transcends and withstands war in the South.
And not only that, but that this tenderness is the land’s rawest resource. To plant a seed, to tend to it, to harvest its fruits, to take joy and pride in it, to transform it into a dish, to offer it to someone else. The land allows a practice of love; it sustains a perpetual chain of softness that bonds us to one another through generations.
Throughout the war, I often thought about my own devotion, my readiness to join the armed resistance if the occupation reached my village. All because I wanted, with everything in me, to still be able to come back to a table my mother had set for us — This table in this photograph, this afternoon.
And so, I wrote: This battle has a horizon. In the horizon, I see my mother sifting sumac with a sieve early in the morning. The coffee is on the stove, and she is about to wake me. I want to keep this image clear. This battle has a horizon.
This image marks our first print cover, and the issue is all about food — as memory, resistance, and care. In your own life, what role does food play? And what dish or flavor feels most like ‘home’ to you?
When the war began in the South, we fled Nejmet El-Soboh near Kana and ended up in Ehden. Our diet changed significantly. We had cut out meat and cooked with whatever ingredients were accessible.
One night, my mother surprised us with Kebbet Batata, made from improvised ingredients she’d pieced together after a failed search for burghol kheshen and hawe’ej el kebbe. “Yaani bent ‘amma (It’s her cousin),” she said — she’d done everything she could to give us a taste of home, when we couldn’t return to it.
I cried over a dish, for the first time in my life.
I began to understand that food, even more than a subject, is a vessel. It holds grief, care, resistance, and memory. It’s how people have shown love to me: roz 3a djaj from a lover who knew I’d missed my mother’s cooking, labneh sandwiches from friends who knew I’d skip breakfast, oranges and rocca harvested from Khiam just for me.
A food offering signals tenderness, and the potential for intimacy to grow.
When we returned home after two months of war, our fig tree had died. A few weeks later, my father planted a new one. That gesture said everything:
In August, the figs are laid out to dry in the sun, then tossed with sesame in my mother’s hands. He knows that the first breakfast she’ll prepare for me when I return is a plate of fig jam, served with Em Hussein’s baladi cheese. He knows that this, to me, is the taste of home.
Rabab Chamseddine
Rabab Chamseddineis a Lebanese photographer and poet based between Tyre, South Lebanon, and Beirut. She is a grantee of AFAC’s Arab Documentary Photography Program (2025), in partnership with Magnum Foundation and the Prince Claus Fund. Her work has appeared inWe Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage(2023, Persea Books),New Work War Crimes: Land Day Edition(2025), andDiscontent’s Revolution Until Victoryissue (2025), and was exhibited inيا رايح عالجنوب(July 2024), a collaborative event organized with the Beirut Art Center.
Her practice explores intimate, often overlooked relationships between people and land, weaving themes of love, loss, and the homemaking that emerges from holding both. Her ongoing project, بس قَرَّب مْوسَم الرمّان (But We’re Nearing the Pomegranate Season, 2024–present), chronicles everyday life in South Lebanon, where land and shared rituals ground everyday resistance to erasure and occupation.
- Rabab Chamseddine
