التمسّكAt-Tamassok

I have been shooting film on a point and shoot camera since December 2018, during one of my first visits back to Lebanon after moving away for the first time in 2016. I started this practice instinctively, wanting to photograph everything I could before it faded. I always knew the things I loved would go away. Growing up in Lebanon, you get used to people leaving because of the circumstances of the country. It grows in your body but it isn’t always clear what it is exactly. Places shift, everyday life carries a quiet sense of impermanence, and over time this rhythm becomes internal even if it’s hard to name.

Carrying a small camera that I could take out anytime allowed me to respond to moments as they unfolded, quickly and without overthinking. I built a reflex and an eye for when something felt worth holding onto. Over the years, the camera has stayed a simple but consistent tool. An extension of the heart. A way of noticing, framing, and keeping.

The photographs in this series are part of an ongoing body of work that I am developing into my first book, spanning the years 2018 to 2026. They move between landscapes, people, and gestures, focusing less on events and more on presence, on what it feels like to be there, to witness, and to continue. The prints available here are fragments of that larger archive. Each image holds a moment that might otherwise pass, offering a way to keep it, share it, and return to it.

This body of work is a living archive of Lebanon across years of instability and shifts with no moments of rest in between. A way to show that we existed and lived during these times, even when it felt like we didn’t. In honor of everyone who has moved, stayed, and had to leave. In honor of the shifting image. We hold on together.

Essay

By Zacarías González

At-Tamassok, Arabic for the act of holding on, offers the organizing principle for Thalia Bassim’s ongoing photographic archive of Lebanon. The selection of twenty-five prints presented here constitutes a first public preview from a larger book project in progress, offering access to fragments of this archive ahead of the book’s full publication.

The work spans nearly a decade of return visits, extended stays, and reunions, tracing a country and relationships in which change has become the only constant. What does it mean to document life and to hold onto it? Rather than producing a chronicle of crisis, Bassim turns towards photographing as an act of being present, refusing the disappearance of things official histories tend not to record. Her visual narrative resists the conventions of crisis photography even as it is shaped entirely by its conditions. She turns towards the gestures and life in between the ruptures.

What emerges is an embodied account of care, of resisting erasure while life continues under war. These photographs feel lyrical and urgent, engaging with ephemerality and sincerity in equal measure. They are reminders of what it looks like to live.

Each image functions as a contained moment pulled from the flow of years, while also pointing outward to the larger work of which it is part. Bassim reminds us that photographs, at their best, do not simply record. They hold. A central thought I have returned to throughout this process with Bassim is one borrowed from Louise Bourgeois: that memory itself is a form of architecture. In these images, that architecture is built quietly, frame by frame, and it stands.