“Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky” — Ojibwe Proverb
There’s a moment — sometimes imperceptible — when the gaze shifts. When what was once the background becomes the center. When the air — that same air thick with dust, grief, and memory — becomes colored. It’s from this shift in perception that Colored Air is born, the photographic and poetic project by Habib Saleh, a Lebanese photographer who, after the Beirut port explosion of August 4, 2020, stopped chasing images and started receiving them.
Young girls playing in a neighbourhood in the town of Joun, Lebanon
Born in Joun, a town in Mount Lebanon, Habib was trained in cinema and fashion photography. But it was the day of the explosion — which destroyed his home and studio — that changed everything. A trauma that sank under the skin and opened an inner breach, a deep silence from which a new way of storytelling emerged.
A scene from Sidon during Eid El Fitr celebrationsA candid shot of my little cousin on the balcony of our home in the town of Joun, LebanonA candid photo of a young boy happily running in one of Sidon’s old streets
Colored Air is not a project in the canonical sense of the term. There is no meticulously crafted concept, nor a linear narrative. It’s more akin to an involuntary meditation, a gesture of resistance and presence. His images — suspended, intimate, silent — don’t aim to shout, but to suggest. They capture the strangeness of the everyday, the fragile beauty of details we often overlook: light on a wall, a resting hand, a fleeting moment.
A portrait of an elderly woman in front of her home in the town of Joun, Lebanon.
For Habib, photography has become a tool for survival. A lens through which to observe the world when everything seems to collapse. And in a context like the Middle East, where uncertainty is a daily reality, the act of stopping and looking becomes revolutionary. “I’m fascinated by life’s ability to go on, even in total chaos,” the artist writes. And in his works, this continuity is felt like a subtle yet resilient thread connecting the absurd to reality, loss to presence.
A landscape of pine trees at sunset in the town of Joun, Lebanon
Colored Air is, ultimately, a tribute to existence. To the people who stay, the places that change, the moments that pass through us. It is a silent declaration of love for life as it is: bittersweet, still, yet alive. Just like air — invisible, but felt. And if looked at the right way, it can suddenly become colored.
A candid shot of a group of kids playing football in Ancient Sidon, Lebanon.
A candid shot of an elderly woman reaching out to hold a child’s hand in Sidon city, Lebanon.A kid peeking from behind the wall of his house entrance in the town of Joun, Lebanon, 2024.A man receives a haircut from a local barber in the courtyard garden of a modest home at dusk. Rows of potted plants line the perimeter. In the background, two children, distant relatives of the barber, embrace near the entrance, looking toward the camera. The town of Joun, Lebanon.A candid photo of friends at sunset in one of Joun’s neighbourhoodsMy uncle’s wife holding a bunch of orange blossoms in her palms during orange blossom season in the town of Joun, Lebanon.Twins in Sidon city, Lebanon, 2024.
