Standing behind the DJ booth in the early hours of Saturday morning, as lights flashed and music thumped around him, Raghed Waked looked happy to be back among friends and colleagues.
The 26-year-old worked for years as a club photographer in this venue, the Grand Factory in Beirut. Then the war started, and the clubs closed., The escalation in the Israeli assault across Lebanon, beginning from September, saw mass killings through an intense aerial bombardment, followed shortly after by a ground invasion.
Waked said he had a sense something bad would happen, even before October 8th, 2023, when Hizbullah fighters fired rockets towards Israeli military positions in “solidarity” with Hamas. “We were already feeling tension ... It wasn’t a surprise to me.”
With nightclub photography no longer an option, Waked began doing war photojournalism instead.
“When I first started doing this, I wasn’t making any money out of it. I was just doing it as an archival project for myself, because I’m from here. I care about this country. I wanted to have these pictures to look at 20, 30 years later, and hopefully ... we would be in a different state, in a better state, and we [could] look back on our mistakes and learn from them.”
He was soon offered assignments, and travelled across much of the country, photographing air strikes and rescue operations, the destruction of people’s homes and the funerals of some of the nearly 4,000 people killed.
Waked – who comes from Jezzine in Lebanon’s south – said he has always been “proactive” in terms of humanitarian issues. “As Arabs, we are portrayed as subhumans to some, which upsets me a lot. And I’ve always wanted to show Lebanon in a good way, in a modern way, in an artistic way, especially like with my work in parties, I’ve always tried to portray the best I can what is happening. But now I’m doing the complete opposite.”
He said the shift to photojournalism required some changes – particularly in terms of reducing how much post-production he did – but there were strange similarities too.
“I think during parties, I used to wait a lot at the front of house for the perfect moment ... Now I’m waiting on the hill for the Israeli bomb to drop, you know? So I can take a picture, which is frightening at the same time, it runs your adrenaline through your whole body.”
Before the war, Lebanon’s nightlife scene was “booming”, Waked said. Grand Factory, where he worked, was ranked in the top 100 clubs in the world by DJ Mag. It has been open for around a decade, with a capacity of about 1,350 people across three rooms. Throngs of clubbers line up outside, before taking a cargo lift on to a top floor with a panoramic view of Beirut’s sea and port.
Lebanon has long hosted well-known names: Waked referenced recent performances by Swiss DJ duo Adriatique and South African Grammy award winner Black Coffee.
Clubs, like other businesses across Lebanon, have faced ongoing challenges. After shutting at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, several were badly damaged by the Beirut port explosion, which killed more than 200 people in August 2020. The devastating economic crisis, the scale of which became clear from 2019, meant many people could no longer afford to go out. The economic crisis also saw Lebanon haemorrhaging its youth, with huge numbers moving abroad. Many Lebanese – both those who left and those who stayed – have a love-hate relationship with their birth country. (Graffiti in Grand Factory’s bathroom reads: “I am not bipolar, Beirut is.”)
For some, going clubbing is a way to forget, for others it can be an act of resistance. After the initial shock of the Israeli assault, Waked said, “People [were] still partying, nightlife never left Lebanon and it never will.” One famous club, Sky Bar, became a shelter for displaced people. Others kept operating, but scaled down their events and did not promote them.
On November 27th, a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah came into force. In Beirut, clubbers were out en masse the following weekend, with some venues even turning away people after reaching capacity.
Waked was busy in the days after the ceasefire, photographing yet more destruction after a final, intense barrage of Israeli attacks in the lead-up to it; then capturing displaced people returning to their homes for the first time, which – in some cases – had been turned into rubble.
“Let’s hope for peace ... Let’s hope that this ceasefire will last,” Waked said, pointing out that it remains tenuous amid numerous reports of violations, almost all of them on the Israeli side (Israel claims it is forcefully enforcing the ceasefire agreement).
But even when peace does return, while Waked is willing to take work as a club photographer again, he says the war has shifted his goals and interests. “I think I’m going to try and pursue a career in photojournalism,” he said. “My mentality changed a lot and I think I want to play a role in documenting the atrocities we see every day in human history.”
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