I feel good in Beirut. For me it’s like being in New York or in Cyprus; you’re in the USA, but not really, or among Greeks, but not actually in Greece. Beirut is in the Middle East, but diluted, mixed and blended: there’s room for me as well; even though I don’t belong I am made to feel as if I do. Maybe it is because I have belonged to a minority all my life (well two, for half my life) that these are the places I thrive in, the places where everyone is a little bit a stranger and no-one is it totally. The melting pots, the hubs, the half-ways.

In Beirut I photographed public spaces: the beaches, the Corniche, the parks.

We also visited the Palestinian refuge camp in Bourj el-Barajneh where I couldn’t always take pictures of people. And when I went through the memory card back at the hotel I swore out loud: the young man in one of the pictures that I was happy about had decided to put on a t-shirt with the text ‘pervert’. Couldn’t you have dressed differently just that day! (And no way I will put that picture out on the internet.)