After losing his sight in Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon, 21-year-old photographer Rida Jaber returned to his camera—learning to create images through touch, sound, memory and imagination.
Rida Jaber holds an analogue camera in his hands. Its back is open, exposing the film compartment and the small mechanical controls surrounding it. He moves his fingers carefully across the camera’s surface, learning its shape through touch.
For Rida, photography was once inseparable from sight. The camera was more than a piece of equipment; it was how he interpreted the world and transformed what he saw into art.
Then Israel’s pager attack took his sight.
In September 2024, thousands of pagers and other communication devices exploded across Lebanon over two consecutive days. The attacks killed dozens and wounded more than 3,000 people, many of whom suffered devastating injuries to their faces, eyes and hands. Israel initially declined to claim responsibility, but a spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later confirmed that Netanyahu had authorised the operation. Reuters
Rida was among those whose lives were permanently changed.
He was 21, with a passion for photography and filmmaking. His vision had never been limited to simply observing what was in front of him. It was part of his artistic language—the means through which he noticed light, framed subjects and created meaning from ordinary moments.
Losing his sight therefore meant more than the loss of one sense. It disrupted the foundation on which he had built his relationship with art.
But it did not end that relationship.
Learning to see differently
In The Eyes the War Has Taken, an experimental documentary directed by Mahmoud Harb, Rida explores how blindness transformed—but did not erase—his artistic vision.
The film follows him as he touches trees and the ground beneath him, feels sunlight against his skin, listens closely to music and lifts a flower to recognise it through its scent. These are not presented as replacements for sight. They are parts of a different sensory relationship with the world.
Sound, texture, smell, memory and imagination gradually become elements of Rida’s creative process.
The documentary does not reduce his story to a conventional narrative of overcoming adversity. The violence that blinded him remains present. His return to photography does not undo what happened or diminish the severity of what was taken from him.
Instead, his work raises a more difficult question: What happens to an artist when the sense most closely associated with his art is taken away?
Rida’s answer is to continue creating.
Returning to the camera
Analogue photography offered him a way back.
Unlike modern digital cameras, many analogue cameras have mechanical controls that can be identified through touch. Their dials, levers and buttons are physically distinct. The movement of the film and the release of the shutter can be heard and felt.
Rida compares his experience to that of photographers working before the digital era. They could compose and take a photograph, but they could not immediately view the result on a screen. They had to wait until the film was developed.
For Rida, that wait may be indefinite. He cannot see the photographs after taking them. Yet he can still participate in their creation: choosing the moment, holding the camera, feeling the environment and deciding when to press the shutter.
His blindness changes the process, but it does not remove his authorship.
“Maybe I can’t see my own pictures, but that isn’t a problem,” Rida says in the documentary. “Because my whole goal is to create art for others to see.”
The statement carries the film’s central argument: photography is created through vision, but vision is not confined to eyesight.
Injuries designed to last
The pager explosions on 17 September 2024 were followed the next day by another wave involving weaponised radios. Hospitals across Lebanon received thousands of casualties, many with severe injuries to their eyes, faces and hands.
Human Rights Watch reported that the first day’s explosions killed at least 12 people, including two children and two health workers, and injured at least 2,800 others, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health. The organisation said the attacks harmed civilians as well as Hezbollah members and called for an urgent and impartial investigation. Human Rights Watch
United Nations experts later described the operation as a “terrifying violation of international law,” reporting that the two days of explosions killed at least 32 people and injured or maimed approximately 3,250. They warned that simultaneously detonating thousands of devices without reliably determining who possessed them or who was nearby could violate the principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack. UN Human Rights Office
The casualty figures tell part of the story. They cannot fully describe what follows: repeated surgeries, permanent disabilities, interrupted careers and lives reorganised around injuries inflicted in seconds.
Rida’s photographs belong to that aftermath.
They do not erase the violence responsible for his blindness. Nor do they turn his suffering into an uncomplicated story of inspiration. They document something more honest: an artist confronting what the war took from him while refusing to allow the war to determine the limits of his imagination.
Rida may no longer see the photographs he takes. But the images still carry his decisions, his senses and his understanding of the world.
The war took his eyes. It did not take his vision.
Reporting note: This article draws on Alex Jørgensen’s personal conversations with filmmaker Mahmoud Harb and Rida Jaber, as well as the story and footage presented in the experimental short documentary The Eyes the War Has Taken, directed by Mahmoud Harb, with cinematography by Ali El-Hadi Nabbouh.