Akkar, Lebanon: 16 refugee families live in tents erected within a disused slaughterhouse near the Syrian border. At night, the men get on their mobile phones and text home, hoping for news from friends and relatives under siege. I photographed them in the dark, their faces lit only by the glow of the screens. With the squalor of their surroundings mercifully cloaked in darkness, they could be us, outside a club, checking our messages - but their communiques are matters of life and death. Later, I photographed their phones and had the messages they hadn't deleted (for security) translated from Arabic to English. Texting Syria is now touring as a photographic installation, produced by artist/academic Shaunna Thatcher and coded by interactive developer/co-creator Daniel Arce.

Unlike in Jordan or Turkey, where most Syrian refugees live in UNHCR-constructed camps, those in Lebanon face a different struggle. They share extremely cramped and overpriced apartments in impoverished neighborhoods, or build tented encampments out of discarded vinyl billboards on the edges of farmer’s fields. Some live inside abandoned buildings. UNHCR has registered over one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon; even conservative estimates place that number much higher.

Kakuma refugee camp, located in NW Kenya near the border of South Sudan, is home to over 105,000 refugees from across the continent. Kakuma is a word that means "Nowhere" in Swahili; since 1992 it has been a forgotten warehouse for refugees who have little hope of returning to their home countries due to conflict, strife or political exile. Some people have been there for as long as 18 years, eking out an existence on the very fringes of East Africa’s most promising democracy, dependent on food aid and humanitarian agencies. Most of the refugees live in mud shelters or UNHCR-provided tents that offer little protection from the elements, insects and reptiles that pose a significant threat. After extensive negotiations with the Kenyan government, UNHCR has begun construction of a new area on the outskirts of Kakuma camp, building houses using a relatively new technology: Interlocking Stabilized Soil Bricks. The bricks are manufactured on-site, using local labour and local soil blended with a small amount of cement and water. It takes 15 seconds to make each brick, a week to let them cure and about a day to build a complete house using the LEGO-style blocks. Human dignity is widely acknowledged to be a fundamental human right, yet there is nothing dignified about the living conditions in Kakuma. This new housing project could help change that. These homes would also mark something of a policy change for the Kenyan government, who for the past 21 years have resisted providing more permanent dwellings for refugees for political reasons. The government recently instructed all refugees living in urban centres in Kenya to report to Dadaab or Kakuma camps. With both camps already severely overcrowded and resources stretched beyond capacity, these new dwellings may offer a safer stop-gap solution until repatriation or resettlement is possible. Unfortunately, negotiations between UNHCR and the government are proceeding very delicately and for the moment, the homes are reserved for Somali refugees who have been pre-approved for resettlement in the US. This construction would mark the first time that ISSB technology has been approved for use in a refugee camp, and it could change the way we house refugee populations.

Lebanon's brutal and bloody civil war lasted 15 years, took over 144,000 lives, wounded more than 184,000 and left 17,000 missing. For all the horror and bloodshed, a shroud of silence cloaks the events of the conflict. History schoolbooks stop at 1975. An official pardoning in 1991 means that all but a few crimes went unpunished, and save for the pockmarked walls of Lebanon's bullet-scarred cities, there are no real memorials to the toll the war took on the Lebanese. For this project, I researched and revisited the precise locations where events transpired that acted as flashpoints for the civil war. The idea was to look for evidence - however faint - of the conflict and photograph the darkest memories of the civil war. Most surprising was just how present the conflict was; hidden behind walls and fences were wounds as fresh as they were even 34 years ago. Some refer to the civil war as "the war of the others on our territory" - "harb al-akhareen". It's a revealing statement, blithely embracing the fallacy that Lebanese citizens would never have committed such atrocities against their own people. There are ghosts in these places, and ignoring them will not make them go away. This project is a glimpse into the past, offering a reminder of the urgent need for truth, reconciliation and remembrance.

Portraits of veteran airmen who served with the RAF and RCAF, photographed at a meeting of the Aircrew Association of Canada, Metro Toronto Branch, November 9, 2013.

State-produced Syrian soap operas offer a dose of escapism to those enduring the civil war - a vital pressure release. As neorealist agitprop, the soaps contain story elements that reinforce regime doctrine. I watched all 30 episodes of Al Wilada Min Al Khasira, a popular TV miniseries seen by millions of Syrians during Ramadan. Whenever the action on-screen reminded me of the tragedy unfolding in real life, I took a photo. The result is eerily similar to citizen-filmed videos of violence uploaded to YouTube and picked up by news media. Taken together, these images offer an unexpected allegory for the war in Syria, where many conflicting narratives have also made it difficult to discern fact from fiction.