After The Fall

This is a feature of my images from two trips to Damascus, the first being six months and the second being a year following the fall of the Al Assad regime.

The captures are chiefly portrayals of street scenes, quotidian occurences and Damascene rituals, as opposed to political goings-on in the country. Huge numbers of foreign journalists have been arriving to Damascus and travelling across Syria in the wake of regime change, treating a trip to a Syria in flux, undocumented by western photographers, as a career-propelling move. I have heard of journalists who don’t speak Arabic seeking help from local photographers and documentarians, without offering paid rates for fixing opportunities and logisitical support. I had no official remit in going to Syria on these two occassions other than to connect with people I had interacted with on Instagram and to speak as much Arabic as I possibly could when navigating my way around the longest continuously-inhabited city in the world.

My wish is that the images convey the inherently romantic nature of the city of Damascus, the chaos and the calm, the grime and the polished marble, the order and the random. I plan to continue visiting Syria in coming years to continue documenting its great capital and its even greater, magnanimous people.