My Syria

Images of my family, my Syria, aching and radiant, seen from exile. My homeland has just tasted freedom. Through these photographs, I hold its light, its scars, and its stubborn hope, believing that though I left to be free, freedom has finally found her.

Project Description – Syria, After the Ache

This body of work is my return to my Syria, a country I have carried like an ache in my chest since I left it. For years, I photographed the world as a journalist, but Syria remained the image I could not make. Now, after its long season of fracture, I walk the streets of Damascus again with a camera and the quiet tremor of someone who both belongs and does not. These photographs are not about spectacle or ruin. They are about endurance. My sister praying. Children playing in an alley of the old city of Damascus, the oldest city on earth. My father asleep with his ancient radio. I am photographing the ordinary because the ordinary survived.

From afar, Syria lived in me as memory and longing. Up close, it is layered with grief and stubborn beauty. This project explores that tension, the distance between exile and return, between the Syria I remember and the Syria before my lens; between the family I left behind and the family I still belong to. The light feels different now, softer, almost cautious, yet it still spills across stone courtyards and aging faces with grace. Through these images, I am asking what it means for a country to endure, and what it means for a son to come home changed.