Shamsi by Zein Nakhleh

Summer 2025 in Damascus and the sun won't let anything hide. This work charts the cautious re-mapping of daily life, where people walk, work and pray under a changed sky.

This work records a city learning new rules. After the fall of Assad's regime, old maps stopped meaning much. Shot on 35mm film in my hometown, this is a study of how streets are remade; how people decide which to fill, which to leave empty, which voices to speak, which to hold.

I watched the body in motion. The bus driver tracing his route past hollowed buildings. Women in government offices not from purpose but habit. Labor and movement endure.

This recalibration is most acute for the city's minorities. Cohabitation is now a quieter, more precarious thing: Orthodox church with empty courtyards, Druze families that pray with curtains drawn. The freedom to believe is not the freedom to congregate.

The process was dictated by the sun. It was the central, tyrannical character. I tried to keep detail from bleaching away and failed: it watches every gesture, public and private.