STORIES

Generations of Damascus

Damascus, Syria · 2023 · 590nm · IR Chrome · B&W

Damascus in infrared, 2023 — childhood, working age and old age, three passes through the same streets.

The week Sebastião Salgado died, I thought about why I went to Syria at all. His humanism is part of why I started documentary photography — why I drove to Beirut and Damascus to photograph people in the streets and in the ruins of Bosra. To photograph human beings with that kind of expressiveness is the work of a lifetime; maybe one day I’ll manage it.

Damascus shows two faces at once — one marked by war, one that seems untouched. In the old city, families move beneath the official portraits on their way to market; a knife grinder works under a rain of sparks, a livelihood kept alive now that the tourists are gone; children play in doorways the size of a cupboard. In Harat al-Yahud, the Jewish quarter — a community present here since New Testament times — the houses stand empty, lately reassigned to Syrians left without homes by the war. And in the covered bazaar, on the last day, you stand in the crowd, dodging the people walking into you, trying to catch the decisive moment one more time.

I photographed in extended spectrum, at 590nm and in IR-Chrome, some frames converted to black and white. Infrared lifts the street out of reportage into something older and stranger — but the faces stay exactly themselves. This is the city’s other archive: not its monuments, but its generations. What follows is arranged the way a life is — childhood, working age, old age — three passes through the same streets, the same light.

Overture

I. Childhood

Children claimed the alleys before I did — crouching over something only they could see, riding a cargo bike like a raft, meeting my camera with a stare that needed no translation. Here the city is a playground first, a monument later.

Plate 01 · Old city — a boy stretched flat on a cargo-bike saddle, swimming through the alley. · amber on cool ground, 590nm

Plate 02 · Old city — two boys crouch over something on the ground; a man starts his scooter behind them. · selective IRchrome

Plate 03 · Old city — a football game in the alley, one boy charging the lens. · blue-orange, near-monochrome

Plate 04 · Straight Street — girls and women in white headscarves outside a shop; a wall of mourning portraits behind them. · classic IRchrome

Plate 05 · Old city — a boy steps out of a dark doorway beside a carved wooden figure, a tree reflected in the glass between them. · amber and blue, heavy grain

Plate 06 · The fabric stalls — a crowd at the bolts of cloth, a boy meeting the lens, an infant asleep in a pram at the edge. · magenta duotone

Plate 07 · Evening market — young men horsing around by a bicycle and a flag stencilled on the shutter, an ice-cream cart alongside. · near-natural colour with infrared haze

Bridge

Plate 08 · Near the Umayyad Mosque — a father carries a toddler, a mother follows with bags, a teenage boy reaches toward the lens; a portrait banner and a minaret behind them. · false colour, lilac sky

II. Adulthood

Between childhood and old age is the city earning its keep: hands assembling silver, pushing loaded carts, splitting a pastry on a bench between errands. Sociable, unhurried, and entirely unsentimental about the war going on beyond the frame.

Plate 09 · Old city — a sunbeam cuts the alley on the diagonal as a couple wheels a sleeping child through it. · split tone, copper and steel, 590nm

Plate 10 · A silversmith’s doorway — carpets, red skirts and silverware in the window; two children in red hoods on the threshold. · IRchrome, rose-red cast

Plate 11 · A knife grinder’s stall — sparks fly across the frame, the walls hung with blades. · dark amber monochrome

Plate 12 · An antiques vault — two dealers among icons, a guitar, an old television, a typewriter. · IRchrome, green-magenta axis

Plate 13 · A bench in the old city — two women share a pastry, a wrought-iron gate behind them. · 590nm, warm figures on a cool ground

Plate 14 · A loaded handcart — a man in red pushes toward the lens, smiling. · sepia 590nm, heavy grain

III. Old age

The oldest Damascenes move slowest and notice the most — a jeweller still soldering by loupe-light, a courtyard kept for afternoon tea, a bicycle wheeled home at the end of a long day. Their city has grown smaller, and they know every stone that’s left of it.

Plate 15 · A jeweller’s bench — an old man solders under a loupe, surrounded by engraved candlesticks and a hookah. · 590nm shifted to blue

Plate 16 · A courtyard — an old man sits alone with a teapot, legs crossed, smiling at a peeling wall. · muted blue-red, heavy grain

Plate 17 · Outside an antiques shop — a man wheels his bicycle past the window as a woman passes with her shopping. · warm gold IRchrome

Plate 18 · A shopfront of pink dresses — a man on a scooter pauses to read a note under a carved archway. · dusty rose duotone

Plate 19 · Backlit, at the market’s edge — a man in a fur-lined hood stands by his bicycle, women in headscarves behind him. · amber-gold, heavy flare

Plate 20 · The covered market — an old man runs with his handcart between the parked cars, blurred. · cool-warm split tone

Plate 21 · A garden, at the end — an old man wheels his bicycle and looks back; behind him, a woman in black meets the camera’s eye. · the series’ deepest false colour