STORIES

Road to Damascus

Lebanon · Syria · March 2023 · 590nm · 720nm · IR Chrome

Beirut to Damascus, 2023 — Levantine heritage read in infrared, between what survived and what was destroyed on camera.

“I am the chief of earthly kings and king, Esarhaddon. … Sidon I overthrew, and cast its stones into the sea.” Bryusov’s line is one way to read this road. The other is older: the road to Damascus is where sight is supposed to change.

In March 2023 I drove from Beirut across Lebanon and into Syria, ending at Damascus — through Sidon and Baalbek, Maaloula, Homs, Palmyra and Bosra. I photographed in extended spectrum, at 590nm and 720nm, because these are places already photographed to exhaustion in ordinary light, and because infrared records what daylight politely omits: heat, haze, and the chlorophyll of trees now growing where buildings used to stand.

Beirut is a Middle-Eastern Paris still wearing fifteen years of civil war — shell-pocked façades, abandoned cranes, a downtown half in ruins. Its National Museum sat on the front line; the demarcation zone was known as “Museum Alley,” and its keepers saved the great anthropomorphic sarcophagi by casting them in concrete where they stood. The Crusader castle at Sidon is a tetris of reused Persian, Roman and Arab stone — whatever was hauled is worn. Baalbek raises blocks too large for the eye to scale.

Then Syria: Maaloula, where the liturgy is still spoken in Aramaic; Homs, three years and three days under siege; Palmyra, taken hostage on camera and detonated for the world to watch — its triumphal arch now rebuilt from strangers’ holiday photographs, which is exactly why I never strip the metadata from mine.

This is visual archaeology as a journey — ancient sites reread under a different instrument, in the narrow band between what survived and what was deliberately destroyed.

The road ends at the Church of Saint Paul — the end of one road, to begin the next.