Français
English
Syrie le jardin enlevé. Colors
PhotosThis photographic exhibition presents a revisited view of the work I realised during a reportage about Syria in 2001.
Then the country was in the midst of a particular spring, a year after the death of president Hafez el-Assad and the arrival in power of his son Bachar, the country appeared to breathe a little and the Pope Jean-Paul II was on an official tour in Damas, I took advantage of this window of freedom to travel throughout the country for a whole month and discovered through places and people, a rare beauty.
Ten years later the country is in the midst of a tragic spring, after a shattered hope, day after day it sinks into a spiralling abyss of terror and violence, civilians and children are the main victims and in front of the incredulous eyes of the international community, nothing seems able to stop the massacres committed on each side by fighters full of hatred, thus ruining the country and its subtle beauty.
I selected a few of my colour photographs from 2001 and removed some visual material from the structure of the image, thus tearing a little of that beauty, but therefore revealing via the handwritten text in Arabic a message denouncing the irony, the violence, the cynicism or the lost hope.
A black and white series in small format 18x24 aims to show the subtle balance and mix of this Syrian society before the tragedy, photography here as evidence of a life forever gone, the essence itself of photography.
I have chosen the texts, and the words in the photographs have been handwritten by artists in exile met in Paris.
I want to thank here, Hala, Lal, Maryam, Rafif, Shadi, Abdel. This photographic exhibition is dedicated to all those who have chosen freedom and stood against barbarians, I am in particular thinking of the Syrian people uprooted from their garden, a garden lost to mankind as a whole.
Il n’y a plus de temps pour demain Mahmoud Darwich.
Then the country was in the midst of a particular spring, a year after the death of president Hafez el-Assad and the arrival in power of his son Bachar, the country appeared to breathe a little and the Pope Jean-Paul II was on an official tour in Damas, I took advantage of this window of freedom to travel throughout the country for a whole month and discovered through places and people, a rare beauty.
Ten years later the country is in the midst of a tragic spring, after a shattered hope, day after day it sinks into a spiralling abyss of terror and violence, civilians and children are the main victims and in front of the incredulous eyes of the international community, nothing seems able to stop the massacres committed on each side by fighters full of hatred, thus ruining the country and its subtle beauty.
I selected a few of my colour photographs from 2001 and removed some visual material from the structure of the image, thus tearing a little of that beauty, but therefore revealing via the handwritten text in Arabic a message denouncing the irony, the violence, the cynicism or the lost hope.
A black and white series in small format 18x24 aims to show the subtle balance and mix of this Syrian society before the tragedy, photography here as evidence of a life forever gone, the essence itself of photography.
I have chosen the texts, and the words in the photographs have been handwritten by artists in exile met in Paris.
I want to thank here, Hala, Lal, Maryam, Rafif, Shadi, Abdel. This photographic exhibition is dedicated to all those who have chosen freedom and stood against barbarians, I am in particular thinking of the Syrian people uprooted from their garden, a garden lost to mankind as a whole.
Il n’y a plus de temps pour demain Mahmoud Darwich.