These are images from the recent Rescue Geography Project.
See www.rescuegeography.org.uk for more details.
I walked around Aleppo all day yesterday: the souks and small workshops, 10 second cooked bread skimmed down the handle of the paddle used to put them in there and flip them, wholemeal for once and I want to try it, but lose the place, and am shy to try to negotiate the price of a single fresh one.. tea in numerous situations offered, sometimes accepted. A man repeats assertion that the scarves would be perfect for my mother or my sister over and over, ‘..very light, very nice…’ Very salmon pink, I think. Continue reading
I went to some ruins this morning early. A 2km broken collonade of romanity lost, a museum with high posted posters of Bashir al-Assad, opened in November ’82, by Hafaz al-Assad. 9 months after the destruction of most of old Hama by goverment troops after an uprising by The Muslim Brotherhood, a militant organisation. Many died. (see Robert Fisk, Pity The Nation).
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It’s been a long time since doing this kind of thing. beyond spluttering about broken cameras- no luck still as yet making visual updates to the blog o reading public- I’m in the Christian quarter of the Old City in Damascus, planning my next move and thinking perhaps not the greatest thoughts, for reasons not to go into here. Unlike Beirut, which sometimes seems contradictory and at pains to remake itself, this place appears immediately, relatively at least, whole. Maybe what I mean is whole in its otherness. You really feel out of Arabic here, or I do today. We were walking around the centre earlier, in the stifling midday heat, and a kid started talking to me in bare bones English, common denominator topics to many perhaps. We spoke, till he got to the door of his mosque, about God and Football. A list of European players, and affirmations of his devotion. The intensity of the old city, full of the bustle of millenial commerce, all the souks with clustered specialities- silks, perfume, wooden cookers tools, inlaid chess sets, Islamic literature, gold lame shirts- I might get one for the next bad taste party- sweets, spices, carpets of course, tools and hardware of every shape and size, old phones, tiny repair workshops… is almost overwhelming. I understand so little, and I’ve not shot a frame.
Before coming here last time, I bought a Hasselblad 500cm in apparrently very good nick, tired of the unreliability of my old Bronica S2A, semi trusty medium format bought in 1999 in Havana for 80 bucks. The light seal had gone, and though I’d wanted to test her with a couple of rolls before I set off, somehow it passed me by to do so, and when the scans came back from the lab, there was intermittent light seal fogging on some of the shots all of the rolls. Several lessons there… so i fixed the seal before i came, and tested it and, fingers crossed, all well… slw connection here trying to put up some snaps but not working well… Continue reading
This I suppose will be the last one from Beirut. Tying up loose ends would be good punctuation, but as with all travel, it’s hard to be conclusive, especially when you start to leave before the cab leaves for the airport, the plane takes off, Continue reading
The old crust is ringing somewhat, and there’s a bit of frustration, perhaps from being alone with my thoughts in the daytime, trying to keep at it, making pictures and all that. Most of the people I know here have jobs, and good for them too, a bit of balance is always good. I’m in a cafe in Hamra, W. Beirut, and there has been a call to prayer. There was a show opening about the Algerian war, looked like good Documentary photography, but I think it’s a bit far, 2 service, the 1500 Lebanese pound/ $1 shared taxis, and more to the point, as I seem to be doubling the service quite often now, I really don’t know where it is. Except that it’s near the airport, in a Hangar. Somewhere like Staines or Chelmsley Wood. Continue reading
This morning I am considerably tired I think. I think it might be that candle, or the midnight lamp, or over-enthusiastic daytime weekend sleeping, or the sluggish pace at which this loads- perhaps it’s the cumbersome name trying to squeeze through the telecommunications system. Sorry about that. I’ve been attempting to accumulate basic bits of Arabic, Continue reading
You come down low over the water, an acute angle to the coastline, and it feels like you’re about to land in the sea, as south Beirut lights pass on the left. Then you touch down and the brake flaps shudder, and the anxiety of such a short flight passes. Just 25 minutes from
