Returns

The International School of Choueifat, Damascus, 2011

I’m going back to Beirut for the first time in almost 5 years next week, and I’ll be posting from there, refreshing this site and revisiting some of the work I made there, and in Syria. For some reason I posted this on FB as a precis, but I thought I’d put it on here too, so it’s visible off FB:

I don’t really post much personally, so to speak, on here, as opposed to repost, in part through FB suspicion, in part because it’s an odd way to communicate and it feels strange to say public things from a private space, and in part because when I used to blog, I’d do it elsewhere and post links, which somehow mitigates anxiety in front of an audience, and I’ve been out of the mode of blogging about photo work and projects and travel for a while. This might also be because that space in my practice as a photographer has been taken up with Some Cities. But I’m going to blog again shortly, update and revisit the writing and photography I did when I first went to Lebanon and Syria, in 2008. So I was looking back at old posts from Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut, Hama, cities that I was seduced by, love and love the memory of. I found this: http://www.danburwood.co.uk/cleansing/ and reading it breaks my heart for the memories of a place that has since been destroyed, people, many of whom are now dead, displaced, or seeking fearful refuge in our corrupt and deeply, multiply culpable nation. I’m not going to say fuck Cameron for his dehumanising comments about migrants in recent days, nor for the anti humanitarian disregard for our fellow humans in crisis displayed by this low and complacent excuse for a democratically elected government. Actually, I am…. Fuck Cameron. Next week I’m going to Beirut, via Athens, in part for personal reasons, and in part to work on a range of things, so I’ll be posting again, with photos. Comments greatly appreciated.