Aleppo, My Beloved featured by Dodho
An image of Bashar al-Assad hangs in front of a window of a school in rural Raqqa. In areas under government control in Syria, it's inescapable to encounter images of the autocratic leader.
My series Aleppo, My Beloved has been featured by Dodho Magazine.
I photographed the work in June 2023, four months after the earthquake that struck southern Türkiye and northern Syria, while travelling in Aleppo and rural Raqqa on assignment for Finn Church Aid’s Tekoja magazine.
The earthquake was the reason we went. But as we listened to people, the story became increasingly about the city itself: memory and the stubborn attachment people felt towards a place shaped by years of war and then another disaster.
The Dodho feature brings together the photographs and a text about how the series came together, including the images I initially kept unpublished because showing the regime’s omnipresent portraiture was not really an option.
