How did this change the practicalities of working there?Įvery time I crossed the border, I learned of the deaths of people I had met before, on previous visits. You witnessed firsthand the changing face of the conflict – particularly the changing nature of the rebels, with the increasing presence of radicals and foreign fighters in Syria. It’s essential that we don’t forget what happened. ![]() I have lost faith in many things, but I still think that documenting conflicts is essential for history, for collective memory. I have come out of this conflict traumatized. Today, with hindsight, and after ten years of this bloody war, in which hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives, I have lost all hope of changing things through photography. In 2012, following this positive experience, and being deeply concerned about what was happening in Syria, I hoped that maybe, thanks to my photographs, I could provoke a reaction and change something there. I naively thought that being a photojournalist could help people: that was the reason why I was doing photography. I was at the very beginning of my career, only 26 years old, and seeing this was a great motivation for me. I could see how this aid had a real and positive impact on people, at least in the short term. The newspaper collaborated with the Turkish Red Crescent Society in an aid campaign that raised several million dollars and I continued to work in Somalia for a year. What was your ‘mission’ for the work when you started, and how has it changed over time, if indeed it has?Ī year before the start of the Syrian conflict, my documentation of the drought in East Africa had attracted a lot of attention in my country following the publication of my photos in the leading Turkish national newspaper, where I was working as a staff photographer at that time. Here he reflects upon his work in the country, the changing nature of the conflict, the difficulty of witnessing and documenting inhumanity, depletion of hope, and the prevailing importance of recording the horrors of war. The conflict has also created the largest refugee crisis of recent history – with more than 6.6 million Syrians leaving the country and another 6 million displaced within it, according to the UN Refugee Agency.Įmin Özmen has, since 2012, been photographing the fighting within Syria, and the ensuing humanitarian crisis, in the paired projects Revenge and Limbo. The war spawned the Islamic State (IS), both as a player in global terror exporting some of the war’s horrors around the world and as a short-lived geographical caliphate. ![]() It has gone from a global media obsession to a now oft-forgotten war, international outrage and obsession giving way largely to news fatigue. It has drawn in other nations, not least Russia, the United States, and Turkey. Ten years old this month, the ongoing Syrian conflict started in March of 2011 and has ebbed and sprawled since. The following article conrtains images of violence and injury that some readers may find distressing.
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