“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. … The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
— Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Thesis IX, on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus
The remains of cars in the streets of Damascus suburbs, photographed a few months after the fall of the Assad regime — silent witnesses to the violence and destruction left behind after fifteen years of brutal civil war, and to the dimension of horror imposed upon human life.
Damascus 2025
