The Gravity of Ash
Maryam’s monochrome world first arrests you with its textures—the cracked concrete resembling elephant hide, children’s laughter frozen into charcoal smudges, laundry lines strung between bullet-riddled walls like musical notations. These are not war photographs; they are postscripts to apocalypse, where survival wears the face of mundane ritual. A man sips tea in a room missing two walls. A girl leaps over rubble as if it were hopscotch squares. The genius lies not in documenting destruction, but in revealing how life molds itself around absence—like ivy claiming a bombed-out cathedral.
The Canon Paradox
Her tool—a 5D Mark IV with 24-70mm f/2.8—becomes irrelevant the moment you meet her subjects’ eyes. We fetishize gear: Leica for soul, Nikon for grit, Fuji for nostalgia. Yet here, Canon’s clinical sensors birth images that throb with Velvia’s emotional saturation. The lesson? Cameras are sieves—what matters is what passes through them. When a Yazidi woman’s gaze pierces the frame, who remembers EXIF data? Maryam proves the body matters less than the vessel: a photographer’s consciousness, distilled.
The Dance of Liminality
Her 2012-2018 odyssey across Kobanî to Sinjar captures not war’s heat, but its afterburn—the way communities hover between resurrection and ruin:
- Rebirth as Routine: Farmers planting barley in soil still studded with shrapnel
- Memory as Architecture: Schoolrooms reassembled from tank hulls and propaganda billboards
- Resistance as Ceremony: Elders dancing dabke atop collapsed ISIS bunkers
These are not “victims” but alchemists, transmuting trauma into tenacity. Maryam’s lens becomes their mirror—not reflecting damage, but refracting resilience.
The Ethics of Proximity
Critics might ask: Does aestheticizing suffering dilute its horror? Maryam answers with compositions that unsettle through beauty:
- A sunset backlights smoke rising from a bakery—or is it a mortar strike’s aftermath?
- Boys kicking a ball through streets where corpses once froze mid-flight
- The recurring motif of hands—digging, weaving, praying—each a manifesto against erasure
Her Prix HIP and Lucie Award-winning book isn’t reportage; it’s archaeology of the present, proving compassion requires neither pity nor pyrotechnics.
The Myth of Neutrality
In an era of desensitized scrolling, Rising Among Ruins weaponizes intimacy. The 24-70mm zoom—beloved by wedding photographers—here becomes a moral instrument. Wide angles engulf you in markets thriving beside mass graves; 70mm compresses a mother’s embrace into a universal icon. Technical “flaws” (lens flare kissing a sniper’s perch, motion blur in a fleeing crowd) become testimonies: The photographer’s heartbeat lives in the frame.
Epilogue: The Shadow Archive
Maryam’s work echoes Don McCullin’s axiom: “Photography is not looking, it’s feeling.” Yet where McCullin documented war’s crescendo, she records its decrescendo—the way ordinary people recompose symphonies from silence.
To view these images is to confront photography’s oldest paradox: The more specific the trauma, the more universal its resonance. That Kurdish boy grinning beneath a tank’s shadow? He’s every child who’s ever turned war scrap into toys. That grandmother sweeping dust from a roofless home? She sweeps the 21st century’s conscience.
Final Thought:
Maryam’s Canon captured light, but her courage developed the negatives. In the darkroom of history, Rising Among Ruins emerges not as a document, but a covenant: To witness is to participate; to frame is to redeem.
