Specters and Spaces

As a young boy in 1970s Damascus, Hrair Sarkissian was often found in his father’s photography shop—the first of its kind in Syria—secretly playing with the equipment. When he was a little older, in the ’80s, he would take cameras from his father’s studio and travel by bus around Syria, snapping pictures along the way. In those early years, photography was the father’s trade and the son’s hobby.

Sarkissian’s artistic “revolution,” as he calls it, took place after he was exposed to contemporary French photography through shows in Damascus and by working as an assistant to Sophie Ristelhueber—a photographer known for capturing the effects of war—during her one-week tour of Syria in 1998. He realized then that photography